Like television in days long gone, it seems like I only have two channels when it comes to sleep, and they both suck dog taint.

Earlier today, I was once more feeling restless and tense and irritable, so I decided to try a logical treatment : exercise. Nothing too amazing, just some limb lifting and range of motion exercises and the exercise technique I call a “standing pushup”, where I stand next to a wall and lean against it then push myself up (back) over and over again with my arms, exactly like I am doing a push-up, but rotated ninety degrees.

It’s kind of an odd exercise, but it works for me, because regular push-ups cause circulation issues and I get all dizzy and nauseous, and with this odd standing pushups, I get a lot of exercise in my arms and shoulders, which really helps to reduce tension in those areas.

Anyhow, I exercised in my style, and it worked. I went from the “tense, irritable, can’t sleep” mode to the “sleeps so deep it’s like drowning” mode. Yay.

I really need a third channel, preferably one where I actually sleep well and wake rested and feel good. I know that sounds like a hell of a lot to ask, but dammit, you have to go for the gold in life or you get nothing. Carpe diem! Seize the fish!

Otherwise, life grinds on after the mildly annoying pause caused by Easter. I try not to get too annoyed when holidays I don’t celebrate get in the way of my usual routine. After all, just because I don’t celebrate them does not make them pointless or stupid. And lord knows, I would hate to be That Guy, the guy who goes around raining on people’s parades simply because he doesn’t enjoy parades himself. That would be so “the opposite of me”. I’m the kind of guy who wants everyone to be happy and to do well and to get along, and therefore thinks you should just let people do their own thing and be happy that they are happy, even if their thing totally does not appeal to you at all.

Speaking of wanting everyone to get along, I had some interesting dreams once I flipped the switch from “shallow restless sleep” to “the sleep of lotus eaters in a coma”. And not just interesting, but actually quite pleasant, which is rare for my dreams. Usually the most I can hope for in my dream realm is “confusing but not actually unpleasant”. It’s rare that my dreams have a coherent mood in either direction, good or bad. Once more, I hug the baseline. Never very bad, never very good.

I’m like this guy.

Of particular note was a dream in which I was very clearly sitting around in a pleasant outdoor location (someplace sunny and grassy, maybe a park) with a dozen or so people and telling one of them how happy I was that I could bring them together into a community and how this is what I had always wanted, to make people happy and to bring them together. To rescue people from isolation and give them a place, a community, where they could feel included and accepted and valued.

And in the dream, I was truly happy. And everything I said is true, that’s exactly what I long to do. In the dream, I had achieved it. Everyone was chatting and happy and relaxed, and I had a supremely wonderful sense of pride and happiness and contentment, knowing I had made something truly good.

And the person I was explaining all this to was someone from my past on Prince Edward Island, who I will call Dave, whom I always thought had trouble fitting into his own milieu because he was just too smart and complex and sensitive for the regular world, despite being thoroughly working class in many ways, and in the dream, he was the latest person I had added to my little community and seen transformed into a happier, healthier, more self-accepting version of himself.

That, of course, just made me feel even better. All in all, it was a simply marvelous wish-fulfillment dream, and I am quite happy that whatever forces were in foment in my brain today, they resulted in such a wonderful, ego-lifting, life-affirming dream.

It reminded me that I have done some good in this life, and I could do it again.

That is something I really need to hold on to these days, I think.