lack of sleep

my father has said that in the years he lived with my mother, he never saw her sleep. she has a tendency to wake up very early (and maybe in her younger years she went to bed late too).

i seem to have inherited some of that "i'll sleep when i'm dead" attitude genetically.

i think i associate my sleeping past sunrise with being ill or being depressed and end up feeling weak if i don't get up with the sun.  as a kid, if i woke up after my siblings, i felt like i had missed something incredibly important - what had they been doing while i was asleep?! waking up "late" gave me anxiety even when i was little.

i function efficiently with about 5 or 6 hours of sleep a night. i think i would do best sleeping 5 hrs at night with a one hour nap in the middle of the day; but ever since i stopped working in daycare that daytime nap has gotten harder to come by...

more recently i have been waking up at 3:30 in the morning. sometimes i can go straight back to sleep and other times i absolutely can't.  this has a similar effect on my psyche as my sleeping late does. i end up thinking that something is wrong with me; some part of me is malfunctioning. why did i wake up when the world is dark and quiet? another kind of anxiety is created there.

sleep is such a mysterious thing. we spend anywhere from a 3rd to a 4th of our lives asleep (7-10 years for me thus far). and while i enjoy the nebulous understanding we have of our dreams and what they mean (there is so much room for interpretation and discovery!) on a practical level, i don't always like how mysterious my sleeping patterns are and how they effect my mood.

i appreciate that my body may be trying to tell me something. i'm just not sure what it is.