I am a middle-aged woman and am not sleeping well.  When I fall asleep I do not often stay asleep and have been experiencing some nightmares.  Why is this happening?

There are many reasons, my dear, many reasons.  Oh my goodness, for you I would say it is probably a hormonal imbalance.  You need very much to align your inner timepiece with the passing of the sun.  If you were to make yourself rise with the sun in the morning and actually see it set in the evening and do this regularly for about a week, you would find yourself  resetting.

You see the sunlight in your world helps the hormonal balances.  You will find from one season to the next, hormones are changed.  I am not talking about only the male and female hormones; there are many that course through the body.  These chemicals regulate all systems, not only the need for sleep but the need for waking, the chemicals for the heartbeat.  You are a chemical soup, so much more than what you might think.  It is one of the worst things to take a chemical to force that brain into sleep but it will not be the deep waves to cause healing sleep.

It is best to be outside, in the air, feel the nature around you.  If at all possible, have your shoes off your feet so you can actually feel the earth beneath it, not on cement or hard top but actually on the ground.  If you stand there long enough you will feel the heartbeat of your mother earth.  It is what your cells are made up of.

And there are those that do not sleep because they have not integrated thoughts or difficulties, trauma or fear.  The being who asked this question is in a cycle of remembering, of losing, of fear of losing again.  It happens with the reuniting and the reoccurance of losing another being, the going through much of the trauma and pain.  Of course, sleep is a time when the body says I will now deal with this, so awake you will be.  It will cause some very traumatic dreams and some disturbances.   But the best thing to do is to think of that time, that loss and embrace it, do not deny it.  Love your being.  It will help you to heal and help you to make peace with the loss.

Some beings lay awake at night for different reasons again, when the need for human touch.  You see when beings do not get touched by other beings, there causes also a great disturbance in their vibration.  They need to have the reassurance that they are present in a physical world,  in a physical body and need to have sleep for physical bodies need it.

When a being is not touched for a very long time they lose the understanding of where they be, often even finding themselves in large groups of people feeling quite invisible, as if they could walk through it and no one would sleep them.  These beings in order to get sleep need touch, massage, dance, even hand to hand.

Some beings do not sleep because they have eaten the wrong food.  Digestion is not something that should be happening during sleep hours.  The stomach should have emptied itself completely before you sleep, for digestion is a very active time when the body needs to be awake.  If you try to sleep when you are digesting you will only create hernias, gas, acids and difficulties which thus in turn will cause the colon to be off its natural balance.  If you know when the colon is off its natural balance this will cause headaches and mind regularities to occur.