One of the Multitude: Tracing a Sleep Crisis

By Abigail Cantelis

For two years, Abigail Cantelis stopped sleeping at night and for many years had difficulty sleeping at times. Her challenges showed her a lot about herself resulting in a spiritual journey that led to a breakthrough and to make changes in her life, in her daily choices. In this inspirational and straightfor

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
• Release date: Oct 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781685155391

Abigail Cantelis

Abigail Cantelis lives in Pembroke, Ma near where she grew up on the coast. She delivers papers six days a week for three hours each day. She has hand sewn clothes and quilts for several years, and enjoys making Christmas cards each year for her paper route customers and others. Visiting with friends is a welcome interruption to her days. Abigail is a born again Christian. She feels born again physically as well as spiritually, because she can sleep again!

Book preview

Note to the Reader

The title of this book, One of the Multitude—subtitle, Tracing a Sleep Crisis—comes from a phrase often used in the New Testament of the Bible, ‘the multitude’, referring to people who followed Jesus during his public ministry on earth.

The two angels on the cover were given to me one Christmas by Judy, a subscriber on a paper route I have. She didn’t know that years back I endured a severe sleep crisis until one day when I spoke of it to her, and that the angels, kept on my mantelpiece, are special to me. Isn’t that funny, she said, referring to what a fitting gift the angels were.

Fitting because though sleep returned to me after the insomnia I endured when I was younger, I’ve known inconsistent sleeplessness since then until recent years. But like the angel on this book's cover I learned not to fret, not to worry.

I don’t know every reason for insomnia but I hope the pages ahead provide one answer to the unknowns of sleeplessness, for many.

Abigail Cantelis

I remember the night I lay awake until morning not because it happened—in high school on two occasions I didn’t sleep—but because it began the two plus years when I couldn’t sleep at all. It was the mid-seventies in Washington, D.C. at a group home where I rented an attic room and shared a kitchen and living room with five others that the surprise experience with insomnia began. Rick was the home-owner who made a living by renting rooms in his six bedroom house.

As I wondered the next day about why sleep left me on that Sunday night I couldn’t think of a reason for it. A legal secretary and dating a law student from a local university where I took night courses, my hope, though elusive, was to marry and live happily. A desire for a career in journalism was nearly forgotten because of a preoccupation with change for my family and me, since a tragedy involving two family members occurred a few years before. Change from a well educated, often troubled family life.

Let me introduce myself to you, reader. I was born in 1947 and have some wonderful memories of the town I grew up in on the coast of Massachusetts, where the ocean and bay sides were delightful for swimming and at low tide on the bay side not far from our house, for digging quohogs with my friend, Vicki; of the woods bordering our yard for exploring with Vicki, where we climbed seventeen foot pine trees and swayed in the breezes on the top branches. We’re thankful and amazed today that the branches didn’t break. I loved my parents in spite of the whacks with my father's belt on the backside of my overalls and shorts.