6 ms·

Usually when I suffer from an inability to sleep it's because my mind ends up focusing too hard on things that ground me to reality. Existential dread, worrying

Usually when I suffer from an inability to sleep it's because my mind ends up focusing too hard on things that ground me to reality. Existential dread, worrying about work, thinking about technical problems etc. So often my technique to fall asleep has been to focus my mind on the fantastical. Stimulate my imagination a bit, like what if I was a dwarf in a fantasy universe. This tends to focus my thoughts inwards and naturally segues into sound sleeping. Letting my mind wander only becomes an issue when it's anchored to real life.

bonestamp2 8y ago
I have the exact same symptom and solution. Well, not the dwarf part... but I'll imagine myself doing something, like riding a rollercoaster for example. I think about every hill and movement, how the wheels are engaging with the track, the hydraulics squeezing to stop the car at the end, etc. Thinking carefully about all of these details takes my mind away from reality and into my imagination, which is where my dreams begin.
gadders 8y ago
I do similar - what if I lived in Ancient Rome, what would my ideal spaceship look like. Stuff that is interesting but inconsequential.
skipants 8y ago
I've read about the military technique the article outlines before, and it didn't work for me at all. On the other hand, letting my mind come up with some crazy dream has worked wonders for getting me to sleep -- so, it's validating to read that this works for someone else, too. That could be a sign that more than one type of insomnia exists.
- mmjaa 8y ago
  Did you practice it for 6 weeks before writing it off as a technique? Because that's supposed to happen ..
sveme 8y ago
For me, it‘s going through every tiny movement of a special climb, thinking about what worked and what didn‘t. All these things have the same core, focusing on the body and freeing your mind from distressing thoughts about work, life or relationships.
sysstemlord 8y ago
And i thought i'm the only one with a fantasy world that progresses a little every night before sleeping. Not much progress though because i fall asleep very quickly when i'm there.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
MarkArts 8y ago
I tried a few different techniques including breathing and meditation and thinking out a fantasy universe has always worked the best for me. It also helps me to realise when I'm unable to fall asleep at all. If I can't visually imaging what happens in my fantasy world I know my mind is to busy and I'm better of reading a book for 10 minutes and try again instead of forcing myself to sleep (which never works)
rusk 8y ago
On a couple of occasions I've tried "lucid dreaming". I imagine myself in a tunnel and I find a hole in the ground and descend down, down, down into the dark by a rope, and sometimes my mind will make some interesting things happen. Sometimes I'll just fall asleep :-)
faichai 8y ago
I do this. I fantasise about a fictional point in time when I pump myself full of nanotech, and transition to post-human. Going through the details as they interact with blood, muscle, bone, neurons etc. helps me to cool the dread and drift off.
- gadders 8y ago
  Reading through the scenarios people use I think someone should create a website with a list- http://www.thingstothinkabouttofallasleep.com http://www.thingstothinkabouttofallasleep.com
mattlondon 8y ago
+1 - imagining myself in some sort of benign make-believe world and what I'd be doing rapidly sends me to sleep. Personally not dwarfs for me, but could be anything - e.g. if I were a living in a TV show/movie's world how would I act?, or if I won the lottery tomorrow what would I spend it on?, or if I could just snap my fingers Magic Genie-style to do things what would I do with that power? I guess it is the introspection part that concentrates the mind on something totally frivolous and non-productive that allows you to just drop off. Whatever the root-cause, usually it is a matter of just rolling over, shutting my eyes, then I get maybe 30-90 seconds of make-believe time and I am off and asleep. Probably works about 90-95% of the time - there are off days where I really cant sleep and now I just get up and do something instead. Doesn't seem to work on planes though! :(
- bradknowles 8y ago
  Going back as far as I can remember, to about 5 or 6 years old, it has always taken me a very long time to fall asleep — like, at least an hour or two. It just takes a long time for my brain to shut itself off. I have to hold myself as perfectly still as possible, not scratching any itches that might come up, or letting anything else cause me to move a muscle. Or, if I do have to move, get it over quickly and then go back to being still. After a long enough time, I can sometimes notice that I have lost awareness of where certain parts of my body are located. I know that I still have an arm, but it’s not tingling or anything and I don’t have a somatic sense of where it is. Same for other parts of my body. Sometimes I have this awareness multiple times in a night, and it’s like someone is slowly dimming the lights on all those circuits until they finally extinguish, one by one. By the time I was in high school, I discovered Dungeons & Dragons, and it was easier for me to fall asleep by imagining what my favorite characters would do in various scenarios. And over thirty years later, I continue to use that same basic concept — different RPG characters now, but the same concept. One of the best things I discovered recently is the “Stillness Moves You” class that my friend Ariana Armistead taught a few years ago. She later developed that into the “InStill Movement” method (see http://instillmovement.com http://instillmovement.com). It is simultaneously the most relaxing AND the most energizing thing I have ever done in my life.
Ftuuky 8y ago
