Not so much. Not lately. I wake up, rather routinely now, at 4:30 AM.
And I am finding that it is affecting my memory, my recall to be specific. Last week, I was able to successfully drift back to sleep by conjuring an image in my head and concentrating on it deeply. Random image of the morning was a donut. I imagined the donut, trying to see it clearly and concretely as if it were real. I am not a concrete visual thinker so this is not an easy task for me. The donut in question was chocolate dipped with sprinkles.
Last night, or rather about an hour ago, I found myself awake again and thinking thoughts of work because that is where my mind normally drifts on work days. “Donut!” I told myself in my still sleepy haze. I tried it. The donut appeared – I must have started to fall back asleep because then dreams started to intrude. My boss, some irritating people at work, and in this mix of directed visualization and half dream, I lashed out at the annoying people with the only thing I had. DONUT! I felt myself throw it at them in my mind. Ha! I will give you donut!
The absurdity of this all woke me right up.
Shit.
I tried a different one, a box. Nope, it rapidly became clear that box isn’t good because it reminded me of the prop used by someone at a very bad talk I attended yesterday at work.
Um, I tried belt then out of desperation – first seeing a belt stretched out in front of my hanging there in the nothing and when that didn’t work, I imagined wrapping it up around my hand and feeling and looking at the leather’s grain, the edges and the length….but by that point, I was fully awake.
Final Trick 
R. G. Maines
/ March 5, 2011funny, I’ve been up every couple of hours, every night, standing up, stretching, changing positions, adjusting my clothes, etc. I don’t think I get more than 2 or 3 hours at a time consecutively. Some nights I’m lucky if I get a full hour.
it’s really wearing on me, I feel for you
dyspatient
/ March 6, 2011How awful. Wearing is right! I feel eroded. I try not to get up because i figure that’s just going to reinforce this unfortunate tendency of my body to think that 4:30 is a reasonable time to wake up.