Suggestion: Endless Daytime - TV Tropes Forum

 

Och, is my sleep ever screwed up.

Constitutionally an early riser, I'm habitually up with the Sun. This means that as we march toward Midsummer, the year's Longest Light, I'm up earlier and earlier every day.

This, of course, is no inherent bad. Early morning is a good time to get things done: I'm fresh from sleep, it's still relatively cool, there are fewer distractions. Still, as the Sunstead (that's "solstice" in Witch) approaches, it does mean that I get less and less sleep every night.

(It doesn't help that I've been paring away at my caffeine consumption lately, either. A tea-drinker, son of tea-drinkers, I'm now down to two cups of green tea a day. Pathetic. Still, I find that what sleep I do get is qualitatively better than it used to be back in my pot-o'-black-a-day days.)

Then there's the matter of twilight, the “two lights.” At Midwinter, we lose our twilights: the Sun goes down, and it gets dark.  But come Midsummer, there's light in the sky long after the Sun goes down, and long before he comes up again. In Shetland, they call this the Simmerdim: the “Summerdim,” we non-Shetlanders might say, the extended twilight of the Lithedays, the Midsummer season.

Children of the Light, Children of the Seasons are we. As the Light waxes, together we enter a collective state of chronic sleep-deprivation.

The ancestors used to talk about “Midsummer madness”: that collective irrationality that seems to seize us all at this time of year.

I'm beginning to think that I understand why it would.