Tiny Threads of Colour

From the ages of five until about ten, I used to have such difficulty falling asleep.
For me, there are two different variations of closing your eyes. There is the natural "When I close my eyelids my eyes roll into the back of my head so if you had xray vision I would be looking up right now" sort of style, and then there is the awkward "I'm just pretending to close my eyes so if it wasn't for this barrier of skin they'd be staring straight at you". When you sleep, or fall asleep, you should be in the comfortable 'natural' style. However, as a child, I was somehow so unco-ordinated that I found this task extremely difficult.

At the time, it felt I'm adopt the awkward style for hours every night, but looking back and calculating the typical kid habit of turning everything into hyperboles, it was probably only about half an hour.

So here I am, this tiny kid with stick thin legs longer than a grown man's stride, attempting to copy this seemingly simple task of falling asleep. With awkward style eyes, you kinda get the feeling that you're staring smack bang at a pitch black wall. This was too much black for my eyes, and I would feel confronted by this solid block of black that seemed to engulf my existance. So somehow, my body developed a mechanism to deal with this. My eyes, or my brain, or even my imagination, distorted this wall of darkness by filling it with colours. Tiny little colours; about the size and width of one of the fragments you get when you pull apart a piece of thread. Bright reds, purples, oranges, blues, green. Very very bright colours would travel across my backdrop, kind of like when you watch bacteria through a microscope. They would travel at different speeds and at different angles, occasionally moving straight through each other. They were slightly distorted, and had that kind of fuzz about them; kind of like the view you imagine people with bad eyesight to see.

When all this happened, all effort of falling asleep would be lost. At times I used to think they were somehow connected to fairies and loved this secret connection. But most of the time It used to frustrate the hell out of me. It would get so bad that I would continue to see these tiny colourful worms when I opened my eyes as well. This idea of never being able to escape these threads of colour would frighten me out of any potential sleep.

Even now, if I close my eyes 'awkward style' and concentrate really hard, very few of these threads appear in my vision. They are nowhere near as bright as my younger experiences, and I'm pretty positive that is not the typical tendancy to hyperbolize jumping in. I wonder what they actually were; maybe just a weird coping mechanism my brain developed during that horrid stage between wake and sleep. Regardless, they were pretty cool. That being said, I am very grateful I have now mastered the 'natural' eye closing style and can fall asleep like a normal person.