I usually don't have a problem with sleep.
For most of my life I have been blessed with the ability to get comfortable and almost immediately fall asleep in whatever situation I found myself in... be that my own comfortable bed or the floor of a busy airport.
On the somewhat rare occasions that insomnia strikes me, it usually has to do with lingering anxieties over something going on in my life, or some other situation being not quite normal.
As I write these words it is a quarter past two in the morning and sleep escapes me.
I was trying to go to sleep, and then I noticed this high-pitched background whine that I couldn't quite identify. I shook my head a few times, cleared my ears, blew my nose and worried that perhaps tinnitus was finally finding me.
Then I got back out of bed and tried to find the location of the annoying whine, which turned out to be a tangible and physical thing and not just something inside my head.
At first I thought there might be some sort of alarm in the house of whose existence I was not previously aware, but then I noticed that it was strongest at one end of the house and near a window.
Then I actually went outside, and as best I could determine figured that the sound was coming from a house across the street and maybe two houses up.
To give it some sort of character, it's a bit like a cross between the buzzing of old fluorescent lights or a failing transformer, the piercing shriek of an in-house smoke or CO2 alarm... but high pitched enough and close enough to the inaudible edge of sounds made by a dog whistle.
I would be willing to bet that 90% of the world would not even hear this sound, so it's not exactly like I could call somebody for violating some sort of late night noise ordinance.
I thought that perhaps having identified the sound would make me able to stop fretting and simply go to sleep, but of course the sound is still there. And I am aware of it, and it annoys me... a little bit like a mosquito in your room at night. Except this is not a mosquito I can actually swat!
So here I sit, hoping that perhaps typing these words out on the tiny screen of my phone will make my eyes and mind tired enough that I will just doze off... like I do so readily in an airport terminal.
But there it still is, at the edge of my awareness, like an almost inaudible dentist's drill inside my brain.
I need to sleep, because there is a lot of work I have to get done tomorrow... later today.
I'm going to turn out the lights and try again, having had this diversion...
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Created at 2024.10.22 02:20 PDT
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