This was a bad sleep week for me again, almost as bad as the one I’d had in January when, in a fit of desperation, I asked for help from TSB’s readers to tell me how you nighty-night folks do it consistently. I’ve been in it lately, though—real down-in-a-hole stuff, and my sleep has been so off that I’ve even tried sleeping in the downstairs bed by myself to see if that would work. It was the same deal, though: I fell asleep with the laptop open on the bed, the phone on my chest, a desk lamp on, and a book underneath the pillow. 

We had couples therapy this week, and our therapist, Rob, who is almost as familiar with my own personal nightmare brain as the other two psychs in my life, knows the drill by now. “It’s like I’m trying to Clockwork Orange myself until 4 a.m. each night, meanwhile she’s peacefully fallen asleep reading her Kindle at 10 p.m.” 

Rob, nodded and took some notes. “Ah, the Ludovico Technique.”  

I had no idea what he was talking about, and we watched the little film dork boy inside him die before our eyes, but we moved past it. 

He then pressed me on this further, saying that it was like I had a “sleep phobia,” which is an actual thing, and I carry almost all of the symptoms. 

Now I’m thinking that when I stay up late to watch violent movies, it’s a way for me to trick my body into thinking that it’s not bedtime but “I COME ALIVE”-time. It’s not that I’m terrified of not falling asleep; it’s more that everyone else will be asleep before me, and then I’ll be up and fully aware that I’m not sleeping, and then I’ll panic for all eternity, live life in between snooze alarms.

And it’s always been this way, ever since I was a kid—ever since whatever bad things happened to me when I was a kid happened.

 “There was a time when I used to snort coke to go to sleep,” I told Rob. I realized how ridiculous that sounded, but it also sounds equally counterproductive to purchase the Argentinian horror movie When Evil Lurks at 1 a.m. to help wind myself down. So what to do?