Confessions of an insomniac
Why can’t we all just be nocturnal?
Melissa Hiebert Staff
It is 4:32 a.m. right now. There are two kinds of people who are up at 4:32 in the morning: cool people who are just getting home from a long night of partying, and loners who have nothing better to do with their time and just plain can’t sleep.
Can you guess which one I am? Aw, come on! It’s not that obvious, is it? I mean, I might have friends! Okay, I’ll admit it — I’m a loner who has nothing better to do than sit here at four in the morning (on a Saturday no less!), since I am one of many who suffers from insomnia.
I decided to take some of this free time to perform some investigative journalism. Did you know that, according to the very extensive sample population that consists of the number of people who are awake in my house at the moment, one in three Canadians suffers from insomnia? Of course, StatsCan claims that the real number is one in seven, but what do they know? But for argument’s sake, we’ll go with their number. One in seven still translates to 3.3 million people awake on any given night.
There are many things that can help alleviate typical insomnia. Drinking herbal tea or warm milk, a healthy diet and lots of exercise, or getting rid of stress and worry in your everyday life. For more severe cases, treatment can involve sleep clinics or sleeping pills. Or perhaps banging your head into a wall or drinking shooters until you’re ‘cured.’ None of these, however, are for me. I’ve decided that insomnia is just a cooler alternative to sleeping.
Who told us that we have to be asleep all night and awake all day, anyway? Genetics shmenetics, all of the cool animals are nocturnal anyway. Bats, owls, raccoons, koalas and echidnas (Knuckles from Sonic the Hedgehog) are all nocturnal, and look at how cool they are. Even Okapis are nocturnal! (An Okapi, I have just learned, is a “forest giraffe” that looks like a giraffe crossed with a horse and a zebra.) See? Just look at all of the wonderful things you can learn when you are awake for 20 hours a day.
And that’s not the only way to spend your time! With insomnia, those pesky all-night cram sessions simply turn into a convenient way to pass the time until morning. You can fight crime, slay vampires, order random items from late night infomercials or build a replica of the CN tower entirely out of popsicle sticks.
Despite their sizeable numbers, insomniacs seem to be heavily discriminated against. After the bars close, there is absolutely nothing open in Winnipeg except for a handful of Tim Horton’s, 7-11s and fast-food drive-throughs. If we are to have a truly inclusive society, shouldn’t we accommodate our insomniac friends and have an open-all-night city? People should have the right to choose when they want to sleep and when they want to be awake.
Nah, scratch that. Midnight traffic jams and people walking around at all hours would ruin the quiet solitude and mystery of the night. Also, insomnia makes you tired enough to go off on nonsensical tangents about fighting crime and Okapis. And there’s only room for a limited number of half-awake loners to wander the streets anyway.
