As long as I can remember I always had trouble falling asleep.
I remember being 7 or 8, lying in my mom's bed sometime after midnight, counting the seconds in the minute to see if I could do it exactly. For nights upon nights, starting as far back as I can remember, I would just lie there in the dark, thinking thinking thinking, my mind just wouldn't stop long enough for me to relax and sleep.
For years I have never been able to have a normal sleep schedule, for a few nights perhaps I will sleep at what are considered normal hours, but then I go for a week or two with the time I sleep ranging all over the place.
I happen to be in one of those unsleepable periods right now, I told my boyfriend before he went home, that I was probably going to sleep "in a couple of hours".. That was at 10 last night, and it's almost 8 am now.
It is pretty hard on me, when I do sleep, I sleep for hours and hours, but most of the time I'm completely bored wishing I was tired enough to sleep.
The good thing about working on HJ is that I can set my own hours, and I don't have to try to keep my schedule straight. Normally it causes me a lot of stress at work and at home, to try to sleep when I'm home and to try to stay awake when I'm working.
I don't have so much trouble staying asleep, I'm really good at going back to sleep once I've gotten there, although I do wake up every few hours. When I wake up, it's either because I'm thirsty, I have to go to the bathroom, or I had some weird dream and I had to get out of it for a minute to collect myself. Usually it's the dreams though. And then of course I forget most of them.