For me, going to sleep is the easy part

Before I launch into this week's rant, I want to send out a quick message to Miss Gauthier who wrote an article last week about "Sex and inanimate objects." I want to thank her for bringing up such an interesting topic as the intertwining of gender stereotypes and languages. The article was well-written, and now I want to respond to it. However, The News-Letter comes out closer to when my article is due next week than I would like, so this is a prep-note saying that I will be doing some research to continue the issue next week. I don't agree with everything Miss Gauthier said, but she said it in a way to which I want to respond, not to which I rolled my eyes and skipped the article. So thank you for that.
A couple nights this week have been so strong that I decided to approach the issue of sleep; more directly, dreams. I make sure to get at least nine hours of sleep every night (yes, this includes school nights). I require a lot of sleep to function and less than seven hours can screw me up for a week.
People think it's ridiculous that I sleep so much at night and still take two or three hour long naps when I get back to my dorm from class. There is a very simple explanation for this: I sleep like hell.
I've had problems sleeping for as long as I can remember. It's not like I have insomnia or wake up in the middle of the night and can't fall back asleep. In actuality, I sleep horribly while I'm actually asleep. When I wake up, I'm more exhausted than the night before. Thank goodness I'm a morning person or else I would walk around like a zombie with arthritis.
No, the reason I sleep so poorly is because my dreams are extravagant, intricate and, in various cases, absolutely terrifying. I have sub-divided them into three categories.
There are dreams, which are the typical weird-as-all-get-out anxiety dreams. For example, two nights ago, I was sitting in a Wendy's trying to explain to a friend of mine that it was incredibly important that the Honey Bunches of Oats cereal in my bag was well-ordered.
There are bad dreams, which are where I'm being hunted down by something or someone's holding a gun to my head. (Those are just brief examples; my brain is far more creative).
There are nightmares, which are when the images and sounds and experiences are directly linked to the triggers that set off my anxiety. For the past week, each night I've had some flavor of these. It can make functioning kind of a pain when I'm sitting in class. When I blink, I can feel the panic rise through my chest because of memories my brain has constructed less than twelve hours ago that can sometimes feel as real as the notes that I'm taking.
Fixing my sleep has been kind of like an Olympic sport for me. When my chemical tests were taken to see just how out-of-whack my head naturally was, my melatonin (the thing that increases throughout the day to make you sleepy) was higher when I first woke up in the morning than most people have when they go to bed at night.
So I started taking sleep medication, which were worse. Whenever I feel into a bad dream or a nightmare, the medications kept me asleep because they are built to deal with insomnia. This meant that when I was terrified, I couldn't wake myself up. I stopped taking those very quickly; we tried about three or four varieties until they finally believed me when I explained that my problems were while I was asleep, not the being unable to sleep.
In a couple weeks, I'll probably be going in for testing to see exactly where in my sleep cycle everything is going screwy. It's almost kind of cool. I'm like a mini-psychology test. Part of me likes this abnormality. It's validation that something in me intrinsically sets me apart.
Of course, this also means that I don't want to do anything when I get up in the morning because, hey, if what's in my head is that mad and I "control" that, what on earth is waiting for me outside of my room?
It's a give and take and a good excuse for naps.