Sleeping is a drag

You don't need to suffer from anxiety to simultaneously suffer from a shit night's sleep.  My parents always were, and I'm sure remain to be, up at all hours, watching the clock.  My father, however, is one of those loathsome morning people who happily gets up at 6am and proceeds to do one thousand sit ups before work.  And that is no word of a lie.  On holidays he adds an extra five hundred as a treat.

Once asleep, I am generally able to remain that way.  It is, however, the getting there that troubles me.  I can lie awake for hours staring into the dark, and then work myself up into borderline hysteria by either contemplating what might happen if a monster propelled itself at me from the depths of the wardrobe, or pondering on the inevitability of death and the meaning of infinity.

I must be a lark to spend a day with.

Being as I have to haul myself up for work at 6.15am Monday to Friday, this clearly is not the ideal scenario.  I have found in the past that prolonged periods without sleep can result in the most unpleasant hallucinations.  Only last month I was beset by tiny black creatures hurtling down my bedroom wall, which threw me all manner of lurid expressions until I looked at one directly, when it would mysteriously vanish into the air.  And this is not something that has happened to me with such severity since my ill-advised year in the Territorial Army, when I spent one night on sentry duty and the sapling opposite took on a most grotesque form of a zombie soldier.  I damn near shot it and I was only carrying blanks.

Since then, I have attempted to devise a number of methods that might aid me in departing to the Land of Nod and preventing those black monsters from ever reappearing.  Some have been successful, and some not so.

Drinking copious amounts of alcohol was one of the latter.  Not only did I feel gravely ill by 2am, but I had to go to work the following morning with a debilitating hangover and a persistent need to vomit.  And being a teaching assistant, I cannot readily plonk myself down in the classroom and bemoan my stomach churning with bargain bin wine.

Music too did not help, as the mind inevitably wandered back to anxieties of the day, and even somebody giving me a funny look at the train station could lead me to wonder if I was unconsciously doing something horrible, like wanking, or screaming without realising at the prospect of another ten hour shift.

For now, what I have settled on is leaving the laptop beside my bed with myriad Youtube videos playing one after the other.  I confess, quite ashamedly, that I am something of a fan of Let's Plays - that being one of those videos where someone plays a game and one sort of... watches along.  I know that they are generally considered the territory of twelve year old boys who play COD and use words like 'rekd' and 'scrub,' but I still enjoy them.  Believe you me, I take no great pleasure in admitting this, because I have thus far kept it a closely guarded secret, but if it can help someone other than myself, then all the better for it.

So if you too might consider this a tactic, here is a recommendation, bearing in mind that I am in no way affiliated with any Youtuber, and am not simply acting as an incredibly poor and roundabout advertiser.  I personally enjoy Lazy Game Reviews, which have a charming combination of a pleasant-voice gentleman and amusing commentary.  While I occasionally laugh myself awake, they do a wonderful job of taking my mind off my various imagined maladies and the fate of the universe.  For the past couple of weeks I have happily fallen asleep to them, and woken up about thirty videos down and with a growing electricity bill.  It is, for the time being, working.

I have also tried Pewdiepie and Cr1TiKaL, but there tend to be a few more gunshots in those and gunshots are not especially conducive to sleep.  Even if they are blanks fired into zombie soldiers.

I don't care what anyone says.  I like Pewdiepie.

Well he isn't for everyone.