Hours pass. Time slips away. Now it’s 3:00 a.m. on a school night and you still haven’t fallen asleep.  Nothing is helping. Not pills, not tea, and none of the tricks in the book. A never-ending stream of thoughts floods your conscience. You find yourself calculating how many hours you’d get if you fell asleep right this instant. Tossing, turning, wishing, praying to something that you won’t have to go to school un-rested. It is but a faint hope because you know staying up past your breaking point is inevitable.

Now it’s 5:00 am and some of your darkest thoughts have come out to play. Your head swirling with countless “What ifs? and “Whys?” Sly thoughts intrude to pull you into sadness.

“Just close your eyes and fall asleep,” they said. “It’ll be easy,” they said.

What they don’t tell you about are the nightmares that terrorize you at night, filling you to the brim with the fear that you are never really going to be able to rest easy, are you?

Welcome to the headspace of an insomniac.

One of the main “perks” of not being able to doze off into la-la-land is constant overthinking. Jumbled up fragments of events mixed with bits and pieces and an abundance of other thoughts just waiting to be picked up and decoded one by one. Admittedly, it’s not all that bad. Some of the best inspiration comes late at night in the midst of confusion. It’s similar to finding a lighthouse in the middle of a great sea storm – almost making it all worth it. Almost. You still have to deal with random bouts of crushing guilt from events that happened years ago.
Sometimes it has nothing to do with overthinking. It’s simply restlessness -- wanting to go out and play while the rest of the world sleeps in a sweet oblivion. It’s almost as if you’re just waking up. So you occupy yourself with anything and everything, books, Netflix, desperately phone calling a friend who is probably the only other person awake.

Eventually, after zoning out a multitude of times, your wish is granted – only to be disturbed by images of worst-case scenarios. So you wake up terrified. The cycle repeats itself throughout the night, throughout the days, until it ends. For reasons unknown it all stops. You don’t know how wonderful it is when it stops. That’s not to say it stays away completely, but the worst of it is over, replaced by better dreams.

Like a wise man once said: “Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking.”

Imagine that.

With a mind constantly buzzing, you cannot expect to simply close your eyes and drift off. However, you can be grateful that the endless nights sometimes lead to oddly brilliant ideas and exciting plans for adventure. The mind of an insomniac is an alien planet of new discoveries and unwritten stories.