Don’t really know what’s going on but the usual problems of dyspepsia and insomnia seem to be giving me no let up right now. It’s a pain – if I get to sleep I’ll be woken up by galloping heartburn, if I’m heartburn free then insomnia will strike.

Actually the worst is not insomnia – whereby you simply cannot sleep – but something I sometimes experience in between the waking and unconscious states. This generally occurs if I’m very tired and need to sleep, in fact am about to fall asleep but then experience a strange feeling of heaviness or listlessness coupled with a strange sort of mental clarity or vision, often associated with feelings of physical dizziness. This will then be followed by a short period of sleep or near sleep, always with intense dreaming or intense uncontrollable ‘daydreaming’. I can’t properly discern the states – am I asleep or just on the verge of sleep or actually awake but no longer consciously in control of my thought processes (like on drugs). Either way this period lasting a few minutes at most will be terminated by a sudden shunt into full panicking wakefulness, like waking up from a nightmare, even though the dreams are mostly formless. Once my heart has stopped thumping I immediately feel the intense drowsiness again and the entire process repeats itself. This can occur 20 or even more times before proper sleep takes hold.

There doesn’t seem to be any predictability as to when this will happen except that it seems more likely to occur if I have a hangover, and never happens if I’m actually drunk. At the moment I’ve had 2 nights straight of this, so hopefully tonight will be OK. It’s a fairly unsettling experience and also makes you wicked blunt at work the next day.

So between standard insomnia, having insides like a hypergolic rocket engine and being a complete mentalista (see above) I’m not really getting my full 8 hours at the moment. The next stage is to try some herbal remedies. My boss swears by some stuff his wife gave him called Valerina – basically Velerian, Hops & Lemon extracts. Hmmmm. It does however contain 2-methyl-3-butenol, so it can’t be all bad ;-) even if it does sound like Valium for ballerinas. Actually Valium dosages that worked on those ‘definitely no whizz taken here’ ballerinas would be cool.