fine whine

I've never liked the whole 'bedtime' concept. Somehow I never got good at it. Well, at least not the falling asleep part.

For years I've had difficulty getting to sleep at the proper hour. My next-door neighbor* would squeal on me when she saw my bedroom light on across the driveway. I just wasn't tired, I'd say in my defense, but my parents wouldn't hear of it. Later in my formative years I learned to sneak down to the basement and watch TV or use the computer in the relative darkness, and down there I tended to get away with it more often.

To this day I find myself with many a more interesting thing to do than sleep at bedtime. Washing dishes, for example.

Sometimes even when I have given up and bedded down slumber eludes me. I'll lay there, tossing and turning and kneeing my wife, and I just can't fall asleep. Having too many thoughts running through one's head is apparently a fairly common problem, I guess, and I'm no exception. But what then to do with all of those thoughts?

Some of them are interesting enough to write down, or to furiously try to remember to write down the next day (the effort of which only makes falling asleep more difficult) but others are just bothersome, like the invisible monsters of youth but not scary, just annoying. There needs to be a way to make them go away, I say.

So the other night I thought back to something somebody'd suggested, sometime ago. I tried to clear my mind of all thoughts, and to focus instead on the flickering flame of a candle, as the sole light in an otherwise dark room, or my head, or something like that. It's somewhat like one of those "try not to think of an elephant" exercises, and I don't think it ever really worked for me in the past, either.

Stupid elephant. You try not thinking about an elephant, if you aren't already.

But I wasn't thinking about elephants this time, or not thinking about them either. I was, in fact, thinking about a candle's flame, and managed to keep focus on it for at least a second or two. Then I noticed that my imaginary candle was apparently perpendicular to my head.

This sounds odd, but bear in mind that every other time I've tried this, that I can recall, I've been sitting upright. With my head upright, the candle was upright. However, this time I was laying down but the candle wasn't. Is gravity that important to my mind, I wondered, and tried to think of a candle parallel to my resting form, but even then physics overruled my imagination and the flame burned upward. This struck me as very odd, and my repeated attempts to fight gravity with my mental powers failed. No matter what I tried I could not imagine a candle burning sideways.

Must've been because I was so tired.

* My grandma, no less! I think my mom put her up to it. Of course I realize she wasn't trying to be mean or anything, but all I was doing was reading anyway, even if it was well after my bedtime.