Just call me the machinist

Last night I did not sleep for one second.

Not one. Instead I lay there listening to a spring wind storm howling round the house, rattling the windows, and shaking the trees.

All night.

I am so tired...

This happened to me once before. When I ended a long-term relationship in 2003 (I think), I didn't sleep properly for about three months. I just wandered round in a daze of exhaustion until it got too much and I fell asleep at last.

I hope it doesn't take that long this time.

Last time, I was alone during my insomnia. So I could get up, turn lights on, read or watch tv, do something to pass the time.

This time Himself is lying there of course. Himself 'has a clean soul', according to a German friend of mine. As soon as he goes to bed he gets sleepy, and about ten minutes after that he is fast asleep for seven hours at least.

So my insomnia is different this time on two levels.

Firstly, because I have to lie there quietly, so as not to disturb Himself who is working twelve hour shifts seven days a week at the moment and consequently needs to sleep, I am not actively insomniac. I descend into a strange meditative state, just by lying there not moving. I feel I am almost asleep, but I can, not quite hear but sense my brain telling my body to stay alert. Then I shift a little and realise my muscles are poised for fight or flight. So I try to relax and sink back into the state and then it happens again.

And again.

And again.

Sometimes I think I actually fall asleep even though I think I am awake. Then I have the strangest dreams, start to feel my mind pulling me out of them and I start awake again. There's this long noooooooooooooh and I start awake.

All very weird.

The other difference is the presence of a sleeping person beside you. You are aware of them, but they are not really aware of you, although Himself seems to be a little bit. If I get too squirmy, he rolls over, clamps a big arm around me and mutters poor baby try to sleep and then sinks back into whatever place he visits in his dreams.

Then it takes me about ten minutes to wriggle out from under the Grip of Iron.

I miss Himself when he's asleep. I see so little of him at the moment. Having him there but completely inaccessible is torturous.

A sleeping person is a strange thing, though isn't it. They're so vulnerable. How did we ever sleep in the wild way back when?

I just finished reading Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, which is an evolutionary biological proposition for why Eurasians took over the world. Basically we lived in areas of the planet that had enough domesticable plants and animals for us to urbanise. Then we developed technologies faster due to the separation of work in society and the development of a political and bureaucratic class. Our close living quarters relationship with our domestic animals caused the powerful germs that destroyed our enemies, the Incas, the Mayans, the North American indigenous peoples, the Aboriginals to adapt to humans. Consequently, peoples who had no domestic animals - hunter gatherers, Mezo-Americans, Australasians - were not able to fight the infections.

It was interesting. Basically, the people who were the least adventurous in the beginning of man's development, ie, the people who stayed in the Fertile Crescent and its surrounding land mass, ended up being the most successful, as those who travelled the furthest were at a disadvantage when we set off to explore eventually.

I have been trying to figure out the moral in that story.

Stay in school, maybe!!

Or maybe, those of us who live in the quieter parts of the world are feeling the same impact now as before, we just don't realise it. People who live in more hostile environments now - North West Territories, Australia - are at the pointy end of climate change. But the drivers of that change are still in the traditional Eurasian east-west axis (and North America of course).

I don't know. I spent a lot of last night thinking about it (I know I'm supposed to empty my mind, but I CAN'T, OKAY) and I can't figure it all out.

I wish someone would so I can get some sleep.