Writing my blog entry a lot earlier than usual today because I am getting the strong urge to take a nap, and I have foresworn afternoon napping, so I figure that by the time I am done writing this, I will either of gotten my second wind or I will be so truly tired that I will know that my urge to nap is based on actually needing sleep, and not just an urge to escape reality for a while.

It ain’t rocket science, but I am trying to be at least somewhat systematic about this whole thing. I have firmly etched the horror of skipping large portions of life into my mind and I definitely desire change. I want to live life, not dream it away.

But it will take time to learn to fill my days with activity and not to resort to taking naps all the damned time just because I have no idea what to do with myself and my time, and cannot handle the reality of filling my time with things other than fucking video games.

Speaking of dreams, though, I did have quite the doozy last night. Not sure what led up to this, but I was put into a situation where I was in some enormous building (possibly a hotel or a mansion of some sort… some place that was quite fancy and had a lot of rooms) and I somehow knew exactly what was about to happen : the police were about to have a violent and bloody confrontation with a dangerous criminal, and I had to bust ass to find someplace safe to wait it all out and not end up getting caught in the crossfire.

And when I say I knew exactly what was going to happen, I mean I knew every detail of what was coming. As I frantically searched for a safe place, I did so knowing that Room A would get riddled with bullets, and Room B was too exposed to the outside (snipers, I guess?), and so on.

So I ended up retreating into a suite where there would be three doors between me at the outside world, the door to the suite, the door to the bedroom of the suite, and the door to the bathroom for that bedroom. I holed up in the bathroom, and pushed things up against the door in case the criminal tried to batter his way in his desire to escape the police.

So yes, apparently I did not have faith in my prescience. Better safe than a statistic, I guess.

Then, it is a matter of cowering in terror while I heard yelling and screaming and crashing and gunfire from the outside. Noises that were getting louder and louder as the action came closer and closer. Eventually I could hear bullets hitting the wall between the bathroom I occupied and the bedroom it served, and I remember putting my hands over my ears and screaming that this is not how it was supposed to happen. Then there was a furious exchange of gunfire… and then silence.

And that is all I remember of the dream. I guess the cops got the guy. But more important than the plot of the dream was the emotional content. I was absolutely terrified, completely freaked out. I have never experienced immediate danger like that in my life, and so I got a taste of mortal fear during the dream. I was as scared as I can imagine being. All I wanted in life was for all this to be over so I could go back to living. I was scared beyond reason.

To be honest, I had always hoped I would handle a situation like that a little bit better. Retain at least a little sangfroid, enough so that I could make smart survival decisions and not just freak out like a rabbit on meth and just do whatever my fight or flight instincts tell me to do.

I mean, I am not expecting to be James Bond about it, but I had always hoped I would be able to keep my shit together in an emergency if I had to do so.

Then again, I did avoid death and the decisions I made were reasonably intelligent. I just made them while being freaked out to the extreme. So maybe I retained my intelligence despite being totally freaked out, which is not bad for someone who has never faced that sort of thing in real life at all.

In fact, maybe that is the best one can expect of someone who is not some battle-hardened warrior.

And I have to admit, while it was all a dream, it was pretty damned exciting. I sort of feel like I have been through something now, even though it was all the product of my subconscious mind. Some have theorized that this is part of the function of dreams (and daydreams) : to let us create simulated scenarios of things we feel we may encounter in real life, and “practice” them.

Not that I am predicting a big shoot up in my apartment building any time soon or anything. It need not be that literal. In fact, dreams seldom are. They speak in metaphor and psychomachea because they are attempting to express great emotional complexity and intensity while the parts of the brain that are literal and linear are asleep.

Not that I have a clue what my dream was trying to express. The fact that I somehow sort of knew what was going to happen intrigues me. That is what keeps this, in my mind, from being a simple fear dream, a “chased by monsters” dream for a jaded media-soaked gent like me.

The fear also intrigues me, though. Perhaps that was the real purpose of the dream, to stretch my emotional muscles now that I am letting more emotion through and to sort of put my emotional systems through their paces.

If so, bravo. I sure as hell was scared during the dream. That system checks out fine.

Now how about those erotic systems, hmmm?

