The Art of Sleeping

Sleep is scarce in the land of eternal rain and wind. My head feels heavy and my eyelids have gotten a life of their own when they try to close behind my back. Concentration is too far to look for, my thoughts just don’t stay on the same page for long before they wonder off to a far off destination in the tropics.

Usually sleeping in this foldwagon doesn’t give me much trouble except for the early wakeups by the warmth and light of the sun. These days I just can’t get to sleep, I linger in the land of the waking while half my brain is trying to pull me under the cover of sleep. It doesn’t work, it isn’t pulling hard enough and I float in a sleepless land of waking. The tent gently tapping my body on one side as the wind pull and pushes the canvas trying to get in. The wind does get in and chills my body while I am trying to warm it by pulling the sleepingbag almost over me head and returning into foetal position.

In the morning I am so tired that I can hardly get myself out of bed and try to catch up on those lost hours of sleep, in vain. Hunger and a full bladder force me to get up and get dressed while the waking world passes by as a strange dream. I am not a big eater and not someone who is good at making decision, even those early ones about what do I have for breakfast. My mind is just too tired to think about what I want, so I resort to eating something somebody else is having, ricecrackers with chocolatespread and hot tea. It is not enough to get the hunger out of my body, but at least it is something.

If this goes on for a little longer I won’t be able to get up at all, all those missed hours just pile up until I can’t get myself out of bed and lie in my tent for the rest of the day, trying to catch up, in vain. Sleep still seems like a waste of time and if you throw numbers in it you realise that you are sleeping half your life in which you could have become your own biggest dream. All I want now is not dreams, not futures, just sleep, endless sleep to compensate before I can think of something else.

The cold isn’t making anything better. You could doze of in the sun, reading a book or listening to music, but in this kind of weather keeping moving is better than sitting or standing still. And when you are tired you get cold so much more easily then when you are full of energy. So I am shivering from the cold, wearing my most comfortable sweater that suggest that I have studied at Oxford University, of course I haven’t. I am not a smartface, no walking encyclopaedia even though people suggest I am. I am just average with a not so secret hunger for knowledge. Knowledge that I could absorb if I wasn’t so damn tired that even walking to the loo is too much and that I will get into bed when I have finished this.

Goodmorning and goodnight!