The Great Sleep Dilemma

Today has just been one of those days. With all the pain and anxiety I have daily sleep is a rare commodity. Even going to bed early last night and "sleeping" through the night did not give any rest. I just seemed to hang on the edge of actual sleep, like it was a cliff that I was to scared to jump off. Seven straight hours of that then over twelve hours spent awake as I progressively enter a more zombified state.

Why is my subconscious so opposed to rest? With the PTSD I have horrible nightmares. Well not even nightmares because nightmares are like dreams, they exist only in the mind. The flashbacks when sleeping are rarely worse than those when I am awake and neither can be predicted with any accuracy. So why is sleep the thing that I just can't seem to find.

My pain level on a daily basis is higher than most peoples when they are even injured, yet I have felt this way for more than two thirds of my life. Given that same amount of time is when sleep has been increasingly more difficult. Yet even with the use of heavy narcotics, always prescribed, I have issues getting past the threshold into deep sleep.

Now it is not even eight at night and I am getting more fatigued by the second instead of the minute. Not even sure why I am taking the time to write this post. As I do though I have been wondering more and more of why this happens. Each tiny part of my life gives an explanation for why I just can not find sleep all the while there is evidence that the parts are not the only cause.

I have PTSD and flashbacks which cause panic, I have anxiety knowing that it might occur, I have severe daily pain but medications that alleviate it have not helped, and this has all been ongoing for fifteen years. Over the counter sleep aids have not worked and prescription medications have caused me to have rather disturbing hallucinations. Even during the more productive periods of therapy my sleep hasn't changed.

Thinking back I remember a brief respite though when I was writing poetry nearly every day, but the words for that seem to have swept up in the whirlwind of everything else. But even then my sleep was still far from what a doctor would consider normal. Instead of staying awake for three days before my system essentially crashed I would stay up for only two.

So what is my point of this, my resolve for the situation? I have no idea. I am truly lost in this. All I can do is keep living day by day. Study when I have the strength, try and find joy in small things, and write whatever I can to see if maybe I can get that little spark back that was the only help to me years ago. Who knows, maybe I will find it and begin to post some poetry as it comes.