I have be trying, today, to develop a healthier relationship with sleep, which means, no napping!

Good old Morpheus and his always ready realm of dreams and nightmares and all manner of pains and pleasures… but none of them real.

Which is the appeal, really. I have been using sleep as a blanket (and comforter) escape from reality, the furthest one can go from reality without dying, and who knows?

Maybe death is the realest thing there is, and not the escape it seems at all.

So I am going to try to cut down on all this napping. Here I have been bitching about how life seems to be slipping away from me faster and faster, and all the while, I am actively sleeping through as much of it as I possibly can.

These two things are not compatible. The only way I have at my disposal to slow my life way the hell down is to be awake for more of it. No more fast-forwarding through my life to get to the good bits… which are largely meals. How sad is that?

I eat to live, I live to eat. Pathetic. That is not who I am. It is just how I have been.

So I am going to do my best to nap a lot less. I probably will not be able to go cold turkey right away, but I can cut down pretty hard. For instance, no sleeping in the afternoon. Right there, a quarter of the day is cordoned off. After that, I will cut out evening naps.

I should be able to get all the sleep I need in the twelve hours between midnight and noon.

And I will try to go to bed at 3 am every night, and take my sleeping pill then, and not dilute the effectiveness of that sleep by napping all day. I might not ever be able to totally fit myself into the normal eight hours a night, at night pattern.

But I can move in that direction, and that could make a big difference in my life. I realize now that I have been living my life always on the doorstep of sleep, and therefore never being truly awake and alive. No doubt this is a form of self-sedation to deal with my depression, which is no doubt going to become a fiercer opponent now that I am going to be more awake.

That is the real challenge. Skipping a nap would be no big deal if I was not then left with hours to fill and a very tiny number of methods for doing so. I honestly do not know what to do with myself most of the time, and I am growing tired of the usual video games and Internet crap. I find them increasingly boring, unrewarding, frustrating, and unfulfilling.

They just cannot compete with real life.

You know, that real life stuff that I have been strenuously avoiding for most of my adult life. I mean, I have always been a head in the clouds kind of guy. The world inside my head has always held massive precedence over the world outside. Even as a kid, I would do crazy things like try to walk home from school and read a book at the same time. ^[1]

So it is not like reality and I have ever been more than nodding acquaintances at the best of times. But at least in the past, I had things forcing me to deal with reality, like for instance school, jobs, and the desire for ice cream.

But in this life of mine, I could practically live my entire life in this here apartment if I felt like it. Direct deposit on my disability checks, Joe and Julian buying the groceries, buying what I want online, not going out to dinner with my friends any more. Get a microwave for the bedroom and practically never leave except to see the doctor.

It is entirely possible. And a very sick and sad part of me thinks it sounds good. The part of me whose response to any form of stress is to collapse and retreat. It thinks “Yeah, that would be great! No stress, no fear, no challenges, no expecations, no reality pushing in and makes life hard. Just me, alone with my Internet, forever. ”

I recognize that part of myself AS part of myself. But only a part. Living like that would be a lot like suicide. I want to gain strength, not capitulate to my weaknesses all the time. I want to grow strong, and robust, and energetic.

That is another thing about my sleeping all the time. I have come to realize that I need to stick a very hard and counterintuitive lesson onto a nail and then pound it into this thick skull of mine : sometimes the solution to being tired is to do something.

Doing nothing makes people tired. The body assumes that if you are just sitting there for a while, it had better shut down a lot of your systems in order to conserve resources. So you slip into a stupor, and mistaken come to believe that this means you are tired and need to rest, instead of simply being in a lower gear, ready to pop into a higher gear as soon as you start doing something active.

I proved this to myself this afternoon. I was feeling very, very tired and the urge to nap was strong in me. But I had already decided not to nap this afternoon, so instead, I got up and loaded up the bread machine to make me some French bread.

And lo and behold, after I did that, I wasn’t nearly as tired and sleepy any more!

What? Effort can leave you feeling MORE energetic?

That’s as crazy as thinking you can spend money in a way that leaves you with more money later!

Well that is it for tonight. Maybe I will take a nap now, maybe not.

I am sure I will get around to it eventually.