Once again I slept horribly, and my sleep score was 75. It turns out that the air quality was never bad, though, so I don’t know why we thought it was saying that at first. I just know that Sense is a hell of a lot deafer than Alexa. Alexa almost always responds when I summon her, but not this thing. Definitely going to return it for that and a few other reasons.

I am really, REALLY getting sick of not sleeping half the time. I’d not only feel better, but I’d work out more than I do if I wasn’t so damn tired so much of the time. First I had a bad dream involving Kathleen and was hot flashing, and then loud traffic woke me up several times.

I will never EVER again live so close to a street again, let alone such a busy one. Phoenix was much noisier overall, but I actually slept better there than I do here and that was with just a box fan. And it wasn’t close to me either. It was on the other side of the room, which was pretty big. Here I sleep with two different sound machines, an earplug in my good ear, plus the air cleaner and I STILL get woken up. It’s fucking ridiculous. But Phoenix wasn’t practically on top of the street, and that house was on a slab foundation, not that I miss the place. I even asked Tom the other day… if we’d liked the house and if we’d had decent neighbors, do you think we’d still be there? He thinks we would have gotten antsy because of the adventurers we are. No doubt! Nothing wrong with staying put if that’s your thing, but after a decade or so, we’re gone. The problem is we’re pretty much grounded here until he retires and that’s in about 6-10 years, depending on money, the economy, our health, etc.

Excluding hotels, I’ve gotten the shittiest sleep in this place of all the places he and I have ever lived together, and that’s been three houses, one trailer and one duplex, all in three different states.

Again, it’s just fucking ridiculous. I know part of my problem is the perimenopause as well as my tendency for nightmares and the CRD, and not just so many loud vehicles zooming so close to the bedroom.

I’ve had sleep issues all my life. If God were real I could hate Him just for letting me sleep so shitty for so long, but being a super light sleeper actually started when I quit the psych meds I used to take daily in my teens and 20s. Before the psych meds, I had trouble falling asleep and I would be exhausted when my alarm went off for school, but I still slept when I slept. I didn’t even wake up to loud sounds let alone someone sneezing in the next state. Something changed upon quitting the meds in 1990. I quit because I was addicted to them, I knew I didn’t need them anymore, and I knew they were actually doing me more harm than good. Little did I know just how much harm! So thank you, Dureen, for handing what was actually a very normal and typical adolescent over to the “experts” so they could make everything just wonderful.

I can’t undo the past ignorance that has helped put me where I am today, but I can try to figure out how to get back to where I was before the psych meds entered the picture and screwed everything up. Maybe I’m approaching it all wrong. Maybe adding various sound machines to try to drown out the noise isn’t the right thing to do. Maybe the only way to get myself to adapt to sleeping in noisy environments is to turn it all off altogether. Well, everything but the air cleaner which is pretty defenseless against the loud and even the medium sounds anyway. I was talking about it with Tom, and he said the only way I’m going to know is to actually try it cuz everyone’s different.

Makes sense to me. The only thing I know we can’t adapt to is less sleep. I’d love to be able to “train” my body to sleep just a few hours, but that’s not going to happen. But can I go back to that place I was at before the psych meds? Well, believe it or not, I’m appointment-free until May 4, so I guess we’ll find out. Tom said he’s always heard that if the body’s that tired it will sleep. I just know that waking up because you have a nightmare or perimenopause is one thing, but the slightest change in sound waking you up is another. Nobody should be this slight of a sleeper. Nobody. If this experiment is a bust, then I guess I’ll keep doing what I have been doing which is basically the only thing I can do… get what sleep I can get whenever I can get it. As for exercising… fuck it. Why bother with something I’m too tired to stick to so much of the time?

My dreams were numerous, as is common when I don’t sleep well. I decided to throw Kathleen in April’s CampNano story (but not kill her), assuming I have enough energy to hit their minimum word count requirement of 30K. Because she’s been on my mind, she’ll be a “dream person” for a while. You know I always base at least one character on someone I know or know of.

Kathleen wasn’t very nice to me for her first guest appearance in my dreams. I went to the office and she made me use this horrible-tasting mouthwash. Because I couldn’t speak, I began to sign to her. She slowly smiled one of those smiles that was almost a smirk, as if she found my signing to her funny or cute. Then she told me to spit the mouthwash out. So I spit it out and told her that it tasted like “burnt pineapples about to explode.” LOL

Then Tom and I lived in a multi-story house. I was sitting on the hardwood floor on the upper level. In one corner there were these grooves in the floor where I could see down to the floor below. I told Tom not to step there in case the corner broke and he fell through.

In the last dream, I was able to remember, I was either leaving a voice message or writing a message letting my parents know that I had set up some kind of account for them and would soon pass along passwords and other information to them.