Sleep

Most of my life i have been a good sleeper. There were times when a student, that I would sleep for up to 18 hours at a stretch, regularly missing breakfast lunch and dinner as a result. As a child sleep would be an escape from the realities of life and nowadays, I approach bedtime with anticipation reserved for one of the best times of the day. Unfortunately my ability to stay asleep seems to have been drastically reduced. I don't need to get up to pee, and i am not worried about anything, I just wake up. I go back to sleep over and over again but it is frustrating not to be able to stay asleep.
Some nights as i turn off the light I focus on really happy times hoping that those feelings will stay with me in my dreams but mostly it doesn't work. I began last night thinking about some of my experiences fishing. Summer days alone on the riverbank, the buzz of insects and the smells of haymaking and the babbling sounds of the running water. Balmy one might think, but then as thought trains tend to, I thought of days when my father would go fishing alone and would come back late. He'd bring fish back with him and I could never understand why. There'd be a bucket of fish, silver grey scaled with creamy white underbellies, stiff as carrots, mouths gaping wide and totally inedible. We tried one once and it tasted like the river looked. Only once can i remember bringing a fish home. I'd read somewhere that Pike were a delicacy, and so when I caught a nice one, I popped it into a sack and brought it home. It said that they need soaking, so i put it in the bath and half filled it with cold water - we had no hot anyway. I thought no more about it until later that evening when mother came home from work. There was a scream as she went into the bathroom. The pike was swimming around, well trying to - there wasn't a lot of space for it. Clearly I had failed to dispatch the beast and it seemed non the worse for wear. At that point, i felt sorry for it and guilty that I had taken it away from its home, so, I popped it back into wet sack and set off once more for the river bank. I released it and it swam off seemingly in perfect health. I often wonder if that pike ever got over the trauma.
I didn't dream about fish father or fishing, i did wake up several times in the night, and thankfully I got back to sleep again.