A week of sleeping dangerously

Day Five--The insomnia continues.
   There are two kinds of insomniacs...those who falls asleep and can't stay asleep, and those who can't fall asleep at all. I am both. But this week, after a long stretch of long, somnambulist bliss, I have suddenly suffered with the former type. I fall asleep, but then sometime between 2 and 3 a.m., I am awake.
   When I wrote the book, "The Insomniac's Manifesto," I did so after spending most of life awake. Back then, I was the kind of insomniac who jumped out of bed and immediately, in my dad's words, "made myself useful." That meant usually writing and researching on the computer. But if that didn't appeal to me, I would do housework. Lots of men's dress shirts got ironed between the hours of 2 and 4 a.m. Housework is less painful in the wee hours of daylight. I once washed the kitchen windows--inside and out.
   But those days are over. Now when I go through a bout of sleepless nights, I usually do one of two things: quietly watch early morning television or just lie there in bed, listening to my husband not snore. He is the quietest sleeper on the planet in the wee hours of the morning. I find myself checking several times to make sure he is still breathing. It's my job as an insomniac to make sure that everyone in the house is fine. When my son lived with us, I would always listen for him as well. Thankfully, he snores like an Amtrak train, so it's easy to know his heart is still beating.
   All in a night's work. But this week, while I was lying in vigil listening for sounds from my slumbering partner, I wrote my column in my head for next week. You'll have to check it out and see just what two hours of wakefulness can do to the creative brain.