I have trouble getting a good night’s sleep. I’ve tried everything, and nothing seems to work.
Many times I think I’ve found the answer to the problem and then I decide a few weeks or months later that it wasn’t the silver bullet I first thought.
Maybe this will be another one of those cases, because just recently I’ve accidentally discovered something that seems to be really helping me get back to sleep in the night when I wake up.
Normally that’s my problem. I wake up in the middle of the night for one reason or another (or for no good reason at all) and then I can’t fall back to sleep. It’s the most frustrating experience to lie there for hours, trying to fall back to sleep.
I also never ever remember my dreams. And I now have reason to wonder if the two things are related.
My mother has never had difficulty sleeping, and she has always said that when she wakes up in the night, she thinks of the dream she was having and starts redreaming it and has no trouble getting back to sleep.
A few days ago I decided I wanted to try remembering my dreams and writing them down. It was a light-hearted thing – intended as part of a gag that isn’t worth detailing here. It was in no way meant to improve my sleep.
But it did. When I woke up in early hours of morning that night, I tried to remember the dream I’d been having, rather than ignoring it and forgetting it and turning my attention to the waking world as I normally would. And the amazing thing: I fell back asleep. Over the last few days since then, I’ve been awakened many times in the night, and each time I’ve focused on remembering the dream I was just in the middle of, and each time I’ve fallen back to sleep, and each morning I’ve woken from one of the best sleeps I’ve had in months.
I’m not claiming this is fool proof, or that it will continue working just as well in the coming days and weeks and months. But it’s promising enough that I want to keep experimenting with it. I’m writing it up like this mainly as a reminder to myself, though if it ends up helping anyone else in the process, so much the better.