ON: SLEEPS TILL CHRISTMAS, AND THE ABUSE THEREOF.

I received an email recently that shouted in ALL CAPS that there were “SEVEN SLEEPS TILL CHRISTMAS!”

Whenever I encounter someone measuring nights and days in ‘sleeps till Christmas’ I think “Not for my father in law, he has about eleven dozes during whatever is on the telly after dinner…” 

One week from Christmas is still perhaps “97 sleeps till Christmas” for that guy. 

Maybe we should measure the passing of time in minutes, hours, days and weeks rather than something so individually variable as ‘sleeps’?

Or lets roll out other utterly inaccurate, deeply variable ways of charting things?

“It’s 37000 credit card transactions till Easter.”

“It’s 42 hiccups till the January sales”

“It's just 15 papercuts till my next birthday”

When my wife was pregnant with our son a surprising number of people who were already parents would mutter ominously “Get your sleep in now! You’ll be glad you did when you have a baby in the house!”

I bridled at the fear-mongering, mainly because we had been ‘trying for a baby’ and now these killjoys were behaving like it was a terrible accident that had befallen us! And also that humans can’t really store sleep! We aren’t a hibernating species. People can’t say “I am working night shifts Friday to Sat next week, so I have decided to sleep from Tuesday to Thursday.” 

What happens for the human animal, it seems to me, is the expenditure comes first, and then, like it or not, eventually the need for sleep will catch up to us.

Eventually.

I am someone who gets bouts of insomnia.

Well I think I do. Does it count as insomnia if you wake up really early?

I once told a friend I’d had insomnia the night before and had been up since 4.30 or something, and he said “I am not sure that’s insomnia. I think insomnia is struggling to get to sleep”

“I WAS struggling to get to sleep. From about 3am onwards. Then I got up” 

If that isn’t insomnia and insomnia is only ‘getting to sleep for the first time that night problems’ then I think we need to coin an extra name for “middle of the night and early the next day sleep problems”

I just call it all ‘insomnia’ (I think we already do this with “cancer” “the Flu” and “the common cold” which are all single umbrella terms for multiple issues. Do not get me started on the glibness with which some of us treat mental health or psychological conditions, “I am a bit bipolar me” “I get really OCD about that” (often said by people who have the O and some C but not much of the D. People don’t do this with more physical medical problems. You never hear “Oh I can get a bit ‘Parkinsons’ when carrying a hot drink sometimes…”)

Is there anything more ironic than getting up after a night of restlessness and insomnia and finding gunk in your eyes that we all call ‘sleep’?

Alanis Morrisette levels of irony. Don’t you think?

Sleep has become faddish and fetishised in modern health culture. I hear constant boasting on podcasts (the ones my wife calls “Men and their green powders” lol) about ‘night time routines’ and people taping their mouths closed and looking at Whoop data. It is an obvious gag but the people taping their mouth shut at night would do us all a favour if they left the tape on for the day too- am I right?

Just kidding, I am a Free Speech guy. I don’t really want to silence anyone. It is way easier to ignore them. Unless we shouldn’t ignore them, if people are saying stuff we should really listen to like “Gas The Jews!” or “from River to The Sea”

To be clear- I don’t mean the green powders guys here. Oddly, I mean many of the modern Left. (Really oddly)

When I sleep I have really boring dreams. Many people dream they are flying. I am more likely to dream about admin difficulty whilst trying to obtain my pilot license. My dream would have me queuing to get a form for the pilot exam rather than doing a takeoff. I once had a dream about car tax that I swear was so boring I woke myself up tutting.

Some people make a living being Dream Analysts, and I don’t like to job shame but that has to be a racket doesn’t it?

I categorise dreams in a very basic fashion: Wet or dry. 

Within Dry Dreams it seems there are a developing set of categories: Anxiety, and Silly/Dismissible, but I don’t understand how we allocate dry dreams into either bucket. At least with a Wet Dream you know it was a Wet Dream.

If I dream I am stuck in a traffic jam on the way to an important gig someone might say “Perhaps you are anxious about an upcoming gig, or worried about your career” and they then label it an ‘Anxiety Dream’

But surely some Silly dreams could be significant or indicate anxiety?

My wife once dreamed she had a homeless boyfriend. Everyone assumed it was a Silly/Dismissable Dream. (I mocked her immediately, and she said “Oh please don't make fun of him, I really liked him”)

Nobody said to her “That is an Anxiety Dream, you are obviously worried that you have a loser husband and when you get rid of him you hope you will end up with a handsome (but homeless) boyfriend, and he will be better than the husband you have. Better than the guy who thought it was a good idea to get a highly flexible offset mortgage and to aggressively attack your long term debt together thus avoiding compound interest… “

Merry Christmas everyone.

Just three sweat-drenched admin-heavy nightmares until Christmas.