The one-eared beagles of insomnia

Since I started writing again on a daily basis my psuedo-insomnia has returned. It’s as if now my imagination has woken up, turning it off at night’s a challenge.

I’ve always taken quite a while to get to sleep though. Most human beings take less than six minutes to fall asleep, if that. I often take over half an hour. In that six minutes, most people spend less than a minute in a hypnagogic state – that floating not-sleeping not-waking consciousness. I can spend quite a while there. I rather like it, until I have to face the next day realising I never dropped into deep sleep.

All that to say, on top of taking a while to drift off, I wake up during the night a good deal as well. I’m a light sleeper.

At the moment, while in Sydney, I’m sleeping on a particularly comfy single bed owned by some friends in Edgecliff. It folds down out of the wall near the front door at the top of their stairs. It's cubby-house cozy. My friends are both lawyers and other than renting in a fab little inner-city suburb they have one other conspicuous consumption item: Russel the Six Million Dollar Beagle. Russel is sweet, quiet dog who is allergic to most of Sydney. His most recent trip to the vet, yesterday, involved removing some sort of cist from his left ear, giving him sixteen doggy-sized stitches and bandaging the ear back to his head for two weeks.

He now looks like a slightly mournful canine Van Gogh.

As a special treat, he got to sleep indoors last night, in the downstairs area. While having a little waking moment at 1 am (when my body had decided I was too hot and rearranging all my bedding was in order), I heard a pam-pam! rattle! pam! rattle! pam-pam!

Russel was asking to go out onto the downstairs rear balcony and pawing at the loose, but not open door. I padded downstairs and let him out for a drink of water. I left the door open and went back upstairs to bed.

Shortly thereafter I heard a skritter-skritter on the stairs, and some sonorous canine breathing.

“Russel?” I asked.

I stuck my head under the bed and was greeted by moist canine jowls. It appeared I’d made a friend.

There’s something reassuring about the sound of a dog breathing while you fall asleep.

Up until the snoring started.

Then I had to coax Van Gogh back down the stairs and into his basket. From a distant room, his snoring was, once more, kind of reassuring.

I miss having a dog, but my lifestyle at the moment is too peripatetic to justify even keeping my lovely wardrobe, let alone dragging a living creature around in my wake.