I found the science news article really interesting about the people who experience "fear sleep". That is so not me. I've got the most finicky sleep mechanism ever. However I found out something odd... if I watch a DvD I've seen before, I tend to fall asleep rather quickly. So I exploit that fact by having a DvD beside my bed and the TV on a sleep timer. So I start out running my movie and falling asleep and then the TV cuts out eventually. Works great most of the time, still there are times when even that doesn't work.

Also, I've always been a late night person but I decided to start getting up earlier and now I'm hoping out of bed at 5-5:30 in the morning and going to bed around 8-8:30. The schedule change seems to agree with me.

I'm another person who must sleep in the dark. I'm super sensitive to the light. So when I moved into this house with cut out half circle windows the first thing I did was figure out how to shut the light out of them! My bedroom is very much like a dark cave.