Mornings are confusing and bewildering to a person with sleep issues. As much as I want to get up and get going while it’s light outside, and finish working before darkness sets in, what I want more is to lie in bed and sleep while I can. If I can’t sleep at night, I have to sleep in the morning. It’s only logical.

Sometimes it’s the first phone call that gets me out of bed. Sometimes it’s the first fax, but if I can count the pages I know whether I have to get up or not. If I hear three pages printing, it’s the daily report from the Kennel cash register, and I can ignore it until I’m ready. If it’s one page, it’s could be something “urgent” from the Boss, and I’d better get up and see what he wants. Sadly, more often than not it’s a junk advertisement that goes directly into the recycling basket.

So. This morning. Pages coming off the fax machine woke me up, but after I counted three, I rolled over and went back to sleep. Then another page printed, so I got up to check it out. After seeing that it wasn’t anything I had to deal with, I looked out the window and saw that it was raining.

So I went back to bed and slept for another hour. I had things I was going to do today, weather permitting. It wasn’t raining so hard I couldn’t have done what I needed to do, but I made the executive decision that it might not rain tomorrow. I always think the sun’ll come out tomorrow. Arf.

Although it was dreary and drizzly all day, I made the best of it. I felt better than I did yesterday, for some reason. Could that reason possibly be the extra hour of sleep I got this morning?

The doctor had some unhelpful suggestions when I brought up my sleep issues with him. I was hoping he’d hand over the key to the pill vault, but instead he suggested turning the TV, radio and lights off at whatever time I set as bedtime and reading. Nothing interesting, either. He told me he reads medical journals to get to sleep. So I tried it, and it didn’t work. In fact, it made me feel worse about sleep than ever, so I gave up and went back to my own system (hint: TV is involved). My system doesn’t work either but is at least familiar and comfortable.