Time for my roughly weekly bitching about lousy sleep and all that shit.

Today was really bad. I can’t say I have gotten over it yet, and here it is, 7:23 PM.

The problem was this morning. I had a very bad attack of deep sleep, vivid as hell dreaming, and for bonus fun, it all ended in a nightmare that really shook me up.

I don’t remember much of the dream, just the ending. That often happens when something happens in a dream that is so bad or so startling that it wakes me up. My mind races to expunge the dream experience from itself and does not leave anything behind except the final climax.

So here is what I remember of the dream :

I had someone else’s car. I think it might have been Felicity’s car, but I am not sure. I can’t drive in the real world, but interestingly, I often can in my dreams.

I guess the dream DMVs have very low standards, which makes sense, because in my dreams, driving a car is only slightly more complicated than just thinking of what you want to do and the car just does it.

You have to wiggle the wheel and sometimes push a pedal, too!

Anyhow, somehow I had possession of a car that was not mine, and somehow I ended up parking it somewhere that, unbeknownst to me, it was not supposed to me.

Really not supposed to be, because it resulted in people moving the vehicle onto the train tracks, where it got destroyed rather spectacularly by a speeding locomotive.

That’s it. No monsters, no aliens, no ghosts, the nightmare was an ethical and/or emotional one. The nightmare was that I fucked up and got someone’s car completely totaled.

To me, failing in my responsibilities like that is one of my worst nightmares. It’s one of the worst things I can imagine happening, and it was made all the more plausible by the fact that it happened because my being generally forgetful and absent-minded and not paying attention to my surroundings.

There was a definite feeling, in this dream, that the rather extreme actions taken to move the car from where it was not supposed to be were justified. I was not outraged. I realized I had done something really boneheaded and stupid and thoughtless and that of course they had to do what they did. I had done something like block a fire lane or a hospital entrance, but a million times worse.

I fucked up. And my friends’ car was destroyed as a result, a car they will still have to make payments on for years, a car I certainly could not afford to replace, and it was all my fault. All my fault.

That sounds like exactly the sort of thing that could happen to me, assuming I learned to drive. All my life, I have fucked up like that. And the weird thing is, the terrible thing is, I always will. I try very hard to be more attentive and responsible and focused, and I certainly don’t make big mistakes like getting someone’s car smashed into a zillion pieces, but still, that sort of thing, on a smaller scale, will likely plague me for life. Again and again, I have the same experience of realizing I just made a horrible error which cannot be defended. It seems to be part and parcel of being a dreamy, internally oriented, intellectual type.

I am not saying that being that way doesn’t pay off in other ways. It just seems like a really heavy toll for what I get for it.

You can see why this dream freaked me the hell out, though, right? It was pretty much a nightmare come true until I woke up. I awoke in a panic of guilt, freaking out like Walter Bishop when he is sure some science experiment from long ago is about to destroy the world.

As I have mentioned before, the only good thing about a nightmare like that is the moments after waking up when you are so relieved to find out that it was all a dream and none of it really happened.

And as giddy as that experience can be, I would still vastly prefer the whole thing had not happened in the first place. It just costs me so much and hurts me so much.

In fact, I am rather worried that my sleep apnea is getting worse lately. Dream content aside, the dream itself happened when I was very “far out” in terms of severely under-oxygenated sleep. I woke up feeling really, really horrible, and staggered around my bedroom like a stoned zombie for my room, barely able to get enough of my marbles together in a pile to get myself a highly needed long drink of water, and sit in front of my computer staring without comprehension at the screen.

And I have spent the rest of today sleeping and trying to recover. And I am still not all there, or rather, I am still not all here.

Again, I wonder if unspent mental anergy has anything to do with this. But that’s a tricky thought to juggle because it could so easily simply lead to more self-hatred and that is exactly the opposite of the direction I want my life to go in.

I am trying to build a stable, healthy, positive self-image. Falling back into hating myself and blaming myself for everything is not the way to go.

On the other hand, I need to keep in mind that I really did feel good in November and that I do know a way out of this jungle of steam and pain and nightmares. I just have to find my way back to that way out.

I don’t have to be afraid of my own life, my own mind, my own chair, my own bed.

I don’t have to live my life in fear of my dreams strangling me in the dark.

Not if I can turn them into words fast enough.