You should hear that title to the tune of the line “long time passing” from Where Have All The Flowers Gone.

Have had another bad period of super deep dreams from desperately deep and troubled sleep, and as usual, I am going to bitch about it on my blog.

There’s such a thing as tradition, after all.

But what strikes me as odd this time is that, this time, I realized that I was reacting to this attack (and the one previous to it, as well) with a kind of “oh crap, not this shit again!” reaction.

Which means there must have been a recent period with no attacks that gave me the subconscious impression that the problem had gone away for a while.

What could possibly explain that? Had it really gone away for a while? If so, why?

Could it actually be that writing a book not only made me feel better because it gave me an outlet for my energies, but because it also helped me sleep a lot better?

I did notice feeling less sleepy and tired when I was writing la book. I thought I was having hyposomnia and getting poor quality sleep, and I was worried I was headed for a huge fall.

And when I had a sleepy period shortly after finishing the book, I thought “A hah, finally the other shoe has dropped. ” I was actually kind of relieved.

But maybe I was way off base. Maybe my sleep problems have a lot more to do with having way too much creative energy coursing through my brain without an outlet than any of the usual causes of sleep apnea.

Maybe my soul-draining periods of intense sleepiness and at times brutally vivid dreams are the result of my brain simply creating an emergency overflow valve, a way to release the energy and get the pressure level down to something more manageable while I sleep.

If so, I have been dreaming my life away in more ways that one!

For a long time, I have felt that these sleepy periods are government by something in my mind, something I could feel slowly draining away as I slept. A kind of tension in my mind, like a knotted muscle, or a pool of fluid retained and then expelled.

I definitely feel calmer and more relaxed and more clear-headed once the sleepiness has run its course.

None of that maps to sleep apnea’s typical course. I figured, it must be that sleep apnea is depriving me of restful sleep and hence my need for sleep builds up to the point where it reaches a crisis point and then my body forces me to sleep until I am all rested up.

This theory is not out of keeping with what is known about sleep deprivation.

But this new theory, that it is an excess of mental and creative energy in my mind that causes these problems, holds even more promise. If I really did have no attacks, or fewer attacks, of this problem in November, then the new theory is the only possible explanation.

And if so, it only further underlines how much healthier I am when I am writing all the time. I have only been writing these blog entries lately, and they help, but they are nothing like writing a book. Writing the book absorbed my entire output. And I felt just plain great.

I have got to seriously think about an entire writing based lifestyle. I have been concentrating on proofreading and submitting things lately (send something to McSweeney’s today, w00t), and all that is necessary, productive, and very cool.

But maybe I should take the idea of writing all the time, without pause, more seriously. I can still work the proofreading and submitting in there somewhere (I think) but maybe I should be writing a lot more. Try to come up with enough ideas for things that I am never without something to be writing and writing like hell.

Heck, maybe I should re-examine my general distaste for the notion of rewriting things. From a practical point of view, it always seemed to me like the prospect of writing the same thing over and over in order to get it right was daunting to the point of despair. Right now, all I am doing to fix things up is looking them over and fixing typos, tightening up phrasings, and maybe deleting a sentence here and there. Small stuff, not a lot of effort, and most importantly, not putting the whole thing into doubt, which I don’t think I could handle right now.

But maybe in the future, with a firm grip on the idea that I need to write and that I can practically write myself sane and healthy if I keep it up, maybe rewriting is a viable strategy for keeping myself busy and hence keeping myself calm and clear and content.

I have been lazy for so long (depression does that to you) that it is hard to force my brain to accept the notion that doing more work, expending more effort, could actually make my life better. I have been a low effort person for a long long time. An energy miser.

But maybe that is the problem. I act as though I have no energy, but perhaps the problem is that I have a lot of energy that has not, until recently, had a route out. If I just open the door for it, I could find I have a lot of energy, and that if I just release it, let it do its thing, it will leave me and hence leave me much saner and healthier. It will take a very big psychological and philosophical shift on my part, but I am open to the idea and if I keep at it, maybe I can even change the whole way I look at the world.

I am not a low energy person who must guard every drop of energy and only do what he absolutely cannot avoid.

I am a high energy person with an energy budget he has to burn through every day in order to be healthy. A daily burden I can only reduce through activity. Otherwise, I get depression and anxiety and fucked up sleep.

It’s a crazy idea, but one that just might work for me.

I wonder if it would work for anyone else?