Another day, another long slow Tartarus of deep and troubled sleep with brief intervals of confused and crumbling consciousness to punctuate an otherwise endless morass of mystical meanderings through the magnificence and filth of the overflowing, overburdened, overactive, overwhelming, overbearing, under-expressed avenues of my taut and tortured mind.

I should have been a poet.

And this trip through the underwhelming thrill ride of my inner mind was made bonus sucky because my friend William was visiting (hello dear!), and I really wanted to spend more time with him, but this feast or famine sleep schedule of mine (far more feast than famine lately) has demands of its own, and so the poor dear spent 20 hours in this apartment in order to spend at most 3 hours in my company. Sad.

And he says it is fine, but I still feel terribly guilty about it. I hate feeling like I have disappointed people or let them down. That makes sense, because I absolutely hate it when people disappoint me or let me down, and so by the simple algebra of empathic projection, I especially hate to be the source of those feelings in someone else.

So that is going to bother me for a while, but I will get over it eventually. After all, we all make mistakes and have regrets, and you cannot go through life dwelling on them, stuck looking backwards while moving forwards in time.

That is no way to live, never looking in the direction you are actually going.

Sometimes I think you should live each day of your life as if you are a new player for the same character in the RPG of your life. You still have all the same stats and resources and so on, but you are a brand new person who comes to the challenges of playing that character fresh and ready to tackle the next part of the quest with vigor and enthusiasm.

I get so tired of being the same humdrum old person every day. I think that is part of why coming out of sleep into the real world is so jarring for me. Part of me simply does not want to come back to reality. Leave the dream realm with its unlimited expression of self and broad and creative reality? Coalesce my enormous churning crackling whirlwind of mind into the tiny confines of this all too human life again? Get stuck being this one limited and frankly kind of pathetic person again? How depressing. Do not make me go back in that box!

Come to think of it, maybe that has a lot to do with why I sleep so much in the first place. I get to shed my burdensome and confining singular identity, with its narrow ledge of possibilities and heavy weight of physical existence, and instead be a multi-probable cloud of energies and influences and emotions freed of the lead dead onus of physical existence.

In a way, the dream world is the perfect rationalist slash idealist environment. No physical limitations, just mind, spirit, and imagination.

But not being a rationalist/idealist myself, I recognize that being all mind with no physical reality to ground you can be nightmarishly horrible. No stability, no consistency, no reliability, just the coruscating chaos of the subjective world. That is, in fact, my definition of Hell : to be locked forever within the dirty waters of my own mind, without any solid land to stand on, doomed to tread water until I drown.

And drown I would, and from thence on, I would be nothing but a lunatic madman bashing his head agaisnt the wall of his cell just to have something to feel for a change.

I have felt this intense fear of going completely insane for a long long time. I remember being frightened by my own weird moods and how reality seemed to shift around me in invisible but important ways even when I was an elementary school student. How a sift inside me, maybe some brain chemistry shift or something, could change the entire flavour, the entire feel, of the universe around me. And how am I supposed to know which of these seemingly random frequencies of reception represents true reality? Subjectively, they all seem real at the time.

Perhaps that is what makes me such a philosopher. I cannot trust my direct perceptions of reality because they change so much. My mood filters my perceptions too much to trust them. If your entire opinion of the nature of the universe can turn on a dime any moment, what is a poor boy to do?

Sit still and try to deduce that which remains regardless of the shift in the tide, I suppose. Seek out the most durable and reliable truths, and anchor your boat to those shores. But always be ready to weigh anchor and set sail should your current island prove unreliable.

No point in sinking along with Atlantis if you can just float away, right?

Bur why are my inner seas so restless? Why must my mind be such spinning nebula of vibrating chaos? What keeps the cauldron of my cerebellum constantly churning and burning and yearning? Why, to put it bluntly, am I so fucked up inside?

All this chaos and motion and stormy creativity must serve some kind of purpose. There must be something great and terrible lurking in my mind’s shadow that would emerge if the merry go round ever came to a complete and total stop.

And that must never ever happen. So the whole thing spins on every axis, and things combine and are broken apart and combine again like primitive proteins in the primordial goop, and somewhere in there is little old me, with a self ten times smaller than the massive metamorphic mind it dwells in, just trying to keep my head above water for another day.

And I guess that is roughly what it is like to be me.

I think maybe I need to go read my new narrative again. It is not sinking in yet.