Inktober 2019 Day 4

Imaginary Soothing Companions:

Inktober 2019 Day 4

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead. Maybe

In the quest for at least minimally acceptable amounts of sleep, I have tried various forms of meditation, mindfulness, and breath work.  There is sadly more to come on this topic, but since I was tired of drawing my own increasingly jowly face, I thought I would move on to my problems with visualization and the generation of positive mind states.

Several meditation or self-regulation techniques invite you to imagine a positive or soothing situation- say that you are with someone you love.  I have tried the perhaps most idiotically concrete implementation of this concept: imagining holding one of my sons as a sleeping infant or napping with my long-departed dead cat. 

But of course, both kids were epically terrible sleepers as infants who preferred to nap almost exclusively while being carried by a walking adult...and would then go off like car alarms the moment they were transferred to a non mobile surface...or a mobile surface that was not their mother, for that matter. 

My cat was rarely a snuggly lap pet and was also a rather opinionated individual who did not exactly prioritize my needs for emotional support....or for sleep. He was more interested, for instance, in catching a mouse in the middle of the night and then carefully pushing it up against my neck so he could play with it in my bed.

I really need to focus and visualize that rarest of infant or feline naps, carefully refraining from letting my mind wander to the other 99.9% of our interactions involving sleep.

Perhaps this is an extra mindfulness challenge that will pay off someday.