It’s the other kind – not the one where you can’t fall asleep, but the deal where you wake too early. I started out slowly: wake up just before the alarm, day after day, then a half-hour, then an hour before the alarm. Then I just stopped with alarms altogether. And all my life I’ve been an alarm guy, you could say. A guy who needed prodding to wake up no matter what time of morning. I’d sleep in by three hours, if I could.

The massive rift cut through my life by bipolar disease has separated from that time. Time is something I have plenty of now that I’ve gone earlier and earlier to the point at which my insomnia becomes something transcendent. I’m now waking up at 2am regularly, completely awake, totally all there. I crash in the mid-morning hours of 8-10. I’m going to bed around 10:30 and face-planting, falling immediately to sleep. And then I essentially take a nap. Wake up 4 hours before dawn.

This is why my insomnia is such an ass-kicker, ninja, street fighter. I’m timing the meds to reduce it, but I always have breakthroughs. I can break through clonazepam. When take it and still break through I’m a ghostly mess, drugged out of my mind by the clonazepam and sleeplessness combined with hypomania. I’ll leave the burner on after making tea. I’ll eat way too much. One time I sleepwalked out of the apartment, and woke up to the ding of the elevator.

I don’t know how to end this post, probably because it’s 5:30 and I’m beginning to feel the first effects of the coming crash. Sunrises can either be inspiring or deadly to your outlook. There’s one coming. Let’s hope it’s the former.