I've found that if I'm not obliged to live by clock time, that my sleep patterns shift according to the light. This means in winter I wake up about 8am, and that I am inclined to stay up much later. At this time of year, I wake early - I'm often awake before the dawn chorus starts, and it's lovely hearing that through the open windows.
My hope has always been that I'll somehow master the art of the siesta, sleep in the hot part of the day, get to enjoy the summer darkness and generally have a good time of it. Not that it's even slightly warm at the moment, and I write this post from inside a large jumper. For whatever reasons, daytime sleeping is often beyond me. The only time I've done it reliably was when I had the assistance of a cat. She used to steal my awakeness, and if she climbed on to me, I became able to rest.
What usually happens around midsummer is that I can't get enough sleep and go a bit round the bend as a consequence. So while in theory the 'proper' Pagan response to midsummer is to feel the high energy, I've had many years where I've just been a broken and exhausted wreck.
There is definitely some kind of relationship between how stressed I am and how light sensitive I am. I crave darkness, but how much deep darkness I need may also depend on what my stress levels are like. The more stressed I am the less likely I am to be able to settle and sleep, and the more of an issue the light levels are.
Recently I've been doing better around sleep - being able to settle more easily, getting more benefit from sleeping, and generally not being so stressed, so it will be interesting to see what impact that has on my experience of midsummer this time around. I'm finding at the moment that I can handle far more light pollution than I've been able to in the past, but I'm still being woken by the dawn, so, it's a mixed bag.
I'm fascinated by the ways in which my body responds to the seasons, the day length and my environment. Humans are too inclined to believe in our separateness from nature, but nature is with us all the time, in our environments and in our own bodies.
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