Fear of Sleep

When I was a child, I suffered from insomnia. I also suffered from a serious lack of being able to communicate why I couldn't sleep. I'm sure some of it was physiological, but I am just as sure it was partly psychological.
Starting around the age of 12, I became aware of my own mortality. There wasn't a near-death experience, or even anything particularly traumatic, at least to my adult mind, that I can recall. I don't recall it being an epiphany, either. It was more like one night as I lay there staring through the darkness at the ceiling I knew must still be above me, it was like I just said, "Oh yeah, I'm going to die someday." and then went right on staring.
In the fall of 1984, I entered Junior High and a particularly dark time of my life. Though I wouldn't read it for another couple of years, I was acutely aware of the truth of Sartre's "No Exit". This contributed to my mood as I try to get to sleep and 10 turned into 11 turned into midnight turned into 1 turned into 2 turned into 3. By the holidays, the realization of my mortality had turned into, "I might die tonight."
1984 was a presidential year and I avidly followed the media coverage of all of the campaigns and formed my own opinions. No offense to my family, but I've never agreed with them politically or thought that their political views held much merit at all. I have always felt that they voted based on knee-jerk reactions and what the television (and then radio) commercials told them were the important issues. As such, I began to learn all I could about nuclear proliferation, which was not easy for a 12 year old a full 9 or 10 years before the world wide web would be in public use. Fortunately, I had an excellent relationship with the library and the librarians. I was allowed to read some of the adult magazines, the ones that had to be checked out. This was when I first discovered Rolling Stone, but it would be another couple of years before I would appreciate it's political commentary. I was mostly interested in U.S. News & World Report. I already had access to Time and Newsweek, and never have figured out why they kept that one back and not the other two. These magazines and other things I read, like Popular Mechanics and Popular Science, and other influences lead my fears to become "We might all die tonight via nuclear annihilation." This fear stayed with me in a very real sense until Ronald Reagan was out of office.
I tried talking with my mom about this, but her response was something along the lines of "don't worry about something you have no control over", which was exactly what I didn't need to hear. None of my friends wanted to talk about this at all with me because they were thoroughly uninterested in politics, for which I can not blame them. I think I may even have talked to my Sunday School teacher or her girlfriend, both of whom I was really fond of. But, if I did, I did not find what I was looking for.
As I got older, I began to do stuff during the time I should have been sleeping, if for nothing else than to keep about thinking about dying. I read a lot of books and watched a lot of television, well at least until midnight or 1 am when the stations went off the air.
In college, I finally cured my insomnia, if not the reasons behind it. But, the cure was worse than the disease, so to speak. I drank enough alcohol and smoked enough pot for nine or ten college students, all of whom would have been considered hardcore partyers. This took it's toll on my health, both mental and physical. At this point I despair that I will ever recover enough to live a normal life, whatever that means.
I also learned during those years, more from my friend Beth than from personal experience, that sleep could be used to battle your demons. And if it took the bottom of a bottle to find sleep, then so-be-it.

Snap back to the present, and I have a real love-hate relationship with sleep. I don't like to sleep, but I like to dream. I take that back, I'm rather indifferent to sleep, what I don't like is that period of time when I'm falling asleep, which is now mercifully short, or that period in the middle of the night where sleep wanes and evades me for an hour or two.