Destructive Distillation

I lay on my bed trying to fall asleep and I lay there for an unusually long time wondering about things. Very random thoughts creep into my head. Several ideas for fiction are bouncing around the walls. I play them and try building storylines assuming I will fall asleep soon lost in some storyline. It doesn’t happen. I start making a mental list of things l need to do. I start enumerating them and presume that all the heavy memorising will break my consciousness. It doesn’t. I don’t remember anything at the end and neither have I fallen asleep. I next contemplate of what I should buy with the little money I have. There are as always a hundred things I desire to have but money is hardly sufficient for one. I sort of decide what I want but then ponder over it, wondering if it is a wise investment. Several minutes have passed and I have hardly reached a decision. The hope that the ever difficult decision process will put me to sleep is gone. This trick too has fallen flat on its face.

I get up and settle in front of the computer. I browse some random sites, check mail and social networking sites after which I watch an episode of some tv show. This generally tires me out and I sleep peacefully. No, not this time. After lying on my bed for a few more minutes, I get up and grab my ipod, play some soothing post rock. The serene and peaceful music should calm my nerves and deaden the intense brain activity and lullaby me into deep sleep. Listening to the soothing music, I imagine myself to be in the beautiful and vast expanses of Iceland and slowly fall asleep. Atleast that is what I thought would happen.

Very frustrated now, I get up to pick my trump card to trounce this opponent. I pick a book I have been reading for a while and flick through the pages as if it were a picture book and it is done. Why do I still feel awake? I pat myself wondering if I have transcended into sleep and imagined the ending of the book and the end of the read. It turned out to be not a delusion but the truth. The ghosts of objects, tasks and people, real and fictional now haunt me. I am flabbergasted as no Goliath can put down this David and this is not even a story for a remarkable underdog win. This is my sleep that I used to have remarkable control over. It has gone out of my reach now. I want sleep, very desperately but it has forsaken me. It will play dirty tricks in the day tomorrow, spoil my morning and afternoon and hamper whatever work I have.

“O Sleep! I see what you have done. However I shall not give in and you shall not win this battle, I shall resist you until tomorrow’s night when you shall definitely give in as your partner in crime, ie my body shall betray you. Ha! Meanwhile I shall tell the world about your antics. “