Have you ever noticed a difference between night-time thoughts and daytime thoughts? By ‘night-time thoughts’, I specifically mean the ones that roll around in your head when you’d rather be asleep? I usually sleep like a slab of concrete. Head down – BAM – that’s it till Rod turns on the shower in the morning but sometimes… no.
Type (A) ‘night-time thoughts’ for me are those that come when I have a creative idea that I’m burning to get at. I sleep about a sixth of my normal hours while my brain turns over the idea from every possible angle working out how best to approach it. When I can get going on the idea it is mapped and planned and practiced and the way it will usually flow then, makes a huge difference.
Type (B) ‘night-time thoughts’ are much deeper. They are the ones that don’t often get air time in the day time hours. The worries, the tears, the longings and the fears. The daytime hours of ‘busy’ keep these all at bay. So much to do, so little time to do it. So many people whose interactions I routinely prefer, or because there’s someone else to be answered tend to get their answers long before the ones below my own surface.
For that reason I have learned to be at least partly grateful for the Type (B) sleepless nights. Those thoughts do also need examining and on those nights they won’t be stilled for the things that make the daytime noise. These thoughts are the uncomfortable ones… the often incomplete/unformed/unfinished ones – that given their own ‘turning over’ in the light of wakeful, conscious thought, can sometimes be:
- finished/completed or laid to rest
- given enough time and space to make some progress within
- acknowledged as part of the fabric that drives me
- offered to God in wordless heart-groaned prayers that even the daylight hours won’t provide words for
- brought into a place where I know more clearly what I need to do… or not do…
Catching each thought and looking at it from all sides instead of leaving them to rumble ’round under the surface changes the thoughts themselves. These sleepless nights give time for the deeper things to come forward and that, to me, is good.