Dog, you are walking the line; or a Litany of Gripes.

Do you see this dog?

resting like a righteous dog, and not like
an early morning sleep-disrupting troublemaker.

He's watching the Australian Open with us, kind of. As if he did not come to the door of our bedroom this morning at 6 o'freaking clock, with his tippy happy toenails, doing the 'let me in' samba.

'No, Bruiser,' I said. With firmness.

Away he slunk, only to come back two point five minutes later, tippytapping like a bastard.

'No, Bruiser,' the historian said. Firmly, if sleepily.

Away and back again. Tippy tappy. The dog is persistent.

By this time, of course, I was awake. My brain was starting to think of things to be mildly anxious about. List-making. I got up, cracked open the door. I said, 'Wait Bruiser,' which is my strategy for getting back in bed and adjusting the covers so that I'll still have some by the time he hops up. But then he hopped up and I was left to fume and cling to the remnants of my covers.

So I got up and wrapped myself in a robe and faux fur blankets and fell asleep on the couch. I woke up late, later than I wanted to. Which always makes me feel like I've started the whole day behind.

DIGRESSION. I really need to get a hold of my attitude.

BACK TO MY GRIPING: So I made some pancakes (and order was restored!) and got myself ready for this agenda:

• purchase two items for historian's birthday
• purchase sundry items at Target
• write drafts of two poems

Believe it or not, I accomplished this agenda. Plus I updated my anxious list. Then we went out for Vietnamese food and Anomalisa, which was very good and also melancholy. 

Meanwhile, this is still going on at our house

I'm pretty sure it's coming down this week. -ish.

and also this:

were you aware of snow in the forecast? we weren't.

We need to take Bruiser out in the snow for a walk, I guess, and then a talking to about sleeping in his own bed until at least seven o'clock. But I admit, I don't have much faith in this strategy. In his whole life, Bruiser has never once been known to seriously heed a talking to.

My little box of worries.

Dr. Write posted this article today on Facebook, about a strategy for managing worry. Ad Kerkhof, a clinical psychologist who works in suicide prevention, makes the case that while you can't not worry--worries, after all, "relate to real and practical problems in your life, so you cannot rid yourself of them altogether"--you can limit and manage the timeframe in which you worry:

Excellent advice, from Dr. Kerkhof.

Last night, when I was ostensibly working on 80% of a full night's sleep and instead found myself awake at 5 a.m. when, really, nothing good actually ever happens, since it's too early to bang around and make breakfast and it's too cold to go outside and so there's nothing to do but worry, I found myself--are you ready for it?--worrying. About this and that. Of course, since I had to wake up in time to make my 8 a.m. meeting, I might as well be extra and extraneously and superfluously alert, two hours too early.

In the article also suggests another strategy: "If you find yourself awake in the middle of the night worrying, with thoughts whirling round repeatedly in your head... this is where imagery comes in useful...Imagine there's a box under your bed. This is your worry box. As soon as you spot thoughts that are worries, imagine taking those individual worries, putting them into the box and closing the lid. They are then to remain in the box under the bed until you decide to get them out again."

Magnificent 1/12 scale Witch/Wizard's Apothecary, on Etsy, aka
My Worry Box.

This is the box that I imagine will be adequate to contain all the things I worry about, such as whether I will have enough time, in the procrastinated hour that I have allotted myself, to finish responding to student work; what I will wear; whether I am a nice enough, a good enough person; if I have prepared adequately; whether I will remember to bring my lunch; whether there are enough cut up carrots for the carrot portion of the lunch I hope to remember to bring; whether I am taking good enough care of the people I love; why, when it seems so dark in the evening, it is so difficult to want to do and accomplish anything but staying warm. Also, I'm a little worried that My Worry Box won't fit under My Bed.

This is not all of the worries, especially not the list-y ones, the long-term projects that I fret about finishing. I think I need a damn big box with lots of little cubbyholes to contain them, especially at five a.m., especially when I'm on the couch with the dog, thinking about the day to come which will be endurable but only just, because (another worry to put in the box) I'm getting a worryingly small amount of sleep.

The Hightouchmegastore Guides for Living #189: Sleeping With Dogs.

1. First, acquire a very, very very very large bed. The breadth of the bed should be akin to a broad savannah, such as where the lions roam.

2. Divide the bed into as many people and/or animals as will be sleeping in it. Preferably, divide these sections with something that a dog cannot knock over, when the dog inevitably turns over in the night with a giant sleepy sigh.

3. Get into your section of the bed. Let the dog get into his section. Drape a drapery across the dog, if that's how you roll. Adjust the covers. Turn out the lights and drift into a blissful, blissful slumber.

4. If you have a smaller bed, you are screwed.

5. Wait: if you have a smaller bed, you must not allow your tender and sentimental heart to be stirred by the sweet sight of a sleeping dog.

6. If, when you gently call the dog's name to rouse him from his evening rest, to entice him to another all-night sleep location, if at that time he opens one eye in bewilderment, as if to say, what's that now? but I was sound asleep! do not be turned from your rightful path.

