5 in the morning and once again another sleepless night and once again my mind just won’t slow or shut down.

I have tried all the normal processes to aid sleep but as usual nothing is working and so in the end I sat and watched several documentaries and whilst they were interesting they were not sleep and do not help.

I did manage to doze a little earlier today for about 40 minutes or so but that was all and is far from being enough.

On the bright side it has meant that I was able to catch up on some emails and approve and respond to some comments etc but even this was a long drawn out process as getting my mind to focus is extremely difficult and I am spending as much time editing and correcting mistakes within stuff that I am writing as I am writing the stuff.

Hm is that even possible?  Isn’t the  act of editing and correcting all part of the act of writing and if so doesn’t that mean that my previous statement would indeed be impossible?  Perhaps the qualifying factor is when the corrections or editing is actually done or who it is done by. If it is done after the fact then indeed it would be possible to spend as much time editing and correcting as it took to do the actual writing but then since this didn’t happen perhaps it is all academic.  Likewise if someone else was to do the editing and correcting they would be the one spending the time and not me so again this wouldn’t apply.

Aggh my mind is going of on one of its implausibility loops again.  I hate when that happens, although I don’t really do hate but certainly I dislike it.

Ok time to get back on track and focus.

Descartes once said, “I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.”

I have to say that the second part of his statement is something that I am very familiar with in as much as very often when I do sleep my dreams are troubled and when they are not troubled they are nightmares posing in dreams clothing.

Not all the time you understand.  Sometimes I remember not that which has tormented me all night and know only of their presence by the disarray of the bedclothes in the morning.  Sometimes, albeit infrequently I do, it seems, have untroubled sleep but as I say this is infrequent and you know what no matter how trouble my sleep may be I would gladly take it over the lack of sleep that I am experiencing at the moment and that has been the case for a few days now.

I guess it is hard for some to imagine what it is like to have schizophrenia and to suffer voices that just won’t let up and thus won’t let you sleep.  Perhaps this will help.  Did you ever go to camp or on a school trip or sleep in a dorm?  Were you ever really tired and desperately want to sleep but couldn’t because others in the dorm were making too much noise?  Well imagine those others in the dorm aren’t in the dorm but are inside your head instead!

It sucks and what is more there is little sign of any let up.  In the dorm situation you can get up and move away from the noise.  Go into another room, sleep in the lounge, the car, the bath tub, anywhere you want that affords you the peace that provides you with an adequate amount of peace and quiet.  But you can’t get up and move away from your head.  It just isn’t possible although it really does sound so very tempting at the moment.

Matthew Walker, director of UC Berkeley’s Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory and senior author of a study on sleep, which is published in the journal Current Biology said, “It’s almost as though, without sleep, the brain had reverted back to more primitive patterns of activity, in that it was unable to put emotional experiences into context and produce controlled, appropriate responses,”

I can so very much relate to this.  I feel emotionally raw and yet emotionally dead at the same time. I feel dangerous and yet endangered. I feel toxic and yet so very vulnerable to the potential toxicity of others.  I have, apart from this blog, placed myself in a virtual quarantine not only for my own safety but also for the safety of others.

When your mental health has the potential of going out of control I think a logical reaction is to try to control those factors that are or remain within your control in the hope of damage limitation.

I dislike not being in control and I fear the result of being out of control.  It is a state that is alien to my extremely logical brain and a situation that is alien to my comfort and confidence.  When you are clinging on for dear life at the very edge of the black hole of mania  losing control in any form is in many ways the Higgs Boson of your sanity.

Sleeplessness is in this analogy my brains Large Hadron Collider.  I have experienced it and indeed seen it at work many times but the more it happens the longer it runs for and the longer it runs for the faster it gets and the faster it gets the less I know about the potential results and thus the greater the potential for the possible creation of uncontrollable mania and thus of the destruction of my mind.

But again my mind is racing and the fears taking on their own pace.  I need to sleep.  I need to slow down. I need to divert my mind by submerging it in dross.