Lately I sleep with nothing short of violent desperation. As if weariness coursed through my body rather then blood. I come home, sit on the couch and my weight is doubled, or tripled even. I lack the desire to eat or prepare dinner so that most nights, I don’t. I sit on the couch, watch perhaps an hour or two of television, only to fall unbidden into sleep as the clock approaches ten. Last night, in the moments it took my Love to go outside to have a smoke, I had collapsed into slumber so deep it took several attempts over an hour to rouse me. I stumbled into the bedroom, collapsed into bed and was instantly out again. Something is simply not right…
As I sleep, some times I wake up at some unknown part of the night (for the alarm clock is on the other side of the bed and I cannot see it from where I lay) and am terribly, terribly confused as to who I am, where I am, what I am doing and what is going on. I have these odd moments where I can not fathom why I am there in the dark and a sense of awful wrongness with the situation looms over me. At the same time though, I am eerily calm about it – as if I am resigned to the outcome, however horrid it might be. I lay there for some small amount of time and eventually a darkness so thick, it’s like velvet, covers me and I find myself falling away, back from myself, into that syrup-thick sleep.
When the alarm goes off in the morning, I experience something similar. I’ve gotten into a habit of setting the alarm for one time, but resetting it for 20 minutes later once it goes off. It allows me time to snooze and accept the concept of waking up and generally works well. Lately though, in those 20 minutes, I am again engulfed by that drowning darkness so that when the alarm rings the second time, I am confused and alienated from myself and my surroundings that I have to remember again why I am there. It is as if time stretched out so far that it has been years and not mere minutes or hours since last I was awake. In the brief moments on the edge of waking, I feel I can remember lifetimes of places, words, colors, and actions that flitter away as my senses return.
During the bright lights and busy pace of my day, I am not tired and I do not think on the oddities of my sleeping the night before. It’s not until I get home and relax that it slowly creeps out towards me as growing shadows of night creep with sunset. I find myself starting to worry; starting to question what this means and why it is happening. Gone are the normal – albeit silly – dreams of the norm. In their place lies a pool of endless darkness, whose surface is so smooth, I can not peer to it’s depths. Gone are the mornings feeling either refreshed or under slept. In their place are confusion and fatalistic knowledge of things not in or of my life.
I just don’t know what any of it means and as it happens night after night and week after week, I grow more and more worried the effect it has on my waking life. Filling my mind and stealing my rest, I am filled with it and I fear that it must stop or sleep will become my enemy and not the friend it’s always been. That where once there was lucid splendor, there is now only a lost lot of time without beginning or end.
In any event, time betrays me yet again as my lunch break is over and I need to yet post this before I can return to my work…thoughts are welcomed…night yet again lies in eager wait, coming all too soon to steal me away again.
~ flowers bloom near Memory and Dream
at 11/8/2001 03:08:47 PM ~
~
