Three A.M.

What is it that pulls me from the depths of sleep at three A.M. to toss and thrash and worry?  Everything seems larger than life and a thousand times worse when viewed from my sleep deprived perspective: the bills, the funny noise the freezer has started to make, the argument I had with my son, things I said in the past, things I failed to say, all those large and glorious projects that I don’t seem to have enough time to do. My past relationships, my failures . . . Everything negative comes under glaring scrutiny as I lay there rehashing lost possibilities. 

I read somewhere that the creative nature of the mind is more active when the cognitive side has been dulled by sleep or quieted in some other way. It’s one of the reasons I began meditating years ago – to unplug from the race and sink deeper into the right side of my brain, to still the chattering monkey and hopefully to touch the place of higher consciousness. And I have to admit, meditation has helped - a lot. At least during the waking hours.

But it’s those other times, those midnight raids of non-reason when I can’t seem to find my Om. It’s that alarm clock sitting there mocking me from its place on the nightstand, clicking away the minutes of my life as the mistakes of my past flash across my mind like a horror movie played over and over in slow motion. It’s the snoring from the other side of the bed reminding me that I’m the only one awake and obsessing during these vulnerable, wee hours. 

If I’m lucky, I’ll get back to sleep, catch a few more winks before the demands of the day call. Or is it that dammed mute alarm clock suddenly finding its voice.

Sometimes when I wake I’ll remember the pounding I’d given myself just a few hours earlier. And if I do remember, I might laugh at how silly I was to worry. For somehow, with the light of day, comes the realization that all those horrible, huge, monstrous problems haunting me during the night - well, they’re not really that monstrous after all. They’ve all shrunk disproportionately from their looming largeness of a few hours ago and are beyond merely miniscule. They’ve slunk back into the closet and are cowering in the corner waiting for their own day to begin.

See that’s when I’m back asleep. And the clock opens its eyes to start staring at me . . . . again.