Perchance to Dream

RHYS BOWEN:Unless you are like Lucy in Key West, the rest of us are suffering from a large dose of winter! Here in California it is raining and raining and blowing. It's dark and gloomy and all I'd like to do is crawl into bed and hibernate until spring!

However,one of the annoyances of my life these days is that I have trouble sleeping. I find I have a really narrow window of opportunity to fall asleep and it's right around ten o'clock. If I don't take advantage of it and fall asleep then, if I dare to stay awake to watch the rest of a show on TV, then I am still staring at the clock at 2 a:m.

And when I'm on deadline, when I'm stressed, when I'm about to take a trip I can fall asleep only to wake up in the middle of the night muttering to myself "Wait. She would never have said that!" and there I am, re-writing the chapter in my head. Or I wake having had a nightmare in which the flight is due to leave and I haven't packed my clothes or I don't know where the airport is. And then there I am, staring at the ceiling until it's dawn. I've tried hot milk, melatonin, lavender, and various other natural remedies and nothing works. Ambien works fine but I keep that for when I have crossed time zones and really need a good night's sleep. Advil PM works too, but I'm against taking any drug too frequently.

So is this something you suffer from, darling Reds? And do you have any solutions that work for you and might work for me? Please share.

HALLIE EPHRON: I love to sleep, and it's the opposite for me. If I got to sleep too early, I'm up at 2 or 3 or 4 and it takes hours to fall back to sleep, and yes I'm herding all the anxieties of the day in my head. Packing dreams? Oh boy do I have them.

I'm afraid of sleeping pills. I know too many people who are hooked on them and they make it hard to wake up.

I try not not to drink too much wine at dinner. Two glasses and I fall right to sleep and wake up two hours later. My friend Pat puts on a headset and listens to audio (never music, never a page turner), something marginally engaging but somewhat boring. I do counting things... like trying to remember all the kids in my elementary school. Or all my teachers. Or I wander around my high school in my head -- down corridors, up and down staircases, in and out exits.

RHYS: That would be a nightmare for me, Hallie. I'd be terrified I'd bump into my headmistress. Boy, was she scary and I once knocked her downstairs (not on purpose, of course)

LUCY BURDETTE: I am not a good sleeper, though I was a champion in my youth. I need to try to get to bed reading by 9, and then lights out by 10 or I suffer. I'm rarely able to nap, and I can't sleep in cars or on planes. It doesn't help to have John and Tonka snoring on either side of me (John's in bed, Tonka is not), but they are my beloved peeps so I can't change that. And the cat is an early bird and quite insistent about the rest of us getting up when he wants breakfast!

As for dreams, both John and I have what we call "sh*t" dreams. What can I say? Poop everywhere--ridiculous! And like Rhys, if I'm getting close to the end of a book, ideas start coming in the night. If I don't get up and write them down, they are gone in the am. Maybe it was only gibberish, but it feels like an awful loss...

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I don't sleep well, either. I have had restless movement syndrome since I was a kid--I've had all the clinical sleep trials, etc. (Talk about NOT fun.) So for me medication has been a godsend. I take a very low dose (comparatively) of a drug that is given to Parkinson's sufferers, and I do take Ambien sometimes but try to reserve that for really bad nights or across time zone travel. Still, I have a window (mine is about midnight) and if I don't go to sleep then, I am miserably awake until the wee hours. And it's so frustrating when you get those book ideas just when you're drifting off, and you know you have to write them down, but you also know that if you do then you're probably not going to sleep for a couple of hours!

Lucy, poop dreams! That cracks me up!

INGRID THOFT: Oh, sleep, how I love you.  I tend to be a good sleeper.  Some might argue I'm too good at it; in an ideal world, I could sleep nine or ten hours a night!  I tend to go to bed around the same time every night, but do allow myself to sleep in on weekends.  I always hear that elderly people sleep much less.  That should put me around the seven hour mark--a normal amount of sleep for most people--when I'm old and gray.  We always have on a sound soother that plays gentle ocean sounds.  It helps to soften noise from the sirens and trucks in our downtown setting.

I do sleep poorly on occasion, but never for more than a few nights.  I can relate to Hallie's packing dreams.  I have those in spades with all kinds of nifty variations.  It's almost like a writing prompt: You have a small suitcase, a room full of stuff, and the clock is ticking.  What happens next?

