Book du jour - mostly numbers

"Getting Back to Sleep" is about the time spent lying awake in the middle of the night - yet another of the inflictions of advancing age. It's written on ledger paper, a sort of account book. This wasted time is literally spent, used up, gone forever - and to no purpose.

Rather than counting sheep, this method of getting to sleep is about counting backwards in 3s, 4s, even 7s - slightly boring but requiring enough attention that the crazy stuff that goes round&round as you lie there in the dark is crowded out. Numbers are numbing.

I used a random number table to select the starting point and the number to count back in multiples of. Each new "night" is marked with a date stamp, and the pencil (6B or 9B) starts out nice and sharp and gets blunter and more blurred, especially when the starting point is in the 900s and the counting is in 3s!

A few mistakes crept in, but I'm not saying where.

*Quick update - people have been sharing their own favourite ways of getting to sleep, or back to sleep. These include listening to music on their ipod
listening to classical music
side-effects of medication for other health issues
meditation - being careful not to use a "daytime" variation
telling themselves another chapter of an ongoing story
listing cities and town alphabetically
6 oz India Pale Ale