Insomnia: Silly Things That Keep Me Awake at Night

Now I lay me down to sleep, but first, I must know if penguins have knees and why cows have 4 stomachs. I need to know why Saturn has over 50 moons and we only have one. If our moon controls the tides, how is Saturn affected by all those moons?

These are the random thoughts of a serial insomniac.

So many pressing matters to consider

I know many of you also lie awake and contemplate very important questions. I know there are pressing matters that keep you up at night. We must know if a popular soda really contained cocaine and who decided it was a good idea to put it in soda to begin with.

By the way, the answer is yes. It did. The guy was a pharmacist, and they used it as medicine. I have no idea why they thought it was good for you. Ponder that for a while. I bet those sodas caused a great deal of insomnia. Why would anyone want that?

Going down a rabbit hole instead of sleeping

Of course, all the answers are at our fingertips. We should be able to find an answer to our burning questions and go to sleep.

Wrong. It leads us to more questions and we end up going down a rabbit hole that ends somewhere on a website we really do not want people to see in our browser history. I fear if people studied my browser history around 1 AM every morning, they might think I am disturbed.

My search to find out how many cats Cleopatra owned may or may not have led me to a site where you scroll continuously to reach the end of a horse’s legs. I do not know how I got there, but I can say with certainty that the horse’s legs never end. I was delirious from a lack of sleep and my brain insisted I find the end of those legs.

Pondering life’s most important questions

There are also plenty of philosophical questions that don’t really have answers. We are left to draw our own conclusions. Those will keep you up all night. Having a philosophical question pop into your head in the middle of the night is an insomniac’s nightmare.

When I say philosophical, I mean the very deep questions that might forever alter our way of thinking. If money is made of paper and paper is made from trees, does this mean that money really does grow on trees?

I tend to think it means exactly that, but maybe I am wrong. Maybe it means money grows as a tree since paper is made from the tree itself. Wait. That would mean you could plant a money tree, and we were told those do not exist. I have been told that all my life. My entire life was a lie.

A sleep-deprived mind is a terrible thing to face

These questions are usually followed by questions of why I am so awkward. Why do I always push a door when it clearly states it should be pulled? Even if I read the little sign, I still try pushing the door. How do I manage to trip over thin air? Why do we call it thin air? Is there such a thing as heavy air, and could it ever possibly be dense enough to trip over?

I know that saying is figurative and not literal, but when I have been awake for far too many hours, the nonsensical begins to make perfect sense. Literal and figurative are blurred concepts. Sleep deprivation does a twisted thing to the mind.

Tell me I'm not the only one

I have to ask you this question so I feel a bit better about my 1 AM weirdness. What burning questions keep you up at night? Do you know if penguins have knees? Oh, and have you seen the website with the horse that has endless legs?

If you have, you have fallen down too many rabbit holes on the internet. Surely I cannot be the only victim of those darn rabbit holes.