HALLIE: And where are the children?! That's always the question in mine.

JENN: Ah, sleep. It's lovely, although I only clock in about five or six hours per night. That seems to be all I need and I can't make myself sleep any longer. I go to bed about midnight, and it's like hitting a light switch. Snap. I am out. I don't dream, well, maybe once a year and then it's a weird recurring dream where I'm ironing an outfit for my first day of work at the library and I'm freaking out because I'm already late, yet I can't stop ironing. I don't wear clothes that require ironing, generally speaking. So, weird, right? I'm also a very deep sleeper. The only thing that wakes me is a sniffle or a cough from my sons' rooms. Otherwise, thunderstorms can roll, neighbors can have loud parties, etc. I sleep through all of it. Okay, right now, I'm a little tired. Oh, and I do take the occasional power nap. Fifteen minutes of being completely out and I'm good to go!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I get in bed, and wham: Asleep. I love to sleep. LOVE. I dream all the time, very elaborate colorful and  complicated, and sometimes blazingly hit you over the head obvious with their not-so-hidden meaning. Like:  had a dream where I was shown my new "house." At the entrance, I was so disappointed, it was not--pretty. But as I went deeper and deeper into the house, it got more and more wonderful, until the last rooms which were fantastic. I said to the person (Who?) "Oh, this is much better. This should be the first room you see."  And the person (who? no idea) said "No--you have to go on the journey to get to the good part."
DUH.
 But as for sleep inducers--if I ever have trouble drifting off, I try to think about being somewhere. LIke on an island, watching the birds fly over. Just watching the birds, then another one, then another one. Just...flying. OR I have an imaginary conversation with someone. If I say this, what will she say? And then what will I say? (Maybe that's SO boring that I just fall asleep.  :-) )  Or-- try thinking about--floating. Just floating.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I had a lot of trouble sleeping when I was going through menopause, but now I'm post-, I do pretty well. My problems are mostly environmental - Ross snores AND has restless leg syndrome (Debs, he's finally seeing a doctor about it! I'm hoping medication will help him, too.) The dog snores - lightly - and we have a drip in the bathroom faucet that we haven't gotten fixed (because it will involve tearing out the whole WWII era plumbing.)

So I lie in bed at night listening to the Anvil Chorus from Il Trovatore: SNORT! snore Twitch drip SNORT! snore Twitch drip..

RHYS: How about the rest of you? Do you find it hard to sleep? Any suggestions for someone like me who was woken by the storm at four this morning and could never get back to sleep?

Shut Eye, Forty Winks, Dreamland, Slumber Party

HANK: I sit here, staring at the computer screen, my brain fuzzy and essentially sludge. What do I need to get back in the, um, well,I'm trying to think of a word that means: quick-witted, thoughtful, flexible, interested, capable, imaginative. But only one word comes to mind right now.


Tired.

I could really use some sleep.

When I give speeches to organizations and book groups, and they say--wow, how do you have a full-time job as a reporter and a full-time job as an author and then all these appearances and you have a husband, if course--how do you do that?

And I laugh, and I say, oh, sleep was the first to go! Who needs sleep?

I do. I do. I do.

There's not a moment of the day I'm not working. (Writing this counts, right?) And I go home at night, and work more and write more and then fix dinner and then have dinner and then work or read-for-work and then go to sleep about--12:30? And get up at 7, if I'm lucky, and then start over.

That's six and a half hours (isn't it? bad at math, too sleepy..), and most experts say, that's not enough. Duh. Although I do know some people can go on less. Supposedly Leonardo Da Vinci would sleep just 15 minutes of every four hours. Whoa. Sleeping AND math. Very Leonardo.

Margaret Thatcher, the former prime minister, was famous for getting by on
only four hours a night. Thomas Edison slept 3-4 hours at night, regarding sleep as a waste of time.



And, surprise surprise, Martha Stewart says: “There’s not enough time in the day.” As a result, she alleges she needs no more than four hours’ sleep a night. (It must be the high thread count Egyptian cotton color-coordinated sheets.)

My waking dream? To have the prescribed-as-normal textbook eight hours sleep a night. Oh, I wonder how the bags under my eyes would fare if I did. I'd love to find out. I'd love to find out in a cool breezy room, with fluttering crisp white curtains and the fragrance of salt water and, yes, beautiful sheets and fluffy pillows.





