Sleep Patterns

I've been going through a period of extremely brief periods of sleep, followed by even more brief bouts of wakefulness, the end result being that I'm sleeping in two hour blocks, which is neither restful, nor particularly satisfying, though the dreams I'm having have been vivid.

Graphic even.

Too graphic for this blog, of course.
(You'll all just have to speculate.)

I've never been 'good' at sleeping. I'm nocturnal, with my mind really coming alive late at night, and then, I have an over active imagination which causes me to spook myself and then spend hours huddled in the dark with the sheets up to my chin, and with some form of contact with Fuzzy and the dogs, basically waiting for false dawnlight to peek around the edges of the vertical blinds and peer between the slats, giving me the sign that the sky is brightening, and sleep is now 'safe'.

It's ridiculous, of course.
And the thing is, I'm not afraid of the dark, I'm just weirded out by mental imagery, however staticky and pixelized.

Fuzzy's alarm clock dependency – five different alarms spaced over two and a half hours – does NOT help, because usually the first will go off just as I'm finally easing into REM and then the pattern will continue until the last one, which still does not provoke wakefulness in the man.

I share all this because lack of sleep has affected my coherence, and my momentary desire to write. At six AM I have lovely ideas, but turning on the light to write them down would wake me TOO much, so they float away.

On the subject of sleep patterns, I am curious:
Do you get eight hours of sleep a night, on average?
If so, is it at a “normal” time, or do you live in reverse, or on a stretched-out schedule?
And does your imagination ever get the better of you, even in adulthood?

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