A Different View with Dave O’Connell

There’s consolation of a sort for the thousands out there who tossed and turned in the quest for sleep through the darkness last night – at least your insomnia hasn’t cost you your job as one of the most powerful people in the world.

Because it now transpired that the recently deceased Pope Benedict had stepped away from his role as Pontiff in 2013 because he couldn’t get any sleep.

And taking sleeping pills in his quest for slumber – ironically the best-known tablets in this field are known colloquially as Bennies – only caused him to walk into walls or fall down while he sought the bathroom in the dead of night.

It’s fair to say that heading up the Catholic Church at a time when sex abuse scandals abounded should trouble your sleep – but in another way it only showed that, when it came to restful nights, the Pope had no greater insight than the rest of us.

The one thing that anyone who has ever suffered from insomnia is that there is nothing worse.

Your body tells you it needs to sleep, your mind tells you that there are only four hours left before you have to get up, your bladder tells you that you need a toilet trip – and the snoring beside you tells you that you’re all on your own.

You can’t turn on the radio in case in wakes anyone else, and it’s the same for the reading light; and getting up to go downstairs amounts to an admission of defeat – so you try to will yourself to sleep which only seems to move the prospect further away than ever.

The bedclothes are too hot or too cold; ditto the bedroom; you know you shouldn’t have had that coffee but it was only after ten o’clock so it shouldn’t have kept you awake all night.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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