Second paragraph of third story ("Save Yourself", by Terrance Dicks):
The Doctor felt tired, as if he'd been waiting here a lifetime.
I loved this. It's a collection of Doctor Who short stories, edited by Steve Cole with contributions from Joy Wilkinson, Simon Guerrier, the much-missed Terrance Dicks, Matthew Sweet, Susie Day, Matthew "Adric" Waterhouse, Colin "Sixth Doctor" Baker, Mike Tucker, Cole himself, George Mann, Una McCormack, Jacqueline Rayner, Beverly Sanford and Vinay Patel. It's a bit invidious to single out individual stories, but I will anyway: Terrance Dicks last controibution to the Whoniverse expands the concept of Series 6B, with the Second Doctor on mission for the Time Lords; Susie Day looks at the Fourth Doctor and Romana punting; Una McCormack looks at the back story of Clive from the TV episode Roseyou can get it here.
There was a bit of a kerfuffle about this book before it came out. One particular veteran Who writer had been invited to contribute, but his story was not published because at least one of the other contributors objected to his views on trans rights, and threatened to withdraw her own story if his was included. More power to her; in her place I would also have objected to this particular writer's views on Islam. And good for the publisher for making the right choice when confronted with a dilemma of principles.
I use SleepBot for this–it measures movement rather than listening to breathing. Fascinating data. Don’t forget to correct it for time zone changes when traveling; I once had a startled moment of “why was I keeping that weird schedule for those two weeks last year?” before remembering I was in London at the time.
Other things I do to fight the link between tech and awakeness:
* Delete all adrenaline-inducing games from the phone. The only permissible games are things like Flow that are soothing visually and don’t have timers. I’m not allowed to play adrenaline games on my laptop or my tablet between dinnertime and bedtime.
* Red-shift my phone, tablet, and laptop with Twilight (Android) and f.lux (MacOS) so they’re harder to read with tired eyes and don’t emit the blue light that most induces awakeness.
* Only use my tiny most-personal account (“little Twitter”) on the Twitter app on my phone–it follows about 40 of my nearest and dearest, most of whom don’t tweet a ton about politics. And even when they do, 40 people tweeting about politics is much less stressful to read than 970 people tweeting about politics. On my laptop, turn off retweets in Tweetdeck, and mostly stick to reading little Twitter. Now that I’m very careful to only give myself measured doses of big Twitter when I’m in a headspace where I can deal with them, I feel way better about basically everything.
* Play soothing sounds from a phone app while I sleep, since I already have the phone next to my head tracking my movement. I’m now at the point where setting the sounds to fade out will wake me up very gently without any need for an actual alarm.
* But I play an alarm anyway, using Gentle Alarm (Android), which can take sleep cycles into account and will wake you with gentle sounds faded in very slowly. I stopped dreading sleep nearly as much once I no longer had to fear being jolted awake by a raucous loud awful alarm noise.