Mornings and Sleepless Nights

I'm a morning person. Back in high school, I may have been what classified as a sleep person, one of those rare anemic sorts whose consistently tired body forces them into naps, second naps, and early sleep into sleeping in. When your energy level is on par with cats during the day and dogs at night, something's the matter with your circadian rhythm, iron-blood levels, and energy quotient. Eventually, probably beginning in my sophomore year of college, I developed a preference to mornings. Whether I fell asleep at 10pm or 1am, I generally woke before eight, often earlier.
I took naps - and I still often do - but my body awakened earlier than many. I'm still not a five-am person, though often 7-am is even my weekend call for rolling over and beginning my morning meditation. I think one of the reasons I was always a "sleep" person in high school was because I never actually slept very well. Until only a couple of years ago, I thought my condition was normal. I thought insomnia was something other people endured, that it meant staying up all night unable to catch a wink for nights on end. I guess I just never wanted myself categorized in anything like a disorder. I just assumed I could overcome anything like that. I recently did some (lousy) research.

According to Wikipedia:
Insomnia, or sleeplessness, is a sleep disorder in which there is an inability to fall asleep or to stay asleep as long as desired.

According to WebMD:
Insomnia is a sleep disorder that is characterized by difficulty falling and/or staying asleep. People with insomnia have one or more of the following symptoms:

Difficulty falling asleep
Waking up often during the night and having trouble going back to sleep
Waking up too early in the morning
Feeling tired upon waking


Hmm.. well that changes things. So I started trying to weasel my way out of this one, too. My problem isn't that I wake up in the night and can't fall back to sleep, or that I wake up too early and feel tired on waking. Almost always, when I awaken, I feel refreshed (though sometimes I wonder if it is a faux-refreshment, since if I don't get enough sleep, I afternoon crash like I overdosed on sugar and ran 10 miles). No, my problems are all at night: difficulty falling asleep.  I discovered the average time it takes for a person to fall asleep is close to 7 minutes. 7 minutes? I average 45 at least, closer to an hour, frequently 50% longer. Is that unusual? Is that a problem?

So where did this all start, this topic? Where was I going? I read recently an author stating that many of the greatest authors of all time did their best work in the morning. Waking up early, they simply wrote everything on their mind and later puzzled it into genius. I'm a morning person, this should work for me too, right? Wrong. Mornings are too natural, and, for some reason, I'm closer to dreams at night. When I'm falling asleep, lying on my mattress at night, these are the times that I divine magical phrases and clever story settings. At night, when the sandman sprinkles his sand into the corners of my drooping eyes, these are the times that my muse strikes, and my music sings. For a bit, I wondered whether I might try and fix my slight insomnia (for it is not a dire exemplar of the disorder). However, I realized recently I would not trade it for the world. Why would I? It is my guiding force into creation. Now, I eagerly await those hours lying awake in bed, not sleeping. Insomnia, my precious art.