escritoireazul

questionoftheday asks: Do you sleep in silence, or do you have to have background noise? Is there a reason for this? How about light? Does it have to be pitch black, or do you need at least a sliver of light to sleep?

My answer:

I have insomnia a lot of the time, but when I do sleep, I can sleep through noise or light. Normally I have a fan running, though not blowing on me most of the year, because I get cold easily, but that's more because I like the sound of the fan than anything. (And as I live now, J can't sleep without a fan, so it's a good thing noise like that doesn't bother me.)

When I'm in hotels on my own, I'll usually fall asleep with the t.v. on, because it's such a strange thing for me. (We don't have cable at home nor a t.v. in the bedroom.) I'll shut it off at some point, though.

I sleep best in a dark room that is cool enough I can sleep under a heavy comforter, but it can't be too cold, because if my feet are cold, I can't get to sleep, yet I hate wearing socks to bed (and in general). (I never wore socks to bed at all until I lived in Michigan and then, despite how warm I kept my apartment, sometimes I needed it. I still sometimes do so in winter, but it is a rare, rare thing.)

J likes to fall asleep to stand-up comedy. It doesn't keep me awake as a noise, but I do sometimes get caught up listening to it as an actual thing I want to stay awake for rather than background noise, so I have to be careful not to get caught up in it. (Much like getting caught up in a story I'm reading.)

Unrelated, I haven't talked about Yuletide as much as I normally do, mostly because I have been fighting a depression crash over the past few months and have been left feeling flat. I got my story done, I wrote one treat, and I'm trying to finish another. Compared to the years when I wrote 10 stories, this could be disheartening, but (a) I've been writing longer stories for my assignments the past few years and (b) I was frantically trying to finish the first draft of a novel before the end of the year (which I did), and that took far more of December than I expected, time which normally would have spent on Yuletide.

I love the assignment I wrote, though, and I think the recipient will enjoy it.