I'm the same. I keep progressing through this sci-fi story as a spaceship captain.
- Haydos585x2 8y ago
  I'm glad I'm not the only one. I've been building a fantasy world for the last decade and it's just in my head. Totally inconsequential and the stories don't need to match, it's great.
bokononon 8y ago
I also do this. Time-travel to Ancient Rome, winning the lottery, pandemic survival, going to Mars. I find I just start the scenario, and the imagination takes its own turns. It's like daydreaming and it's an enjoyable way of falling asleep quickly.
- shrimp_emoji 8y ago
  I just do abstract absurdism, like: what if a space ship was propelled by teddy bears? Bright lances of ionized teddy bears cleaving the sky in twain from distant torchships pulling out of parking orbit. Power armor visor stress test. Hammer. .50 cal. RPG. Someone just spilled neutronium. It eats through to the Earth's core. An algorithm iterates over all the atoms in the Universe, replacing every other with its antiparticle. And then noises wake me up all night, and I get bad sleep. :3
  - mladenkovacevic 8y ago
    Yes yes, this happens to me as well, but I don't make an effort to conjure these thoughts... they come on their own as I drift to sleep. Perhaps if your brain is too active at bed time, it needs a little boost to get it into sleep-mode, in which case intentionally creating these thoughts helps.
  - ateng 8y ago
    As my mind falls between asleep and awake my brain would start coming up with absurd thoughts as well. This would also happens when I'm too tired (think you haven't sleep for 24+ hours). I sometimes speculate that your brain comes up with absure ideas all the time, and a "reality checker" would dismiss those ideas without you realising it when you're awake? Perhaps the absurd thoughts come out only when you're tired (checker running low energy) or falling asleep? May be some types of psychological dieases are due to this checker not working properly?
    - shrimp_emoji 8y ago
      No doubt certain other, cough[0], influences inhibit that checker too. I wouldn't know though. : p In my case, I feel like I deliberately keep such checking off to diminish the profoundly powerful boredom of trying to drift off to sleep. You might as well try to keep yourself entertained before you dissolve into the void! 0: https://youtu.be/c2LXul1XAvk https://youtu.be/c2LXul1XAvk
thesagan 8y ago
I think of riding ferris wheels or a sinking/falling feeling of approaching Earth in a space capsule coming back from the moon.
mrcsparker 8y ago
I do this too. Fantasy universe works best for me. Always asleep after a few minutes doing this
Taylor_OD 8y ago
Yes. This has been my long time go to method. I think of something spectacular. I'm a caveman and need to find meat in order for my family to survive. I'm a part of a space voyage 1000 year into the future. I'm a billionaire with no responsibilities. It allows my mind to wander and go into a world that similar to dreaming. It helps my racing mind quite a bit at night.
- ai_ia 8y ago
  Seems like a case of Maladaptive Daydreaming.
  - Taylor_OD 8y ago
    Sure. Call it whatever you'd like. It helps me sleep.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
    That sounds like the opposite of maladaptive?
CyberDildonics 8y ago
I've had a lot of problems in my life, but most of them never happened.
kaycebasques 8y ago
Beautiful! Thanks for sharing. It's cool to see so many others saying that they do the same thing. I do this from time to time as an act of rebellion against the part of me that takes life too seriously. The speech that I give myself goes something like this: "You have this amazing mind that is capable of creating entire worlds. But you've been spending all of your time and energy worrying about stuff. Let's have some fun for a while and practice strengthening our imagination."
mladenkovacevic 8y ago
Yes I find that immediately before my brain falls asleep, my thoughts turn very abstract or even surreal.. like they don't make much sense. It's hard to remember of an example right now because this all happens in some layer of subconsciousness and evaporates as soon as you fall asleep/wake up but it's something like "oh I'm just here smelling this colour and it kind of tastes like cinnamon." Actually probably even more abstract than that, but that's the best I could do on short notice while fully awake.
takinola 8y ago
I am fascinated that so many people do this. I always thought I had discovered a little cheat code to sleep. I try to solve impossible technical problems (eg designing a perpetual motion machine, walk on water, space propulsion system to put humanity in Alpha Centauri.) I figure that if I don't fall asleep, I may just make some major breakthrough so it's worth it! The other approach I take is to listen to a podcast that has an even emotional flow (99% invisible is a great one). The common thread in all these approaches is that they help me stop thinking about the real issues in my life. It's easy to run a groove in your mind thinking about some very real problem you're dealing with and that makes it hard to fall asleep.
MattSayar 8y ago
Agreed. I know I'm drifting off to sleep when my thoughts get more and more fantastical and abstract. Just keep nurturing that and.... it's morning.
jcul 8y ago
I sometimes do something similar, I try to do hard sums in my head, multiplication and division of big numbers. I think it has the same effect distracting me from the issues in reality and my mind can get bored / tired.
SZJX 8y ago
I don't even feel that I'm deliberately doing it. Every time before I fall asleep, my mind naturally wanders off to a daydreaming state before I know it. I only consciously realize this is happening whenever I'm disrupted by noise just before I totally drift off. I think this is basically how every sleep happens really. If you focus on it then you're likely accelerating this natural process.

