Oh sleep, where art thou?
Friday 1 March 2002

A minimalist design for Autumn. I got tired of looking at all that dark blue background. It's a wet and cold first day of autumn. I am sitting in my office (still can't call it studio... one day I will have a "studio") surrounded by incredible amounts of mess which is the last remaining sign of my two weeks of complete lack of motivation. My waste paper basket is overflowing, my desk is covered in random piles of tax stuff, home loan stuff, property contracts, client sketches and hundreds of little origami shapes from daily foldings from my origami desk calendar.

Last night I slept well for the first time in weeks. Most other nights I have woken around 4am and stared up through the darkness without even a tiny little bit of tiredness attempting to lull me around the edges.

argh? does that really say 2am???

I have tried all the tricks - There's Big-P's suggestion: counting to ten slowly over and over, imagining that I am rendering each number in a different art medium - crayon followed by pencil followed by paint and so on. No luck. My mind is far too easily distracted. Easy-E emailed me her method which is counting chickens with handbags. Her advice:

"You line up 100 chickens (yes with handbags) in front of yourself, then visualise the first one. It may be brown with a red vinyl handbag, or white with a super-cool Puma sports bag. Doesn't matter.

"One hundred chickens with handbags"

Now watch this chicken settle down on the floor, close her eyes, and nod off to chickeny sleep. Next chook:

"Ninety-nine chickens with handbags"

... ad infinitum."

This did work on one occasion, but on every attempt after that I found myself busily trying to think of 100 unique handbags to go with each of the chickens and not really relaxing my mind.

I have tried deep abdominal breathing, relaxing every muscle from head to toe, thinking "nice thoughts", watching late night music videos and warm milk before bed, all to no avail. So I lie awake and try to guess the time from the amount of light seeping through the blinds and the volume of traffic idling and revving outside the window. I lie there and lie there and end up slipping off to sleep just before the alarm goes off.

For some reason the pattern was broken last night, maybe it was all that flamenco before bed time, but I slept well and feel pretty good today... hopefully the curse has been lifted.

 

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