Dreaming with illness!

I will repeat this again: ''I feel rather dazed so I may be typing some random 'things,' because I have a very bad cold. Therefore, I am sorry if I post in the wrong section or insult anyone.''

Right now I’ve had the cold; I’ve had it since Thursday. I never had much sleep every night because of this; I kept waking up during the night at about 5am and never able to get back to sleep. I normally sleep all the way through the night and fresh for the morning. As I have school tomorrow I desperately need this sleep.

So the problem is that I can never fall back to sleep and it's hard enough to fall asleep in the first place. Are there any tips for falling asleep naturally etc?

Thanks.

Sometimes it really hard to get decent sleep when you're sick due to being so uncomfortable and not being able to breathe well. If you can't do any deep breathing exercises because of your cold, take some liquid Nyquil and I guarantee you'll fall right to sleep! (Sorry, I know you wanted natural ways to fall asleep, but if you're miserable, Nyquil will knock you out.) I wonder what kind of trippy dreams (if any) you'd have after taking it - I can't remember the last time I did. One of the down sides of Nyquil is that it makes me feel kinda "clouded" in the morning (medicine-head).

In some ways, I find having a cold can be beneficial from a dreaming perspective. When I'm better again I suddenly find myself hit by a barrage of really interesting, inspired dreams. It's sort of like I'm catching up on a whole week's worth of dreaming in one night, with the best of the bunch coming through.

I can't help with the specific 5am waking, but I know a few general tricks for getting to sleep with a cold. An old wives' tale is that sheepskin helps you sleep. When I have a cold, I put my sheepskin rug on the bed. I do seem to sleep better, but that it might be the placebo effect.

Another technique I use is to prop my head up to a more vertical position. This is harder on the neck so it's not good for regular use, but the vertical posture is much better for breathing than the horizontal.

I just recovered from a nasty bout of flu myself. The only way I have ever dealt with it is to drug myself into submission and hope the flu goes away soon. Kind of wimpy but for me it works. After three weeks I am back on solid food and dreaming sweetly again.

I've found that some soft music can knock me out extremely quickly. Normally, I take anywhere from 10 minutes to half an hour to fall asleep, partly because I can't stop my mind from running around and thinking about everything. The other weekend when I was sleeping over at a friend's place on the floor, I put on some soft, mellow music over my earphones, and I was out in about 10 minutes, even though a couple of people were having a conversation in the same room. Very unusual for me. This method may not work for you, as everyone is different, but it's worth a try.