I still feel like I am losing the war against sleep.

It might serve me to start keeping a sleep/dream journal though, just so I can keep track of exactly how much sleep I get, and have some venue for externalizing my dreams.

The thing about that is, dreams offer us a window into the inner workings of our mind. But we do not get the full benefit of that unless we take them from their origins in our deep subconscious minds all the way to the highest level of consciousness by writing them down and hence externalize them.

That way, we can both release the emotions involved, and raise these strange yet oddly meaningful episodes all the way to the very top of our consciousness so that they can be processed by our entire minds as they drift back down to the depths from which they came.

Boy, watching xxxholic has brought out the mystic in me. Or the psychologist. Or the spiritual counselor. Whatever you want to call it. It is all the same thing to me.

The only difference is the type of metaphors used, and how conscious the practitioner is that metaphors is all they are. Not mystic principles, not rules of magic, not ways of the spirit. Just useful metaphors for describing what, in the strictly scientific sense, are merely the workings of the human mind.

But from the point of view of any sort of counselor, who of course has to deal directly with the complex mixture of subject and objective reality that is the phenomenological landscape of the mind of another, scientific language is just another set of useful metaphors, effective with some, and worse than useless for others. And the true healer holds no pointless loyalties to one set of metaphors or another. They use whatever works best for each patient, whether it is the clinical language of science (which I prefer) or talk of souls, spirits, fairies, or The Other Side.

That is why I try to hold back my skeptic’s urge to get all pissed off at people who take people’s money for being their spiritual medium, life coach, or psychic friend. If it genuinely helps the person, who are we to judge what set of metaphors and beliefs form the key to the door of the person’s mind? Not everyone has a scientific mind and for many people, the metaphors of religion or mysticism, with their advantage of not needing to be processed by the conscious mind, make a heck of a lot more sense than all rational, sensible, logical thinking in the world.

And while I am a logical scientific type, to me, nothing is more important than helping people. I am a compassionate pragmatist with a deep and sincere desire to make life better for people, and from that point of view, whatever works is fine by me.

After all, who are we to say someone should not be happy because they sound their happiness the “wrong way”? What callous arrogance! What cruel hubris! What vile ignorance!

But back to that whole sleep thing. I suppose the tricky bit is that it often takes me a while to fall asleep, and it is not like I am likely to be able to look at the time and write it down the second before I actually go to sleep.

That is just not going to happen. So it would have to be, at best, a journal of when I lay down and when I wake up. A “time spent in bed” journal rather than strictly a sleep journal.

And I guess that would still give me some sort of sense of how much time I am spending asleep. I want to know just how much of my life I am wasting in bed.

The Quetiapine has been very useful in making sure I get some deep sleep every day. Taking two of them with my midnight snack ensures that, more or less, I will be asleep by 2 am or so. And I usually get, I think, four or five hours that way.

Then I get up, have breakfast, go back to bed, sleep till noon or so, eat lunch, then it is back to bed till around 4:30 PM, and that is when I feel I truly wake up.

And having a day that goes from 4:30 pm to 2 am kind of makes the days whizz by. According to that schedule, I am only truly up for less than ten hours, instead of the usual sixteen. Even if you add in a few meals, that still only brings it up to twelve hours or so. That is not a normal amount of time awake.

My life is slipping through my fingers, and I am not sure I have the strength to stop it. Part of me really likes having the duller parts of life slide away quickly. But that is a very limited way to think. All of life could be the “good parts” if I just put more effort into it.

But I feel like that part of me is still partly paralyzed. The deep cold numbness is not just an affliction but a defense, and waking up that part of me will always be painful before it is pleasant.

As I have said before, it is like when your foot falls asleep. It doesn’t hurt, exactly. Your foot is merely numb. But it feels very cold, and deeply and terribly wrong.

So you move your foot, knowing that doing so will make it start to actually hurt. Pins and needles, a hot flushing sensation, cramping… any are all of those are the price you are going to have to pay to get your foot back to normal.

And you might complain or swear or whatever, but you do it anyhow, because you know that this is the only way to get your foot back to normal and go back to using it like normal, too.

And that is more or less what recovery is all about. Shaking up things inside of you, waking them up, dealing with the pain and discomfort that brings, and knowing that it is all worth it because it is the only way to bring yourself back to life.

And maybe even get to be a happy, normal person some day.

But first, you have to…. WAKE UP.