Talk about the last time you had a sleepless night
You should mention
What caused the sleepless night
Did it keep someone else awake
What you did to ensure it didn’t happen again
I have to go back quite some time to remember when I last struggled to go to sleep. Ok now I remember I was at University and the reason I did not sleep was because of something that had happened when I sat my first exam at the end of my first year. It was very scary at the time as it had never happened to me before and to be honest it never occurred again. Like I say it was to do with my first exam and what happened is that when I opened the question paper my mind went a complete blank. And when I say a complete blank I mean a complete blank. I could not remember a thing about the subject I was being asked questions about. Now I should tell you that I thought this was going to be my best exam because this was without doubt my strongest subject. Anyway I stared at the exam paper for nearly an hour and a quarter before I started to remember something. You know even then I could only remember bits of things. Anyway I did the best I could with what time I had left.
I came to the decision that desperate times called for desperate measures after all I did not want to go through all that again. So I decided that I would stay awake all night prior to doing the next exam. At that time I lived in a flat with seven other students so I had to be careful not to wake them up. My plan was to make a flask of coffee and spend the night in my room. The next day I did ask if I had bothered anyone during the night but no one heard anything so everything was ok. Anyway as planned I spent the night doing some revision and generally making sure that I could remember all the key points I would need for the next exam.
Sure enough the next exam went a lot better and I more or less wrote everything that I needed to. But after the exam I was so tired I just went straight back to my room and spent the rest of the day asleep. So in the end I didn’t really gain anything I just lost a days revision, which I needed for the next exam. I decided that I would not stay awake like that again because on reflection it was a stupid thing to do. To my great relief I had no further problems and thankfully I got enough marks to take me into my second year.
A couple of weeks in to the second year I met the lecturer who marked my troublesome exam. He asked me to explain why I had written so few words in my first exam. I told him what happened and he laughed out loud. He said we have all been there and we have all suffered in that way. It made me feel a lot happier.
