Interesting Falling Asleep Approach (anxiety, mentally, college, thoughts)

[TamaraSavannah]

I often use a subject and then start working on it mentally, going through each little detail, point by point. I find that I usually never get through it before I fall asleep. In the past, it has been some tactical subject such as how to approach perimeter security for an air crash but more recently, it has been seeing myself in some kind of fantasy.

Like the one last night where I took the I Dream of Jeannie episode "Permanent House Guest" (Dr. Bellows moves in), and switched it around a little, such as being astronaut Major Barbara Belinda Bocheta (all names 3 syllables) and instead of having a boy genie stirring things up, I'm rehearsing a play scene concept with "Mr. Kidd" & "Mr. Wint" (using something of the final scene from "Diamonds are Forever"), with a director behind a curtain on the tented patio. Dr. Bellows cuts me off before I can make any explanations so I shrug my shoulders and proceed with the scene.

Let me get to the psychology of this, however. First of all, as I work through these fantasy scenarios, I concentrate to see them in first person, through my eyes, and not as third person or studio audience. Secondly, as I said, I usually never get through them before I fall asleep.

Sunday night, however, I think I fell asleep without being aware that I had been asleep (that's not uncommon) but then waking up the same place in the story. I'm working on the story, become aware that my thoughts have drifted, and start working on the story again, but then become aware of the difference of time because it is darker outside (I work nights).

Now it might just be this particular fantasy on this particular night for while I was sleeping, I was cooking a brisket in the oven. Maybe the aroma of the evening was triggering the same thought process that was associated with it when I fell asleep. The reason why I picked that particular episode was because I was cooking brisket, rather a grand thing to do, and in the original episode, Dr. Bellows arrives to find Major Nelson dining grandly at home.

Thoughts?

[Tracysherm]

All my life, when I've had trouble sleeping I would do mental exercises like that to help myself go to sleep. As a young girl, my favorite movie was Grease, and I had seen it numerous times, so I had the movie pretty much memorized. When I had trouble sleeping, I would just mentally "play" the movie in my head, and I would always fall asleep before I was finished. Sometimes I would play the movie as if I were just watching it on the screen, but sometimes I'd "play" the movie as if I was seeing it from the point of view of one or more of the characters.


Another one that worked was Wizard of Oz. Sometimes I'd mentally play it as if it were on screen, but sometimes I'd play it from Toto's point of view, and imagine how he would see every scene. I remember in some movie, I forget which one, a character was telling his psychiatrist that he would mentally play the whole movie Breakfast at Tiffany's, from the point of view of the cat, and I could totally relate to that!


As a young adult, I would do this with movies I had memorized in my early 20s, like Pink Floyd: The Wall, or Monty Python and The Holy Grail.


Sometimes I also do a mental walk-through of a place I am very familiar with, imagining every step, and every little detail I see. For example, I used to walk the same route to grade school and then later, to high school. So I had 13 years (K-12) of walking those same blocks in that same mile, and everything along that route was clear in my memory. So I would go to bed, imagining leaving my childhood home, and walking to school, but I would always fall asleep before I got there. You have to do it with a place that's very, very familiar though. So even though I might try to do it with places from adulthood, like my college campus or the building where I worked for over 10 years, there's something about encoding a place as a child that makes you store up lots more detail. So it could take me over an hour to mentally "walk" through one block in my childhood neighborhood, because I would remember each house, the colors of each house, the things in their yard, the one place where the sidewalk was bumpy because of a tree's roots, the one tree where I used to collect caterpillars, that one square in the sidewalk with someone's initials carved into the cement, etc, etc. The more detail, the better.


I think the common theme here is mentally following some well-established "script," attending to every detail, and thereby getting your mind into a place where you can fall asleep, either to distract from worries/anxiety, or to sort of put yourself into a state of self-hypnosis. But I agree, it can be very effective.

[TamaraSavannah]

My fantasy life often involves being an animal, a Pegaron (winged unicorn) and approaching things from the aspect of being an animal. In the Charmed universe, I am Aja (Ah-JAh), a Pegaron in human form..but still an animal. So in one of the scenes where there is a need to remind people just what I am,

(where Leo has been made mortal again) "It is incredible to see the world as new again, as only a human." Aja comments with a "uh-huh". "Well, think about it , what if you didn't have your magic? What if you unpowerful as any other animal?"

Aja stares at him curiously for a few seconds and then says, "What possibly makes you think that all animals are not magical?".

It is so much of my fantasy life that in one of my first acting exercises, where "Imagine you are sitting in an airport....," (and then he starts describing 9-11 over the TV sets), I could immediately fall into it and find my own acting path out. Ie, the telepathic link that Pegarons have with each other went something like this, "Cancel your ticket and come home. If your plane crashes, that will be most hard to explain (Pegarons are immortal but human existence is so bureaucratic) but if you leave now and come home, no one will think much of it, and you will be safe." So I approached the "ticket counter", cancelled my ticket despite the "agent" saying I might not get another one, and ........ "proceeded home", though I don't recall which method I used. Adult Pegarons can not only travel by physical flight but also use a "Dragons of Pern" like 'tween.

I have probably used such for falling asleep, just not recently, probably mostly because if not intricate detail pre sleeping, then using, thinking about one of the several characters I use, depending on the audience and how I react to the audience, in dancing.