Curious Case of a Part Time Insomniac

One realizes the true virtue of something when one experiences its extremities. The warmth in the dead of winter is best appreciated when the heater goes kaput, the value of a charger is realized when the battery level on our devices reads 1% remaining and the sight of a recently emptied toilet paper roll in the bathroom when we're done with our 'business' makes us realize that we possess emotions like shame or humiliation.

In the life I`ve known so far - I`ve been a morning person. Waking up when it is still pitch dark and dead silent outside, taking in the crisp air that is pregnant with freshness and making the first brew of strong coffee; not merely as chores but rituals that I have grown up with while pacing myself for many a day- ahead.

In order for me to be up by what would still qualify as the middle of the night for most people; 10 PM irrespective of the day of the week is when I fell asleep. The world shut down at that arbitrary point on the clock only to restart again in the wee hours of the morning and lights out wasn't merely a physical switching off of the lights but of my eyelids as well. This system literally worked like clockwork ( no pun intended) when I would wake up from my hours of necessary rest  at precisely the same time every morning.

However recently, things took a turn for the worse. For the first time in life - I found myself straying on the dark side - with being consistently awake beyond my bedtime and struggling to get some shut eye despite lying in bed for what seemed like all eternity. Being new at the insomnia circus, I didn't really know what one did to kill time. To add to the sleeplessness, the silence in the room is so thick you could literally cut it with a knife. It is like a floating entity watching you stare at it while sneering at you. 

There is only so much staring that one can do in the dark without one's subconscious going into overdrive. Some of the areas I constantly touch during such bouts of sleeplessness are stark boring but other earth shattering questions like - Why are the housewives in Desperate Housewives so desperate? Does Sex and the City actually show porn? Did the makers of How I met your mother suffer from a brain freeze post Season 2? Will there ever be a show as awesome as FRIENDS? also figure in the mix.   

If this were at home in India, I surmised that I'd have the luxury of staring at the creaky rotating fan for solace but not here. To top that I'd probably go and wake up Amma in the middle of the night and she'd very sleepily make some wisecrack about reading her Doctoral Thesis for leisure which has magical sleep inducing powers and shoo me away. 

Eventually when I did fall asleep, it was because I was bored out my wits and finally decided to take solace in the last resort - to read through an extremely drab Control Engineering textbook filled with pages and pages of equations and circuits filled with dozens of alphas, betas, gamma's, delta's, PI controllers, feedback loops, Flux capacitors and time machines to finally get some shut eye in the succeeding few moments. 

To the wiseass who coined the phrase - Mommy knows best; Amen to you kind Sir/madam.