I’ve been struggling with sleep.

Becki Brown
3 min readNov 30, 2021

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It’s not often sleep has been struggle in my life.

I’ve been blessed with the typical 8 hours, achieved without much wrestling with the sleep goddesses.

But recently, I have felt tormented, waking up in the middle of the night with a fear of the darkness, the shadows, the soft sounds that surround me.

It’s been 3 weeks since I’ve consumed THC, which I imagine previously aided me in a soft, gentle, easeful slumber.

Without it, instead of sleeping 10 hours, I am sleeping more like 7 to 8 — also probably a product of my not currently being in a depressive episode.

But ya, waking to a sense of dread and fear has been, for lack of a better word, scary, eerie. I catch myself closing and opening my eyes with a frequency of every few seconds, eager to see what surrounds me.

I waver between telling myself it’s all in my head and believing in energies. It would be overly simplistic to call these dark energies or ghosts, but they are something along these lines. Something incomplete, some sort of unfinished business.

And I’m not sure if they wish to get my attention or if 2 AM is simply the time when everything is calm enough for them to be sensed.

I repeat a prayer that keeps me calm, collected: I am loved. I am protected. I am guided.

I imagine a sphere of light circling me in my bed. And these practices bring comfort.

But they do not rid me of the eerieness of all that surrounds me.

I have lived long enough to understand we can create demons that are not there. That our nervous system can fabricate threat.

But like I said, I don’t know that that which I sense is threatening me. It seems more like it’s existing, and I am picking up on it. Like an undercurrent of life that is easy to ignore in the busy light of day.

And so I have been tired. A tiredness that sits with me throughout the day, a reminder of my nightly troubles. And it’s hard. Hard to be tired, strained.

It reminds me how lucky I’ve been for most of my life to not be troubled, for sleep to have been easy.

And yet I wonder: am I being shown something? Is this guiding me somewhere?

Because although in the United States we only put weight in that which serves “happiness” and “productivity” and all those seemingly positive American attributes, there is a realness to what I’ve been experiencing that feels worthy of being looked at.

To understand what exists in the middle of the night when it is just us and the darkness.

What does it want me to know? What does it want me to see?

Or does it simply want to be felt. A reminder that there is so much more to this existence than the narrow box we’ve created.

These “ghosts” don’t feel like they want to hurt me. But that they do want to be understood. That they’re tired of those too scared to sit with them.

For although we try, nothing can truly be denied. Ignored, yes. But that which exists simply is.

Maybe this all sounds silly — there are parts of me that do not take much of this too seriously.

But there’s also a part, low in my gut, that understands with words I may never know.

Anyway, I hope these beings find a way to communicate beyond the sphere of my middle of the night waking. Because I am tired. And pretty soon, I will grow resentful of being asked to listen.

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Becki Brown

A reluctant optimist, I use writing to talk myself down from the perpetual threat of existential crises. more musings @ https://beckibrown.net/