Of course, if you are a kid during school season, or if you are an adult, it is often necessary to be awakened by an alarm clock. As terrifying as that experience is, I still prefer to the following:
A few years ago, I was living in an apartment in a town that I did not like. I was working at a job that had long since become unacceptably repetitive and monotonous to my gypsy soul. I felt trapped in that job (and that town) by the perks (great coworkers who didn’t want me to leave and very decent pay). That isolated town in the middle of nowhere might not have been so bad at any other time in my life (or if I had not been single), but I was at that point in life where one feels ones remaining youth (and the opportunities that go with it) quickly slipping away. I wanted desperately to escape.
On top of that, I had to put up with a small, seemingly insignificant problem that had more of an impact than one might imagine: I had no control over the thermostat in my apartment. Every winter, all winter long, I felt as if I was living in a dry sauna. I am a very warm-blooded person. I get warm very easily in conditions that most people (especially women) find downright cool. I sleep very poorly when it is warm. Being overly warm when I am asleep causes me to have bad dreams. The greater the heat, the worse the dream. My only option to control the heat in that apartment was to open the living-room window a little at night and let in the stingingly cold sub-zero air (it had to be the livng-room window because the bedroom window was too close to the bed). That window was a very inefficient thermostat, and that cold air was much too icy even for me. Furthermore, that cold outside air did not blend well with the hot inside air. Instead, the cold air simply replaced most of the hot air in very short order. If I opened the window only a microscopic crack, then the apartment remained hot while a bitterly cold stream of air ran through the center of all that heat (in a manner of speaking).
To make matters worse, my bed (which came with the apartment) may have had serious ergonomic drawbacks that were not noticeable to the conscious mind.
In short, my (seemingly) bleak future, the excessive heat of my apartment and that unergonomic bed all combined to ruin my sleep -- almost every night for three and a half years -- in a way that I had never experienced before. It was very annoying, to put it mildly. The fact that it never happened when I spent my weekends here in this town proves to me it was related to one or all of those problems.
I should clarify that actually falling asleep was easy. In fact, it was as easy as ever (at least since college, when I had trained myself to let go of the stress of studying and fall asleep within a given period of time). For the first few hours, I slept normally; then, almost invariably, at around 4 AM, consciousness would flood my brain as quickly and as completely as a 400-watt incandescent light bulb floods a room when you flip on the power switch. I was simply 100 percent awake -- as if I had never been asleep. Every sound in the room was instantly audible. I knew immediately that there was no going back to sleep for at least an hour or two.
I cannot put into words how terrible it was to wake up that way. Even if I woke up that way a mere five minutes before the alarm went off (which was rare), I hated it. It just felt totally unnatural and wrong. On a few occasions (it's hard to remember how many), I would not awaken in an instant. Instead, I would slowly, unendingly become aware of the fact that I was waking up (like hearing that Harley-Davidson getting louder and louder and louder). I couldn't stop it from happening, and I certainly didn't want to speed it up, so I just had to let it happen. On those rare mornings that my alarm woke me up with its terrifying nuclear-alert siren, I almost cheered. I would much rather wake up feeling the pain and exhaustion that comes with an alarm than that "instant-on" feeling that I was getting without it. Sure, I still complained bitterly every time the alarm went off because it made me immediately aware that the previous two decades of Reality had not been a mere figment of my imagination. In fact, every time the alarm went off, I sincerely uttered, "Oh God! Not THIS again!"
But at least I had awakened "normally" on those occasions, and for that I was very grateful.
Nowadays, with that job and town long behind me, I almost never -- if ever -- wake up like that. But I don't wake up pleasantly very often either, the way I did when I was a kid. Yes, consciousness arrives in relatively manageable doses, but they aren't very pleasant doses. I seldom feel physically comfortable during the waking-up process. I also feel as if I have a headache that will only go away when I get up (but maybe the latter is simply because I need better pillows). Society has also trained me to feel irresponsible if I don't hop out of bed immediately. Did I say "trained me"? I meant "ruined me."
Making matters worse are the cold winters and four spoiled-rotten cats, three of whom invariably need to sleep right up against me like doorstops -- on top of the covers. As you might guess, this not only makes things even hotter, but it also prevents me from being able to roll over or move in either direction to the reach cooler parts of the sheets. But even if they weren't sleeping right next to me, the cooler sheets are usually too cold to touch, so I don't move around much anyway. Then there is the matter of the extra blankets that I need when I first go to sleep but which are too hot by about 2 or 3 AM. That's usually when the excessive heat and the unpleasant dreams wake me up. Since I am hot, I need to change positions somehow and throw off the extra blankets, but I don't want to move too much and disturb the cats (yes, I'm a pushover). I do what I can and then try to go back to sleep, but it isn't easy. I lie there, trying to retain some sort of grasp on my sleepiness through the power of suggestion. If I lie there too long with my ears wide open, full consciousness may strike, and it will be a struggle to fall asleep again (for some reason, hearing seems to play a huge role in thinking too much).
But there is a solution.
In the early 1980s, the only way for me to drown out the noise of a chirping cricket (one of the most grating sounds on earth to my brain) was to turn my head to one side so that my bottom ear was buried in the pillow. I also had my shoulder under the pillow pressed up against my ear. Then I grabbed another pillow and put it over my head and pressed it down on my other ear. If the cricket wasn't too close, that worked. If it was too close, I would have to get up and spray about 15 square yards of territory with Raid (I wasn't very skilled at locating them yet in those days ;-) in an effort to put it out of my misery. Eventually, the pillows frequently became ineffective because I couldn't help but imagine that I was hearing the cricket anyway (I also couldn't relax knowing that a rude and inconsiderate cricket might go "unpunished" ;-). So I just got used to getting up and spraying them and getting it over with. For some reason, in the late 1980s and 1990s, I generally had an easy time falling asleep again almost immediately. Therefore, the pillow tactic fell by the wayside.
Then I landed in that bad bed, in that sauna-like apartment, in that miserable town. I was forced to try the pillow tactic again. It didn't work very often there because there were too many problems to overcome. Lately, I've started using the sleeping pill(ow) tactic again after I wake up smothered by hot blankets and spoiled cats (that sleep nearly as deeply as hibernating bears at night). With those pillows blocking out most of the world, not only do I fall asleep again almost right away, I sleep as soundly as I did when I was a kid, and I wake up almost as peacefully and contentedly as I did when I was a kid..., until I remember I am not a kid. Then I think, "Oh, no! Not this middle-aged crap again!"
Anyway, the pillow tactic allowed me to wake up yesterday morning more relaxed and comfortable and at (TEMPORARY) peace than has been the case in a long time. For a while, even Reality and the remembrance of this annoying aging process couldn't spoil my peaceful frame of mind. Today was OK, but the phone rang a single time at 7 AM and woke me up. The fact that I remained relatively relaxed and somewhat at peace after it rang is a testament to the sleeping pill(ow).
