Huge Sleeping Problem

[Ellipsis]

Hey everyone. Since I came to college I've been having a really hard time getting adequate sleep because of my neighbors and roomate. I am a pretty light sleeper and need really good conditions to sleep well. I've been sleeping with earplugs but most of the time they fall out halfway through the night. My roomate gets up every day at 5 AM to pray because she is a fundamentalist muslim. Obviously, this does not go well with my sleeping problems. Every time she gets up, I invariably wake up too, and cant go back to sleep for HOURS. I think that since Ive been in this bad living situation for a few monthsl, I've sorta become conditioned to wake up when she gets up in the middle of the night. My sleep schedule is very flexible and I am a morning person, so once I am 'up', so to speak, I am up for the day and it is really hard to fall back asleep. So since my sleep schedule is set to wake up at 5 AM, thats when I wake up, and I absolutely cannot fall back to sleep. This morning she got up at 4 AM and woke me up. I didnt fall back asleep until 7 AM. I got a total of 3 hours of sleep. I cannot live like this. I need to know what to do to either improve the depth of my sleep, avoid being 'reprogramed' by her annoying habits, so to speak, or simply have an easier time falling back asleep. Please help!

[Clairity]

Since your roommate probably isn't going to change her religion, is it possible for you to move to another room? .

[Jorge]

^^^ yeah that's the most obvious thing to do. Change rooms. If you can't then..take sleep medicine everynight..=D Just kidding don't do that.

[megamorphg]

Ellipsis, as a freshman in college last year I had the EXACT same problem last year... except the opposite. My roomates would just sleep EXTREMELY late and bug the crap out of me so that I couldn't sleep when I wanted at all. Option #1: Tell your roomate, straightforwardly, directly without ANY ambiguity how he/she is affecting your sleep and ask her to be more quiet when she wakes up and pray OUTSIDE mebbe in the living room. (I used to be a muslim myself and wouldn't mind if someone told me to do this.) You're paying thousands of dollars to dorm and shouldn't have to deal with ANY crap. Option #2: So your roomate got pissed off at you that you would ask to do something like that and it's just getting harder. Well I highly reccomend adapting to an Everyman schedule. This is basically a polyphasic sleeping rhythm based on 3 hours of core sleep with intermittent naps spaced evenly throughout the day for rejuvenation. Look it up online and read accounts from differnt people including Steve Pavlina and http://www.puredoxyk.com. Learn. Adapt. I personally did this last year for a lot of the time and must say that it helped a LOT in adapting to my dorm's wild party atmosphere. I personally am still not fully adapted but I feel that polyphasic sleeping helps IMMENSELY with dreams! My dreams are REALLY vivid and I notice that I get lucid dreams more often that I did with a normal (monophasic) sleeping schedule! Earplug problem: get better ones! But usually for me earplugs are really only necessary for the getting INTO sleep part. Once I'm knocked out... NOTHINGS GONNA WAKE ME till it's time haha

[Ellipsis]

Thanks for the help everyone. My roommate and I talked it over and found a solution at least for the short term. I started using a technique someone posted on another thread involving counting and imagining yourself writing the numbers as you count. This has done wonders for me the past two nights. Thanks to whoever posted it; I was unable to find the thread when I went back to check the author.