To Sleep, Perchance, To Dream

The first night you don’t sleep is fine. You were out late, you had a few drinks, your liver is grumpy, it makes sense.

The second night you don’t sleep is okay. You might have set up too many expectations by going to bed early to compensate for your lack of sleep the first night, and anyway, you had coffee later than usual that day.

The third night you don’t sleep is when you stare at the ceiling and wonder if this is what your life is going to be now.

Very, very luckily I slept on the fourth night. Thank you to everyone who asked me if I was okay and offered me suggestions re: breathing techniques and other relaxation exercises. I feel a bit silly for making a big deal of it, but I will file your advice away carefully for the future. In this PhD adventure, insomnia seems inevitable.

I also have my own advice to offer for tricking your brain into sleeping.

(This is for the little league insomniacs. If you’ve got big time insomnia then I don’t know what you’re supposed to do and I’m sorry.)

It seems to me that what keeps me awake is thinking in words, whether that’s mentally writing a blog post, re-writing a chapter outline, or re-hashing a conversation. So what I try to do is force myself to think visually instead, and I do this by working on a bunch of ‘locked room’ problems.

In detective fiction, a locked room mystery is a seemingly impossible crime - a murder victim found in the middle of a room with the door locked from the inside and no other points of entry.

Here are my locked room problems. Hillary Clinton once said she could sleep anywhere and she probably thinks about some of these problems too, just saying.

• if you entered your home and found a dead body on the floor and the door locked from the inside, how would it have happened?
• how would you kill someone without a trace? For this to be a perfect crime, it has to be absolutely untraceable to you. This means that if you don’t already have the knowledge, skill set, or equipment to commit a particular kind of murder (for example, if you don’t already own an edible pea shooter or know how to make poison-dart earrings) you need to find a way to acquire these things that can never be linked back to you.
• bonus, how would you kill someone without a trace if they were under constant security monitoring? (For example, a president?)
• how would you give the FBI the slip if you were under constant video surveillance, and every person you met could be a potential agent?
• how would you break into different buildings that you are familiar with, if you locked yourself out?
• how would you escape a zombie-nazi apocalypse? (Clinton almost definitely thinks about this last one.)

I find all these questions incredibly soothing to think about, and I'm glad to share my insomnia-busting tips with you. Got any other suggestions for sleeping, or any creative solutions to these locked-door problems? Answers on a postcard, please.