Well, it was sort of like that, for you Frampton fans. I went to bed around 12:30 am and at 2:30 I was still awake. I used all the methods I knew to fall into a good night’s sleep.
My brain moves like a bullet train working out 5-10 different ideas at the same time. Methods to combat this are unorthodox. I love music, but my associative memory decides to take me back to the days when that music was popular, causing me to open even more doors, test possibilities, and run what-ifs.
The other tactic is to put on an interesting podcast. This will cause my brain to downshift to focusing on one thing. Mathematically for me, this constitutes relaxation and can bring on sleep. I decided to do this with Mathew Amster-Burton and Molly Wisenburg’s Spilled Milk podcast: Where they “cook something delicious, eat it all and you can’t have any.” At the risk of disappointing Matt and Molly, who are incredibly entertaining, this usually works, but not tonight.
I moved on to music, but it had its usual effect. I then moved on to a short stories podcast which is something I do not normally do. None of this worked. There were a couple of times I was going to surrender and come up to the kitchen and put some words into play and I should have.
As a writer I know that ideas are like comets, you do not just get to see it whenever you want to. In those hours of insomnia, ideas were flowing like August meteor showers. Not only blog pieces and stories but even a song. I have known for some time that I would eventually return to songwriting now that I have spent a good part of 2023 writing my heart out. It is the next step in getting back to normal.
If only I had given in and come upstairs to act on the ideas. The surrender is not surrender at all but an exciting launch into taking nothing and building endless possibilities. I did not get up, foolishly thinking that I would somehow remember.
Upon waking I feel like the man waking up in the first line of Do You Feel Like I Do, the iconic song made famous by Peter Frampton that he also co-wrote. As much as I try, the ideas that swam freely in my head at 2:30 this morning seem to be gone forever. I know they were there because my excitement for them is like the wine glass that the man in the song wakes up holding onto. It is there, but he has no idea how it got there or where he has been.