That Indescribable Something
This article started as a journal entry in a psychoanalytic diary that I had to keep for a psychoanalysis class that I took with Peter L. Rudnytsky during my undergrad days at the University of Florida. It deals with the troubles I’ve had sleeping throughout my life and paranoid fears that are all tied into the insomnia.
The rain has set in now. The sky was grey all day, and I knew that the rain would set in eventually. Unlike most people, I love grey, overcast days. In fact, I actually prefer them to sunny days. I love to curl up with a book on rainy days and read all day.
I have a general distaste for the sun in general. By nature, I stay up late and sleep in. This wasn’t always the case, though. When I was young, I got up very early in the morning, ate my cereal and either watched TV or read a book.
I have had trouble sleeping as long as I can remember. When I was little, I would lie in bed, unable to sleep. I would sit there, think, and worry. I don’t think I worried at first. I think I just lay there. After I went to school, I started worrying about whether I had my homework done or not. On a couple of occasions, I got up in the middle of the night to do homework that I had forgotten—much to my parents’ distress.
Later, I became very afraid that something was going to get me in the middle of the night. I remember thinking that I had to keep all of my limbs from hanging over the edge of the bed or something would get them. As this progressed, my fears became more specific. I became very afraid of vampires. For a while, I would run crying to my parents’ room after sitting awake for hours and getting more and more distressed as the minutes passed. I remember clearly that I feared that a vampire would come crashing through my bedroom window and kill me.
As I became older, I was still afraid of that vague something that was going to get me; but I didn’t tell anyone about it anymore. I became afraid that prowlers were looking in my bedroom window. I worried that someone was going to try and kill my family and me. I even developed strategy plans for when they finally got in the house. I was going to get my brother’s BB gun from the closet and hide under the bed.
During my teen years, relationships and situations plagued my mind at night. I thought about all of my failures. I concerned myself with tests that were weeks down the road. I obsessed about my social ineptitude. On top of this, I continued to be afraid that something was after me. I became afraid of ghosts and also - perhaps more concretely - afraid that the inmates from the prison where my dad worked would escape and take me hostage. However, as I got older, I began to just get up when I couldn’t take the mental strain anymore. I would get out of bed and either watch TV or play the guitar until I was exhausted.
Toward the end of my teen years, the something became aliens who were going to abduct me in the middle of the night. At other times, it was our drunken next door neighbor who was going to shoot me and my parents for drug money. The something has changed form through the years, but the feeling during the middle of the night that something was after me has been fairly consistent.
There have always been several ways to combat these intense feelings of anxiety. If another person were in the room with me, I could relax and go to sleep. When my brother would come to our room to go to sleep, I would finally calm down enough to rest. I also remember getting up in the middle of the night on many occasions to go sleep with my sister when I was in my preschool years. (This also leads me to believe that I had these nocturnal feelings of anxiety longer than I can consciously remember.) I also don’t have these feelings of fear if I’m sleeping in the daytime. I sleep much more soundly in the daytime. Another way to stop the anxiety was to turn on a TV. The actual sounds of the TV didn’t soothe me; it was the high-pitched whine of the TV screen that clamed me down. Finally, I could just stay up until I passed out from exhaustion.
The fears slacked off almost entirely since I’ve been in Gainesville. Of course, when I initially came to Gainesville, I was living in a dorm situation with a roommate. There were always people near me when I go to bed(1). For the first time in a long time, I could actually sleep eight hours a night most of the time. However, whenever I would visit my parents’ house, I had those same feelings of fear; and those feelings helped to form my personality. In my natural habitat, I stay up late and sleep in. I keep curtains pulled so I don’t have to look out a window at night, and I get up every morning wishing I could just sleep all day.
Of course, now I’m happily married, and having Allyson in the same bed helps me a lot. I almost never have trouble sleeping since she and I have been sharing a bed. However, when she has had to work late and I go to bed without her, it almost never works very well. I still get those feelings that some terrible something is after me, making sleep nigh impossible.
July 2nd, 2007 at 13:09:14
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