In Alaska I slept all day because I worked all night. The first half of the summer I wore earplugs to bed, assuming that people would be noisy outside my room during the day. And they were. My Bulgarian neighbors would sometimes sit outside my room with a laptop to Skype home, speaking perhaps overly loudly the way you do on a Bluetooth, not trusting technology to deliver your normal speaking voice. Sometimes they talked to each other, loud unintelligible birds to my ears.
My earplugs would fall out sometimes, or I would forget to put them in. And the Bulgarians would wake me up. If I let it make me (irrationally!) mad, I would have a hard time falling back to sleep.
If I thought of it like John Cage would, as music - if I accepted that the day holds a cacophony that does not concern itself with whether I sleep - I would wake up - then listen for a little while, calmly letting my mind wander - and slowly my thoughts would stop making sense - and I would fall back to sleep. Acceptance: much better than jamming a little piece of rubber in the ear.
