Sleepy Sig

This essay is about my sleep habits. I’m not sure how interesting this is to anyone, but I felt like writing about it. Sleep has that strange quality of being a very important part of any person’s life, and also one of the most unremarkable since we aren’t really “there” for much of it. I’m going to break this up in to a series of discrete but related tidbits.

Sig is Alaskan

I was born, and spent my formative years in Anchorage, Alaska, which is a unique part of the US. Even in Anchorage, which is the largest southern costal city in the state, the summer days are almost 20 hours long as are the winter nights. The span of the day feels like it is in constant flux, every day getting a bit shorter or longer. As a result of this, I am indifferent to whether the sun is up or not when I go to bed and when I wake up. Likewise I’m not especially bothered by sleeping in the light or being wide awake in the dark. Generally speaking, I find this to be a nice advantage as I can very quickly adjust my schedules when traveling or if I need to adjust my sleep schedule.

Sig is From Mars

Not really, but I sleep a bit like I was from another planet with a longer day cycle. At various times in my life I’ve been fortunate enough to be allowed to simply sleep and wake whenever I feel like it. Personally, I love this and the habit I naturally fall into is more like a 26-28 hour cycle which pushes me to wake up and go to sleep at a progressively later time each day until I loop around across the midnight barrier. I love going to bed when I am good and tired and I like to sleep and linger in bed until I am restless to get up. This just feels like the right and natural way for me.

When I have to keep a schedule, or a choose to keep one, I am constantly in tension with the need to go to bed when I’m not truly tired, and to wake up before I’m truly rested. I can, and have done this in much of my life, but it is always a little bit of a struggle, especially the waking up part of the cycle.

Sig Sleeps Well, Mostly

While I don’t always fall asleep the moment I go to bed, I very rarely get insomnia or actually have trouble sleeping. I like it best when I’m truly tired and can just go straight to sleep in a matter of moments, but even when I’m a bit wired, I can get myself down within 30 minutes or so if I’m determined. I tend to sleep very soundly and am difficult to awaken once I’m asleep. I routinely sleep through alarms, lawn mowers, vacuuming, and nearly any other sound. I almost never get up in the middle of the night for any reason.

The biggest bane to my sleep is usually allergies. When my allergies get more extreme I’m prone to some sleep apnea and while that doesn’t wake me, it does make for a rough nights sleep of stressful dreams and feeling like I got beaten up over the night. If I can remember to take a bit of allergy medication, it tends to prevent that, but it has a habit of sneaking up on me.

Even while traveling, things like jet lag, time zones, day and night times, don’t really phase me much. At worst, I have one iffy nights sleep and I’m back on a “regular” schedule, even if that schedule isn’t always a perfect fit for normal humans.

Sig Doesn’t Wake Up So Good

I am not a morning person. When I get done sleeping, I badly want to pee, I’m a bit stupid, I’m slow and lazy, and I’m often irritable, and I’m usually hungry. I can get going and do the things I need to do, but I’m definitely not enjoying any of it unless I had a good long Martian sleep and was allowed to linger in bed long enough to shake off this hibernation state. This haze tends to ware off after a few hours, or until I have had a nice salty breakfast. If I have to go to work or the like, I tend to do all the routine busy work in the morning, sifting emails, organizing the day’s tasks and so on.

Sig is a Night Owl

Mostly due to not being a morning person, I get progressively more active as the day goes on. I hit my peak sometime in the late evening. I do my best work in the wee hours of the night when I’m coming down from my peak, and can settle in and grind out work without distractions. I get the most done when I only have the minimal distraction of some music or a sound scape going on in the background. Once the rest of the world goes to bed, I get rocking at the keyboard or dive deep into a game. I know its time to go to bed when my work or play becomes a struggle.

Sig’s Sleep Meditations

I have a number of different meditation techniques I use to enhance or manipulate my sleep. These aren’t things I do all the time, but more tools to pull out when needed. Here are a few.

