Waking Dreams

I've always had a lot of trouble with the basic act of going to sleep at night. This is because I have trouble stopping myself from thinking. I think very tangentially, and therefore continuously. The unchecked stream of consciousness, as it were, often makes it impossible for me to relax beyond a certain lower limit. So, most nights, I simply read or write or play games until I'm literally too tired to think, too tired to do anything but sleep. As a matter of fact, I'm writing this just after staying up playing Brink (an odd and slipshod, yet satisfying game) until around 2:00 on Friday night, knowing that I have the opportunity to wear myself down completely and then have a commensurately huge sleep-in... around noon should do the trick. My mental fortitude hadn't been broken down enough by the time I turned in out of physical tiredness, though. That's why I'm blogging. 

What keeps you up at night? The situation in the middle east? Your lover? Physical pain? Hunger? Your city's noise or light pollution? Existential crisis? The baying and cackling of bloodthirsty hyenas in the bush?

For me, it's usually just an obsessive reviewing of the events of the day - which I'm supposed to be doing automatically during dreams. My actual dreams are seldom everyday events, not overtly anyway - they mainly consist of outlandish panic-filled scenarios of missing or botching classes and appointments, or when I've been in a good mood, levitation or outright flying. (Also, the Deep Old Ones occasionally try to pester me, but I sleep with an Amulet of Warding whenever I remember, so no big deal.)

In any case, what I mostly think about while I'm still awake are the hard questions about myself, as opposed to more general philosophical appraisals of humanity, life on Earth, the universe, etc, though they can always crop up as sidebars and tangents. 

I would elaborate, but it looks like I've achieved what I set out to - my blain is finally beginning to surrendr its bustling business and allow me to sleqiu23wubn8gh lo;k'