7. You may give the dog another five minutes. Ten minutes tops. In fact, as you plan this whole sequence of events, take the "first a warning, then a five-to-ten minute wait" factor into account, so your own slumber will not be delayed.

8. After five minutes, ten minutes tops, speak to the dog in a firm but gentle voice. Tell him whatever lets you feel okay about yourself, but say it and get the dog off the bed, out of the room, and moving on to his new sleep situation.

9. Don't give up, now. Sure, he looks cute there all nestled into the bed, like he belongs there with the pack, you, the alpha, and him, the doggy beta. Just think of the middle of the night when he will be immovable and you will be awake, plotting how to get just six inches more of the covers and scheming about how to turn over without losing all the covers. Keep that thought uppermost in your mind as you make that dog get off the bed and leave the room.

10. No, he can't stay for just a little while longer. Just a little while longer? No, he cannot.

11. Is he out? Good for you. It shows strength of character and resolve. You are the boss of that bed and of the sleeping you do there. Now settle in, finish the crossword, turn out the light, and take a deep, calming breath of the cooling air in the room and the almost-disappeared redolence of a dog who is now sleeping in his proper place, i.e. and to wit: not with you.

In the middle of the night.

This morning, I got up at 4:20 a.m. to take my daughter, who was home for a quick trip to be a part of a wedding, to the airport.

The horror!

I know.

What made it worse was a new phenomenon in my sleep world: the "I can't fall asleep because I have to get up so early" dance. It is an absurdity. I know that if I don't sleep, I will be wrecked from lack of sleep. I know it. And that makes it, somehow, harder to fall asleep. Also: what if I sleep through my alarm? And what if I have failed to set my alarm? My daughter will miss her flight! And there will be a disaster! Many disasters! Who can sleep with so many disasters, and all so imminent?

Perhaps yesterday, some of you read this in the Review section of the Times. "Rethinking Sleep."  (Oh, for sure. I'm rethinking it right now.)

One of the most interesting things in the article was the fact that a history professor began to research "the history of the night" (poem idea--get on that!), and found many references in historic and literary texts to what was called "the first sleep" and the "second sleep"--with a period of wakefulness in between the two sleeps which occurred around midnight and lasted for a couple of hours. Apparently this period was regarded as the best time for contemplation and deep thought, as well as for sex.
However:

Most of us, however, do not treat middle-of-the-night awakenings as a sign of a normal, functioning brain. 

Doctors who peddle sleep aid products and call for more sleep may unintentionally reinforce the idea that there is something wrong or off-kilter about interrupted sleep cycles. Sleep anxiety is a common result: we know we should be getting a good night’s rest but imagine we are doing something wrong if we awaken in the middle of the night. Related worries turn many of us into insomniacs and incite many to reach for sleeping pills or sleep aids, which reinforces a cycle that the Harvard psychologist Daniel M. Wegner has called “the ironic processes of mental control.”

Also, a psychiatrist at NIMH did a sleep study in which he deprived his subjects of artificial light at night. At first they slept soundly, but not too long into the study, the subjects began to wake up for a little while--a couple of hours--then go back to sleep:

It seemed that, given a chance to be free of modern life, the body would naturally settle into a split sleep schedule. Subjects grew to like experiencing nighttime in a new way. Once they broke their conception of what form sleep should come in, they looked forward to the time in the middle of the night as a chance for deep thinking of all kinds, whether in the form of self-reflection, getting a jump on the next day or amorous activity.

I will pause, so that you may reflect.

In any case, I am now off to bed. My eyes are hot and I feel dangerously close to losing it, over nothing at all, or not much. If my sleep is seamless, bully! And if it is segmented, I will be thinking deep thoughts. I'm sure you'll be able to feel me thinking them, way over across town, where you're awake, thinking some deep thoughts of your own.

Sleep clinic.

A version of this article from the L.A. Times appeared in the Salt Lake Tribune this morning, headlined "If you sleep more, you may sneeze less."  Some highlights:

"The longer you sleep, the better off you are, the less susceptible you are to colds," said lead author Sheldon Cohen, who studies the effects of stress on health at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University.  Prior research has suggested that sleep boosts the immune system at the cell level. This is the first study to show small sleep disturbances increasing the risk of getting sick, said Dr. Michael Irwin. 

and 

The people who slept less than seven hours a night in the weeks before they were exposed to the virus were three times more likely to catch a cold than those who slept eight hours or more.

 and finally 

Sleeping fitfully also was tied to greater risk of catching a cold. Those who tossed and turned more than 8 percent of their time in bed were five times more likely to get sick than those who were sleepless only 2 percent of the time. 

So:  if you sleep seven hours, you're basically saying to the virus, I want you for my very own.  Sleeping fitfully?  It's like a mating dance you're doing for the virus.  And the advice of the experts:  "The message is to maintain regular sleep habits because those are really critical for health," Irwin said. 

No, let me just repeat that in case you missed its perspicacity, and in a larger font size, and indented: 

"The message is to maintain regular sleep habits because those are really critical for health," Irwin said. 

Oh, thank you.  How very helpful.  I will telepathically communicate my gratitude for this advice to the researchers tonight, while I'm tossing and turning during my less than eight hours of sleep.