**cries.**

I have had 40 MINUTES of sleep. I have been trying to go back to sleep for literally hours. I was in a wonderful, deep sleep and was cruelly and mysteriously dragged out of it. I can't get sleepy enough to go to sleep again, except at the exact moment noises are happening outside. These noises never come when I'm wide awake, but only at the precise moment I'm dozing off at last! Where is the justice in this?!

It's even more frustrating that it has to happen today. We're finally getting The Lawyers on Cozi for a few nights this week and I've been looking so forward to it. I've been waiting for 9 months for them to put that version of The Bold Ones back on! And unless I can get at least three hours of sleep (preferably more!), I'm probably going to be too tired to enjoy it when it finally comes on.

Every day is a struggle for sleep, but it always gets worse around late winter/early spring. For the last several years, anywhere from February to April, I end up with such extreme insomnia that I'm run ragged and have a physical meltdown. I feel dizzy and ill for a couple of weeks or more unless I eat practically constantly. Worse, some foods won't agree with me while it's happening, so I don't have a lot to choose from. I dread it every year and try so desperately to fight it off. I was successful only once. I don't understand what causes it every year at that particular time, nor why it only started happening the last few years and never before that. And I'm panicking because we have a big day outing to go to a family event at the beginning of March, and what if this horrible meltdown happens right then?

Nononononononono.... **cries.**

AUUUURGH!

If you can believe it, I still haven't managed to capture any further sleep. I'm still running on 40 minutes of sleep and whatever is keeping me awake in the first place.

I like to read my stories for five minutes or so before attempting sleep, as somehow that can induce sleepiness better than immediately hopping into bed. And reading my stories is better than reading someone else's, since I already know what happens and I won't get hyped up wanting to know what happens next.

But that didn't work today. I must have read bits and pieces of two dozen or more of my Ginger and Lou fics without getting sufficiently sleepy (except when those @!&^%#^% sounds roused me as soon as I dozed, AUUUURGH!). Finally I gave up and read some of one of the Star Wars books I brought back from the library in order to read Boba Fett's storyline. Still wide awake, I got back on the computer for the third time during this disaster. I checked mail again, wrote some, removed a bad plot twist from a ficlet, and watched three Mike Hammer episodes (sooo much adorable Darren). Still nothing.

I really don't know what I'm ever going to do. When the insomnia is this bad, I wish sleep would just hold off until it's time to sleep again. Occasionally it will. But I'm afraid that this time it's going to hit me like a ton of bricks right when I most want to be awake: first, to see a Perry Mason episode with H.M. Wynant, and then to see The Lawyers episode (and oh, I hope it's one with Joseph. He's absent from about five episodes).