Wake Up Meditation – I use this when I need to wake up early and do something important. As I am getting sleepy, I repeat in my mind something like this: “I am going to wake up early, I will feel refreshed and ready to go, I will be excited to (do whatever it is I need to do), I will be alert and get dressed quickly, I will hear the alarm and wake up right away. I am excited to be waking up. I will (do the thing I need to do). etc…”

I find this wake up meditation to be pretty effective at countering my tendency to want to sleep in, my habit of ignoring alarms, and my grogginess. It doesn’t work if I don’t actually have something important to do. Its no good for everyday work etc. But when I do have something I know is important, its got a good track record for me, and when I forget to do it, is when I end up embarrassing myself by oversleeping.

The Mental Warehouse – Its very rare, but I do sometimes need to go to sleep when I have something truly pressing on my mind. Mostly, my brain is a quiet place and thoughts don’t come there unbidden. But life’s most exciting or horrible moments, I can have persistent and unwelcome thoughts. This meditation is more visualization than words. I imagine I’m in a large warehouse of boxes, representing all my thoughts and memories. Whenever the intrusive thought comes into my head, I pack it up in a box, step by step, and put it on the shelf. I promise I’ll come back to it later, after sleeping. It doesn’t work like magic, but it gives you something to focus on other than the thought itself and is simple enough to be boring in and of itself so eventually, it does the trick for me.

Disorganizing My Thoughts – This is the best one for just getting to sleep generally. I noticed that when I am about to fall asleep, my thinking becomes very disorganized and irrational and very shortly after I’m out. So the idea was that if I can intentionally create this mental state, sleep will come faster for me. This can be both a verbalized or image based meditation. Basically, you just try to imagine disconnected and nonquitter ideas. So for example: “Rabbit, banana, summer is big, my toes are potatoes, find the asterisk, what are fish, purple tinsel, wine in a crate, etc…” Don’t let any thought rationally lead into the next, search for something disconnected to imagine or say and don’t stay on any one thought more than a moment.

Sig’s Dreams

This could be a whole essay on it’s own. As a kid, I used to have a lot of anxiety dreams. These petered out as I got older and now they are incredibly rare for me, usually only when I have an apnea episode or the like, and even then they are more just tense than truly upsetting. One peculiar thing is I often have a kind of “dream lore” in that when I’m dreaming, there are a kind of alternate set of facts about things that are true but make little to no sense when I’m awake. They do change over time, but any given paradigm tends to last for a while. A recent example is the idea that all my game designs for Evil Genius Games are part of some kind of secret pattern that has a profound meaning that I’ve encoded into them. That’s definitely not true, but in my dreams, it is a fact. My dreams are not about designing games or my work, but that fact is there, and I’m aware of it when dreaming. Characters and situations in my dream likewise exist in the dream world, but not in the real world. They can feel like people I’ve known all my life, but awake, they are total fabrications and are ill defined.

Common themes in my dreams include. Levitating and flying, though with difficulty. I think this is because I can’t move my legs so I imagine floating rather than walking. I dream about secret doors and elevators a lot, especially in the context of science fiction convention hotels. Exploring unknown spaces is a very common dream experience for me, and its something I love to do in real life as well. My more stressful dreams often involve driving, though that’s become much less common now that I drive much more infrequently. If I have a new game I’m playing, often I will dream about the everyday world, but in the lens of the game. Its like the rules of the game superimpose on more mundane events and honestly doesn’t make much sense in the dream. The most common theme is not having a good place to pee, and peeing in all kinds of inappropriate places or splashing all over when peeing but still needing to pee more. These are often the dreams I wake up to when I get the chance to sleep in.

I mostly see dreams as my brain telling my brain a story to try and sift through thoughts and feelings that are present in my mind. I occasionally have lucid dreams where I am pretty aware I’m dreaming but decide to just keep indulging the fantasy as its pretty entertaining. Recounting my dreams after waking, they often jump from one idea to another, or go around in circles with the same idea coming back to the fore. Occasionally a dream will give me a feeling of profound emotion or the sense of a grand idea, but typically examining it after I wake up, it’s actually pretty mundane and I think the dream was really a way to visualize a feeling rather than me having a feeling about the dream. Frankly, my waking imagination is a lot better than my dreaming imagination.