Prose - Sleep

The more we age, the more sleep becomes a luxury. I was rarely one to be able to do without my sleep, especially in my younger days. When raising my daughters, lack of sleep could bring on streams of irritability.
As I look back at my teen years, one wonders now, how we could have slept so late in the day. Growing those hormones takes a lot of rest. Usually, once babies have come into our lives, sleeping in goes out the window, rarely to be experienced again.
As a child, I think between the ages of eight and eleven years, I was known for walking in my sleep. What a bizarre phenomena. I never had the misfortune of wandering outside our home, but was occasionally found roaming through the house. Never once did I have any memory of this. I was always guided back to bed without waking consciously. What emotional aspects causes one to rise up from a supposedly sound sleep to move around?
I sleep so much better when I go to bed early, between 9:00 and 10:00 PM. In the Five Element theory of Asian medicine it is believed we should be asleep before gall bladder time. The reason being, the mind can let go easier before we get into the energy of this time. Our sleep is more restful. For me this is totally true, if I’m up after 11:00 PM I can lay awake for hours, not good, since I don’t sleep in. My sleeping in days have now extended to 6:00 AM, with an occasional 6:30 on an extremely fortunate day.
Patricia