Travelling Companions: Part Two

 

I've posted a lot of photos over the past week alongside some comment or other that says, "I prayed here." Which is true, and it's been a tremendous gift and blessing.

What I've not written too is "I slept here," although most of the time it would have been equally true.

Another of my companions on this pilgrimage, helping to make things just a little more challenging, is hypersomnia: a condition not unlike narcolepsy that causes me to fall asleep all the time, at unexpected moments, and sometimes without warning.

Unlike my autism this is a fairly new thing for me; it's emerged over the last few years. I've had a polysomnography measurement and multiple sleep latency test at the local hospital's sleep clinic, and met with the consultant there; we're still trying to work out exactly what's going on.

In the meantime, the impact has been quite significant. I'm not allowed to drive a car at the moment (I don't think I've been behind the wheel for a year or so now). What about the moped? That's ok at the moment, since I've not fallen asleep on the bike - yet! - so the doc's fine with it. Family, colleagues, folks at church have got used to me conking out. Strangers just ignore me, I find.

I've learned to spot the warning signs, mostly, so I get myself somewhere quiet - churches (especially crypts), coffee shops, libraries, museums, galleries are all good, as are parks on a sunny day - and I lie me down for forty winks. Sometimes I'm out for ten or fifteen minutes, sometimes a couple of hours. No telling which it will be.

Here's what it's like: you've got a switch in your head that flips up in the morning to wake you up, and down in the evening to send you to bed. It also flips down if you do too much, or exert yourself, and need a rest, or if you're on holiday. My switch is broken. It flips up when it feels like it ("2am! What a great time to be alive!") and down on a whim ("Halfway through a meeting at work? Never mind, let's nap!"). I have no control over it. I once visited a friend in hospital struggling with cancer and fell asleep in mid-conversation.

I don't know why it's happening; Sally, my wife, thinks it may be accumulated stress and pressure has just busted something, and she may be right. This pilgrimage has been a gift after the last few years, during which (on top of the whole COVID and lockdown thing) we've been through the illness and death of a dear friend and colleague at Launde, the stress of closure and reopening multiple times over the pandemic, and - for me - a mental breakdown which knocked me out for three months and for which I'm still getting therapy. So yeah, stress might be part of it.

Here's how I've been trying to think of it lately: as a weird gift. Psalm 127 has these words in the middle:

It is in vain that you hasten to rise up early

and go so late to rest, eating the bread of toil,

for [the Lord] gives his beloved sleep

So maybe God is trying to give me something I desperately need - although I wish it were a gift given a little less liberally! But at least all these lovely, cool French churches give me places to exercise my new spiritual gift ...