bonestamp2 8y ago

I have the exact same symptom and solution. Well, not the dwarf part... but I'll imagine myself doing something, like riding a rollercoaster for example. I think about every hill and movement, how the wheels are engaging with the track, the hydraulics squeezing to stop the car at the end, etc. Thinking carefully about all of these details takes my mind away from reality and into my imagination, which is where my dreams begin.

gadders 8y ago

I do similar - what if I lived in Ancient Rome, what would my ideal spaceship look like. Stuff that is interesting but inconsequential.

skipants 8y ago

I've read about the military technique the article outlines before, and it didn't work for me at all. On the other hand, letting my mind come up with some crazy dream has worked wonders for getting me to sleep -- so, it's validating to read that this works for someone else, too. That could be a sign that more than one type of insomnia exists.

mmjaa 8y ago
Did you practice it for 6 weeks before writing it off as a technique? Because that's supposed to happen ..

sveme 8y ago

For me, it‘s going through every tiny movement of a special climb, thinking about what worked and what didn‘t. All these things have the same core, focusing on the body and freeing your mind from distressing thoughts about work, life or relationships.

sysstemlord 8y ago

And i thought i'm the only one with a fantasy world that progresses a little every night before sleeping. Not much progress though because i fall asleep very quickly when i'm there.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

