insomnia

Why is it certain people's brains go crazy with new ideas at night? I, for one, am not amused. I am tired of being up late, twisting and turning, trying to "drift off" to sleep, only to have my brain buzzing away with new ideas that draw me to the computer or a piece of scratch paper. I've never been much of a morning person, but why must I be an "all night" person?

This gets rough, and even rougher is the fact that I don't want to get addicted to some strange sleeping drug to solve the problem. In fact, I loathe the idea of having to take something to get to sleep at a normal time. Hell, if I wanted to do that, I might as well become an alcoholic or opium addict.

Although my late night episodes (and their accompanying late morning episodes) are a bit on the extreme side, I do believe that we, as a nation, wake up too early. The fact that we put so much value in the opportunity to "sleep in" should tell us something - that there's a reason why many of us feel like zombies prior to 9am; that it feels better to wake up on our own than to be jolted awake by incessant alarm clock tones or the voices of morning radio drunk-jockeys.

As kids, it seemed to take a few hours in the early morning before our brains truly started to function, although we could trudge like zombies to the bust stop and our first class (or two). I wish that we (as a first class society), could improve our own quality of life by allowing people to wake up on their own, instead of enforcing the same strict sleeping (and waking) patterns upon everyone. We are not all made the same. The "morning person" definition was established because it is a very real phenomenon, and it's just not fair to shove your happy-go-lucky morning person ways down the rest of our throats.

Give us ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ's or give us death!