I come from a long and distinguished line of insomniacs. My sister has never slept well, my mother can function quite happily on 4 or 5 hours a night, my grandmother was on much the same schedule. (ok, so the line isn't very long but it's definately distinguished) So it should have come as no suprise to me that I also have troubles sleeping. And yet it did.
When I moved to Sweden I remember that I was getting the best sleep I'd ever had in my life. I figured the daily 19 hours of darkness were resonsible, but I also had an amazing bed. Then I moved back to Texas, and on to LA where sleeping was relagated to 3 or 4 hours every other night and a full 8 on the weekends. That's architecture school in the US for you and after 6 years of education/sleep deprivation, I am fully exempted from ever having to see another sunrise. Give me a sunset any day. After graduation I took to sleeping every night but it wasn't until I moved here to Dublin that I realized just how poorly I'd been sleeping. For the first time in close to a decade, I slept thru the night. Every night. Without chemical assistance. (loooove Valium) And I was waking up actually refreshed. Then I moved in with Nightmare Roommate and the sheer stress of living with her kept me awake again, tosssing and turning.
There are, of course, different forms of insomnia. Some people simply can't fall asleep, which I believe is my sister. My mother is they type that just can't sleep for very long. I have always been the type that wakes up several (an average of 5 or 6) times a night for varying lengths of time. Often I can fall asleep again, but I've been known to spend a couple of hours reading until I can nod off again.
Since I've been at Casa Clare, however, I've been sleeping well again. I'm not tense and groggy at the same time, which was an interesting state to live in, let me assure you. When the weather finally turned as close to summer as it gets in Dublin, I started leaving my bedroom windows open and was getting even better sleep. I've always slept better in fresh air and I know this about myself. (The air conditioning of Texas almost did me in. Hate a/c and forgot just how much until I was shopping the other day and had to leave a store because I was too cold to stay) So again, I was suprised to find that I'm having troubles sleeping.
Which is fine I suppose; I can cope, but I'd rather not. I've seen the promised land! The past week or so, I've been waking up every morning, without fail, between 5 and 6am. I don't go to work until 9:30 so that's a little early for me to be up and around. Especially since I live with someone who doesn't want to be awake that early. So I lie there and listen to the silence. It's so quiet here I'm constantly amazed. I hear the birds chirping and absolutely nothng else. It's wonderful. Dallas was never fully quiet. LA was never fully quiet. Even at the beach you could hear traffic over the waves if you weren't close enough to the shore. But here, and also at FFS', the silence is almost a sound in itself.
I remember descibing the hush of the first snow to my friend Cinderella (yes, everyone does get a nickname) just before she married and moved to Michigan. She's a Texas girl and pretty much everyone was telling her how cold it was going to be and how awful snow is, etc... Pretty much horrifying her, which is a delightful way to go up the asile, no? So we talked about how wonderful that first night is. (snow, not marriage. I have no idea about that) My favorite time as a child was sitting inside the house, all toasty warm, sipping hot chocolate, watching it snow outside and seeing it sparkle in the light of the house. For awhile I was convinced that there were diamonds in the newly fallen snow. But more, I loved how quiet a blanket of snow made things. As if the snow itself covered the layer of noise and smothered it so we could fill the air with something better. Cinderella thought I was crazy but called me on the first snow to tell me she heard it too; that crisp lack of noise which becomes a noise in itself.
That's what morning sounds like here. It's a wonderful experience. I just wish I could experience it in the evenings.
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