MarkArts 8y ago

I tried a few different techniques including breathing and meditation and thinking out a fantasy universe has always worked the best for me. It also helps me to realise when I'm unable to fall asleep at all. If I can't visually imaging what happens in my fantasy world I know my mind is to busy and I'm better of reading a book for 10 minutes and try again instead of forcing myself to sleep (which never works)

rusk 8y ago

On a couple of occasions I've tried "lucid dreaming". I imagine myself in a tunnel and I find a hole in the ground and descend down, down, down into the dark by a rope, and sometimes my mind will make some interesting things happen. Sometimes I'll just fall asleep :-)

faichai 8y ago

I do this. I fantasise about a fictional point in time when I pump myself full of nanotech, and transition to post-human. Going through the details as they interact with blood, muscle, bone, neurons etc. helps me to cool the dread and drift off.

gadders 8y ago
Reading through the scenarios people use I think someone should create a website with a list- http://www.thingstothinkabouttofallasleep.com http://www.thingstothinkabouttofallasleep.com

mattlondon 8y ago

+1 - imagining myself in some sort of benign make-believe world and what I'd be doing rapidly sends me to sleep. Personally not dwarfs for me, but could be anything - e.g. if I were a living in a TV show/movie's world how would I act?, or if I won the lottery tomorrow what would I spend it on?, or if I could just snap my fingers Magic Genie-style to do things what would I do with that power? I guess it is the introspection part that concentrates the mind on something totally frivolous and non-productive that allows you to just drop off. Whatever the root-cause, usually it is a matter of just rolling over, shutting my eyes, then I get maybe 30-90 seconds of make-believe time and I am off and asleep. Probably works about 90-95% of the time - there are off days where I really cant sleep and now I just get up and do something instead. Doesn't seem to work on planes though! :(

bradknowles 8y ago
Going back as far as I can remember, to about 5 or 6 years old, it has always taken me a very long time to fall asleep — like, at least an hour or two. It just takes a long time for my brain to shut itself off. I have to hold myself as perfectly still as possible, not scratching any itches that might come up, or letting anything else cause me to move a muscle. Or, if I do have to move, get it over quickly and then go back to being still. After a long enough time, I can sometimes notice that I have lost awareness of where certain parts of my body are located. I know that I still have an arm, but it’s not tingling or anything and I don’t have a somatic sense of where it is. Same for other parts of my body. Sometimes I have this awareness multiple times in a night, and it’s like someone is slowly dimming the lights on all those circuits until they finally extinguish, one by one. By the time I was in high school, I discovered Dungeons & Dragons, and it was easier for me to fall asleep by imagining what my favorite characters would do in various scenarios. And over thirty years later, I continue to use that same basic concept — different RPG characters now, but the same concept. One of the best things I discovered recently is the “Stillness Moves You” class that my friend Ariana Armistead taught a few years ago. She later developed that into the “InStill Movement” method (see http://instillmovement.com http://instillmovement.com). It is simultaneously the most relaxing AND the most energizing thing I have ever done in my life.

Ftuuky 8y ago

I'm the same. I keep progressing through this sci-fi story as a spaceship captain.

Haydos585x2 8y ago
I'm glad I'm not the only one. I've been building a fantasy world for the last decade and it's just in my head. Totally inconsequential and the stories don't need to match, it's great.

bokononon 8y ago

I also do this. Time-travel to Ancient Rome, winning the lottery, pandemic survival, going to Mars. I find I just start the scenario, and the imagination takes its own turns. It's like daydreaming and it's an enjoyable way of falling asleep quickly.

