Wierd, I just realized that the last few posts that I thought I put up didn’t go up. Oh well…

So, one of the many reasons I haven’t put up anything here in a while is, of course, the fact that holidays take me out of commission for a while. However, holiday recovery has been accomplished for a while now and I still haven’t put anything up.

The reason has more to do with the fact that I haven’t been able to sleep well for months. I have actually no idea why this wave of insomnia has hit, I didn’t significantly change anything about my life when this started, strangely suddenly, in September. (Just woke up in the middle of one night without any trouble going to sleep before)

September was not a good month for insomnia to start, although possibly appropriate since we were rehearsing Dracula at the time. I though it might have something to do with that project, but the insomnia has continued well after the vampires went to sleep. Since then, it’s been varying in intensity for a while. I don’t have the problem where I can’t sleep at all, I do sleep. It’s more along the lines of waking up repeatedly in the night and a general degradation of the quality and type of sleep occurring.

You can imagine that this has had a detrimental effect on concentration and energy levels. Depending on how things were going on a given week, I was not a necessarily safe person to have around the studio for a while. People got bruises to prove it. The problem eventually drove me to try medicating myself (sleeping pills) which had mixed success. For those of you who know my aversion to consuming medication, that tells you how extreme the problem got.

Sleeping pills only shut your body down, which was apparently not my problem. I also apparently don’t like shutting myself down artificially because the first few nights I took sleeping aids, I fought them off and woke myself up, which was super-creepy. I also had trouble waking up because the pills keep you down for a certain amount of time, whether your body wants to be down or not.

So, on the advice of a neuro-biologist friend of mine (cool friend to have, I say), a few days ago I switched to using melatonin, which is the chemical your brain uses to tell itself to go to sleep.

Which brings me to why I’m writing today – I have energy! A couple days of going to bed because my brain tells me to is great. It’s still hard to get out of bed in the morning, but that is starting to fade as I get further from pill-induced habit.

Yay for modern science! Now I can see if the melatonin will get me into some good sleeping habits and I can go to sleep completely drug-free. Also, now that I have energy maybe I can try to figure out why I started having this trouble in the first place.

We’ll see.