Sleep or Die (Infographic)

Ever since I could remember, I've had trouble sleeping. Perhaps, it had something to do with my nightly woes as a kid:

a. I had an alcoholic of an uncle growing up. Hmmm, that sounds wrong - most of my uncles on both parental divide were alcoholics. In fact, I had five uncles who died under the influence…plus a first cousin and my paternal grandfather.

But I digress… This uncle is Dad's second cousin. He was always drunk and when he's blotto, he's disturbing the peace to say it mildly. You know when he's smashed - he's daring anyone to come out of their homes and fight him. That is, him and his bolo - a large, sharply pointed, single-edged knife that was the Filipino warrior's (and revolutionary's) favorite weapon. When he's on a bender, he gets really scary.

A Filipino bolo. Image by Lorenzo Lasco

I slept with my grandparents and every single night that he's wrecked and hollering for a fight, I can remember my wee 6-year-old body quaking in extreme terror. Not the fact that we're safe home, that our bedroom door is locked and all the lights in our room - including all lamps and candles, I kid you not - are blazing, could take away the terror. It was like my mind was locked into a continued state of fright, that it was the end of the world, and I knew that if he yelled all night long I'll be dead by morning. I never felt safe…and it'd be morning by the time I could get to sleep.

I started sleeping well at night only when he died - he got run over by a bus during one of his nightly rages. (The agony I went through lasted for many years, I think.) My grandparents, I knew, sighed heaps of relief. In my kiddie mind, I can only thank God. I know, bad of me, but I was young and he was the terrorist of my life. His passing stopped the waking nightmare that I always had every day.

b. Around fourth grade, I started dreaming of a racing horse. It was always the same every night - I could see it galloping as if it's being ridden hard, beneath its feet fine grains of sand continued shifting and shifting and shifting relentlessly…until the sand turned into pebbles, then stones, then rocks, then boulders…and I was being buried alive.

I'd always wake up screaming and reaching for something, yelling gibberish. I was gripped by another kind of terror once again that only lived in my mind. It was hellish. And I refused to go to sleep, whatever my elders - Mum, Dad, Grandmother - would do to drive away the fears. I was terrified and there was no saving me.

No doctor or psychiatrist could help me. Until my mother decided to get help from a faith healer, who said I was the victim of witchcraft. My parents talked with the witch - who turned out to be Mum's best friend - and thankfully, the galloping horse went away.

It took me years to get over these terrifying episodes that marked my childhood. I think, even in college, I couldn't go to bed quickly. The earliest shuteye I'd have then is at past midnight. And the habit continues today. Now, because of a number of reasons, I couldn't go to bed before 2:00 in the morning, 6:00 at the latest (especially when I'm watching my Korean dramas).

I'm not worried because even if I sleep late, I wake up late. I always clock in 7 hours of sleep daily. The 5-hour snooze is rare, and only when there are schedules in the morning that can't be cancelled or done away with. Still, it's a nag when you're body's on a different time zone anywhere you go in the world. People see you as a slacker - they don't see me writing my ass off from 8:00 in the evening to 4:00 at dawn, trying to earn a decent living. Sigh.

And then I stumbled upon this infographic about the dangers of lack of sleep.