shrimp_emoji 8y ago
I just do abstract absurdism, like: what if a space ship was propelled by teddy bears? Bright lances of ionized teddy bears cleaving the sky in twain from distant torchships pulling out of parking orbit. Power armor visor stress test. Hammer. .50 cal. RPG. Someone just spilled neutronium. It eats through to the Earth's core. An algorithm iterates over all the atoms in the Universe, replacing every other with its antiparticle. And then noises wake me up all night, and I get bad sleep. :3
- mladenkovacevic 8y ago
  Yes yes, this happens to me as well, but I don't make an effort to conjure these thoughts... they come on their own as I drift to sleep. Perhaps if your brain is too active at bed time, it needs a little boost to get it into sleep-mode, in which case intentionally creating these thoughts helps.
- ateng 8y ago
  As my mind falls between asleep and awake my brain would start coming up with absurd thoughts as well. This would also happens when I'm too tired (think you haven't sleep for 24+ hours). I sometimes speculate that your brain comes up with absure ideas all the time, and a "reality checker" would dismiss those ideas without you realising it when you're awake? Perhaps the absurd thoughts come out only when you're tired (checker running low energy) or falling asleep? May be some types of psychological dieases are due to this checker not working properly?
  - shrimp_emoji 8y ago
    No doubt certain other, cough[0], influences inhibit that checker too. I wouldn't know though. : p In my case, I feel like I deliberately keep such checking off to diminish the profoundly powerful boredom of trying to drift off to sleep. You might as well try to keep yourself entertained before you dissolve into the void! 0: https://youtu.be/c2LXul1XAvk https://youtu.be/c2LXul1XAvk

thesagan 8y ago

I think of riding ferris wheels or a sinking/falling feeling of approaching Earth in a space capsule coming back from the moon.

mrcsparker 8y ago

I do this too. Fantasy universe works best for me. Always asleep after a few minutes doing this

Taylor_OD 8y ago

Yes. This has been my long time go to method. I think of something spectacular. I'm a caveman and need to find meat in order for my family to survive. I'm a part of a space voyage 1000 year into the future. I'm a billionaire with no responsibilities. It allows my mind to wander and go into a world that similar to dreaming. It helps my racing mind quite a bit at night.

ai_ia 8y ago
Seems like a case of Maladaptive Daydreaming.
- Taylor_OD 8y ago
  Sure. Call it whatever you'd like. It helps me sleep.
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
  That sounds like the opposite of maladaptive?

CyberDildonics 8y ago

I've had a lot of problems in my life, but most of them never happened.

kaycebasques 8y ago

Beautiful! Thanks for sharing. It's cool to see so many others saying that they do the same thing. I do this from time to time as an act of rebellion against the part of me that takes life too seriously. The speech that I give myself goes something like this: "You have this amazing mind that is capable of creating entire worlds. But you've been spending all of your time and energy worrying about stuff. Let's have some fun for a while and practice strengthening our imagination."

mladenkovacevic 8y ago

Yes I find that immediately before my brain falls asleep, my thoughts turn very abstract or even surreal.. like they don't make much sense. It's hard to remember of an example right now because this all happens in some layer of subconsciousness and evaporates as soon as you fall asleep/wake up but it's something like "oh I'm just here smelling this colour and it kind of tastes like cinnamon." Actually probably even more abstract than that, but that's the best I could do on short notice while fully awake.

takinola 8y ago

I am fascinated that so many people do this. I always thought I had discovered a little cheat code to sleep. I try to solve impossible technical problems (eg designing a perpetual motion machine, walk on water, space propulsion system to put humanity in Alpha Centauri.) I figure that if I don't fall asleep, I may just make some major breakthrough so it's worth it! The other approach I take is to listen to a podcast that has an even emotional flow (99% invisible is a great one). The common thread in all these approaches is that they help me stop thinking about the real issues in my life. It's easy to run a groove in your mind thinking about some very real problem you're dealing with and that makes it hard to fall asleep.

MattSayar 8y ago

Agreed. I know I'm drifting off to sleep when my thoughts get more and more fantastical and abstract. Just keep nurturing that and.... it's morning.

jcul 8y ago

I sometimes do something similar, I try to do hard sums in my head, multiplication and division of big numbers. I think it has the same effect distracting me from the issues in reality and my mind can get bored / tired.

SZJX 8y ago

I don't even feel that I'm deliberately doing it. Every time before I fall asleep, my mind naturally wanders off to a daydreaming state before I know it. I only consciously realize this is happening whenever I'm disrupted by noise just before I totally drift off. I think this is basically how every sleep happens really. If you focus on it then you're likely accelerating this natural process.