So my husband invited a few guests to our place for a swim and a BBQ on the weekend. It sounds harmless enough and a typical Aussie summer thing to do. And we had a lovely evening floating around in the pool, eating sausages and barbecued eggplant and demolishing two cakes brought by the guests. But there was a bigger problem later that night: I couldn’t sleep.
Learning lots of new stuff
I didn’t use to be this bad, but recently, being exposed to a lot of new stimulation at once sends my brain quite crazy. One of the families my husband invited were people I’d never met before; the man is a colleague who I’d heard a lot of (good) things about and had been keen to meet, and he brought his wife and their 18-month-old daughter.
Here’s the problem: not only were they really nice people, but they were also very interesting. They’re migrants from Sri Lanka, a country I know little about, and I didn’t even know that the most common language there – which this family speak at home – is Sinhalese. The list of new and interesting facts I learnt about them goes on, and I won’t repeat it here, because my brain already spent several hours in the middle of the night repeating it.
So at around two o’clock in the morning, my husband rolled over and asked me why I was still awake (I was obviously keeping him awake with my tossing and turning). I just said, “New people,” and he understood. Of course, he told me I could think all I like about them in the morning, but my brain didn’t take that on board for a bit longer.
Meeting new characters and plots
I guess the main problem is that my fiction writer’s brain is seeing new characters and new plots in the interesting lives of others. The sleeplessness doesn’t happen when I meet just anyone; they have to be interesting and in some aspect different from my previous experience.
Variants of these kinds of people invariably end up in a story or novel I write – but curiously, as far as I can remember, it takes months or even years before they do – so my brain has carefully tucked them away in some filing system to be retrieved when they best fit the literary situation.
I wonder if I’m a little odd with this overactive imagination thing, or if other writers get stuck thinking over and over about new people and new situations. The same thing happens to me if I travel somewhere new and unique – too many new impressions leave me lying awake trying to process them all. Please help me out and leave a comment if I’m not alone.
I find that going on holiday or out of the city has the same effect on my brain. Especially when I go out to visit a friend’s farm or go to small towns – my brain switches on and there is no (or very little) sleep. It’s good for my writing but not so good for the next morning.
CB, glad I’m not the only one. Interesting though that being someplace that should be relaxing has this over-stimulating effect on you.
I can completely relate! With the stimulation of my real-life and virtual interactions, as well as my frequent traveling, my mind seems to be in perpetual explosion mode. Most of the time, I love it. But when I’m trying to fall asleep, it can be torture!
I do 3 pages of freewriting every morning upon waking, and it’s a wonderful way to center your mind. Perhaps it could also be useful before bed…
Zoe, that’s a good idea to do freewriting before going to bed. For a while (a pretty short while – you know my stick-to-it levels are low) I did a couple of pages of freewriting most mornings, but I never really made a good habit out of it and was annoyed it always seemed like more of a diary than what I wanted freewriting to be. But as a pre-sleep mind dump – could work for me!