Sigh. Oh, sorry, I yawned. How much sleep do you need?

ROSEMARY: More than I'm getting! On a regular basis I seem to get six hours, out by midnight and up by 6am, although when it's crunchtime I easily stay up until 3 or 4 until all or most of the things on my list are accomplished. (Then I drag my sorry butt around the next day.)

But the work is never finished. I was busy before I started writing - I did a lot more volunteering than I do now and for a time I was going to Africa once a year to check on the library. And my garden was in its early stages so I did a lot more planting. Some days I just take the day off - my husband laughs because all that means is that I'm working at something other than writing or promoting.

JAN: Those four-hour-a-night-sleep people have different DNA than the rest of us. Or maybe they are aliens sent to spy on us because that's just not human. Last week, I did a story for the Globe and talked to the pre-eminent sleep researcher in the country. He said you need one hour of sleep to process, sort, file and "deal with" every two hours you are awake. Sleep is the body's filtering and filing system and when you don't get it (unless you are an alien), you can't properly deal with your emotions and the weird little traumas of every day life.

This is just a long-winded defense where I call in a Harvard researcher to validate my absolute need for eight hours every single night. If I somehow get shorted one night, its NINE hours the next. I am a complete and total sleep WIMP.

HALLIE: I'm with you, Jan. Eight hours a night. MINIMUM. I'm so glad Harvard says that's a good thing.

I consider myself a champion sleeper. Usually I'm out within a minute or two of my head hitting the pillow. I sleep especially well with the baseball game on the TV. Or during that last fifteen minutes of Masterpiece Mystery. On the rare occasion when I can't sleep I get my husband to talk to me and that does the trick.

HANK: Oh, that's hilarious! We won't tell him...

HALLIE: And confession: I like to take a short nap mid-afternoon, too. Just twenty minutes out and I'm good to go. Yes, that's on top of my 8 hours.

Such a wimp.

ROBERTA: Hallie, I'm so envious of you falling to sleep like that. My hub is the same way--he's off to dreamland and I lie there thinking about a thousand things that should be done. Not good at sleeping through the night either...oh for those younger days when I was a champion sleeper too! And Deb, I'm not at all a night person. Not a 6 am girl either. John teases that my peak hours are 9 to 11 am. Could be:).

Hank, I've never noticed any bags--you always look better than the rest of us.

HANK: May I find your glasses for you? :-)

RHYS: I'm just getting over two years of real sleep problems--some nights with no sleep at all. It's bliss to be able to fall asleep right away, but I can only do it if I grab the window of opportunity which is between 9:30-10:30. If I stay up past that, or I'm watching a stimulating show on TV, I can be staring at the ceiling at three. And I do need my eight hours too. The problem is that I wake by seven however late I fall asleep.
And something else that's strange--I sleep really well away from home in hotels. If I wake at home I'm lying there writing the next chapter or remembering something I should have mailed. Away from home I sleep. Maybe I should be on the road all year.
Oh, and I love naps too, but they have to be less than ten minutes or I feel like a zombie.

DEBS: Oh, I'm so glad someone else confesses to naps! And that you are not all aliens who only need four hours sleep. I need eight, although I usually don't get quite that much. And then I need a nap mid-to-late afternoon, after which I write like a maniac and could keep going post midnight if I didn't have to do things like fix dinner and clean up . . .

I can't write when I'm tired. My brain just doesn't fire. But even after so many years of practical experience with this, I'm still amazed at the difference enough rest makes. I am also a night person, and the more I can accommodate my body clock, the better I do.

As for those bags under the eyes, Hank, I am SHOCKED, just SHOCKED by how much difference rest makes in the way I look as I get, um, more "mature." At least I don't have to be on TV when I've had a bad night :-)

ROSEMARY: I do think naps are wonderful - such a treat. And then you've got a whole new day!

HANK: Oh, gosh, I can't nap. When I do, I wake up and want scrambled eggs. No matter what time it is. It scrambles my brain, I guess.


So Reds, how much sleep do you need? Or, just as interesting, how much sleep do you get? Naps? Or no naps?

Are you a Martha Stewart or a, um, Hank? And--just thought of this--did you ever have slumber parties?

And hey, because it's Monday and why not--I have a signed copy of Lisa Scottoline's brand new SAVE ME to give away to one lucky commenter!