A short note on sleep

Sleep has been a funny thing for the last month. Sometimes I sleep so deeply and so well – sometimes I drift in and out, and when morning comes I feel like I never even lay down. Sometimes sleep evades me entirely. There are, of course, a few reasons for this.

The weather – There are nights when I take a (pointless) bath and am instantly drenched in sweat. When I wake up and my pillow is soaked through (these are usually the nights I sleep most deeply). There are other nights (as I described in an earlier post) when the rain is too loud to sleep. The night after it rains, the humidity has cleared, and the temperature drops. On those nights, I lie huddled in my bed sheet, very surprised to find goose bumps on my arms!

The drugs – I was warned that my anti-malarial medication had side-effects of sleeplessness, paranoia, and vivid dreams. I haven’t found that it bothers me too much, except on the night I take it (Sundays). My dreams are insane! When I wake up, I have to remind myself where I am, and I can remember every tiny detail of what I was dreaming – the dreams are usually long and fairly elaborate. Last week I had a very disturbing dream involving sitting down on a toilet – my eyes popped open as I woke with a start. I was certain that I had just poo-ed in my sleep, and had to actually get up and shine my torch over the bed to be convinced. I promptly went outside to the latrine – I wasn’t going to risk it!

The animals – Goats are the most annoying animals on the face of the planet. Oh, they’re cute. But when a baby goat (a kid?) bleats for forty-five minutes at 2 a.m. because it’s hungry and can’t find its mother – I begin to wonder whether my host family would like goat for dinner tomorrow, and whether I can wake my senses up enough to catch the thing (not to mention whether my Swiss Army knife is a suitable implement). Only kidding, I could never kill an animal – I know I couldn’t stomach the sight of the blood. Hah.
Oh and I had an even more exciting visitor the other night. I made the mistake of leaving an apple on my desk in a rubber bag, intending to take it to work the next day. I don’t even know what time it was, but I woke up in the middle of the night to a rustling noise. Scrunch, struffle, crumsh (or something like that). I was suddenly very alert. There was something IN my room. I sat up and listened intently. The noise came again. I very slowly lifted the mosquito net and waited again so I could figure out where the noise was coming from. There it was – the desk. I glared across the room in the darkness, and reached beside the bed for my torch. I stood up quickly and shone the light onto the desk, intending a dramatic “gotcha!” moment. Nothing. Hmm. I lay back down again and willed myself to sleep. The same thing happened at half-hour intervals, and I began to wonder if this was one of the “paranoia” side-effects from my malaria drugs. Each time I woke, there was a little more light in the room – eventually I didn’t need the torch, but began to just watch the bag on my desk intently between dozes. When I started to hear the noises of my family waking outside, I dashed out and picked up a long, thin stick from the pile of firewood. I went back into the room and threaded the stick through the handles of the bag, intending to take it outside and give it a good whacking. I dropped the bag just after the edge of the verandah, and poked it gingerly, hoping the whatever-it-was (oh god, please not a rat) would scramble out. No luck. I prodded a few more times, with no results. I finally peered inside the bag, and found nothing other than a half-eaten apple. Clearly the rodent had escaped while I had been napping.

I was very pleased to discover that I had not been hallucinating, but less pleased at the departure of my apple – it was my last one, and it’ll be three weeks before I can get back to Tamale (the capital of the northern region) to buy them again. Here in Damongo, the only fruits I come across are mangoes and oranges.

At any rate, I learned my lesson - I’ve stopped keeping food in my room, and slept very well the rest of this week!