Creative NaBloPoMo #14: To sleep, perchance to dream

"Have you considered," she says, her face serious, "that many - most, even - of our symptoms are a result of inadequate sleep?"

I don't won't to be rude, so I just stare at her, while my mind screams "What, you mean extreme fatigue, muscle aches, nerve tingling, anxiety, panic attacks and assorted miserable parasomnias could be BECAUSE I'M NOT SLEEPING ENOUGH? YA THINK?"

"Perhaps if your sleep could be regularised..." she muses. "Although I realise that's difficult, of course."

Oh my God.

I have never known, probably never will know, whether the insomnia and poor quality sleep is born of the post-viral syndrome and anxiety, or if it just wildly exacerbates them (or indeed, is mother to them both). All I know is this:

It physically hurts.

It's psychological torture, being committed by my own brain upon itself.

It feeds itself - the more nights it happens, the more likely it is to go on happening, and so on and so in in dreary ad infinitum.

It has a host of knock-on effects and makes everything ten times worse.

It's a mean trickster, breaking the pattern every few nights to throw in a beautiful, uncomplicated long night's sleep, almost as a tease. Invariably this is followed by the worst of the worst - nights with no sleep at all, or two nightmarish hours from 5 to 7am.

The more overtired you are, the harder it is to begin to break.

I would not wish it on my worst enemy, ever.

(This piece on Cracked sums it up pretty well, I'd say).