Had another majorly sleepy day today, although thankfully, the whole sweaty suffocating thing was quite minimal.

So apart from the feeling like my life is slipping through my fingers as I sleep my limited number of heartbeats away, it was not all that unpleasant.

These sleepy days seem to come in swarms. Not sure why. Perhaps it’s just that once the dyke of insomnia (or rather, hyposomnia) is burst, it takes a long time for all the pent up need for hardcore REM time to drain away.

But knowing how these things work, I know that I will sleep a lot for an indeterminate amount of time and then one day, out of nowhere, I will be…. done, more or less.

I will take a nap and wake up feeling actually relaxed and rested for a change. These are very precious moments due to their scarcity and I cherish them.

I have been thinking a lot lately about how many of the paragraphs of this blog start with “I have been thinking a lot lately about…”.

What can I say? I’m a thinker by nature. I do a lot of thinking.

Seriously though, I have been thinking about how tense my mind is a lot of the time. Mind, and body. I am thoroughly used to having this sort of painful, forced nature to my consciousness, like I am eternally a student struggling to stay awake during a boring but important class.

Hence, I think that at some point in my childhood, I solved my battle with insomnia by learning to basically force myself to be awake and alert for school (thus taking a vital amount of pressure to sleep off myself at night) and I have been doing that ever since.

So I go through periods where I am, psychologically speaking, going around with my eyes propped open with toothpicks, and when that eventually catches up with me, I slump into hypersomnia and end up losing days of my life to catching up on my sleep debt.

If this theory hold true, then what I really need to do is to just let go and relax inside this torqued up noggin of mine, sleep all I need to sleep without judgement or restraint, and when I am caught up, truly caught up (as opposed to just being back to being able to force myself awake and build up sleep debt again), resolve to never tighten that particular valve again, no matter what.

Hopefully, after that, I would be able to develop some sort of normal sleep/wake pattern, or at the very least figure out what weird sort of pattern actually works for me.

It would be so nice to find out what it feels like to be truly rested and relaxed for more than a few hours. Sleep has been a difficult issue for me ever since I was a wee one terrified of the dark. I can’t remember a time when I could just sleep eight hours and wake feeling rested.

Instead, I get varying degrees of sleep that leaves me feeling drained and abused. Then I get tired of the sleepiness and force myself to stay awake for a while.

But I am not truly rested, so the sleepiness returns, and the whole thing continues.

Another sleep related thing I have noticed is that the worst time for me is the period between putting the book down and/or shutting off my tablet and when I actually go to sleep.

No matter how I try to taper off the stimulation involved, I always end up having a kind of anxiety attack because of that dropoff between doing something and doing nothing. My heart rate is up, my mental stimulation level is high, and then I drive off the cliff by stopping and trying to relax.

Obviously, eventually I relax and get to sleep, but those periods of dropoff are very hard on me. I think that is the real reason I want a really strong sleeping pill : so that it is no longer up to my clearly untrustworthy conscious mind to get from wakefulness to sleep.

Instead, a nice strong drug takes the choice out of my hands and thus saves me a lot of anxiety. The drug would just bulldoze through all the interfering neuroses and mental blocks and boom, I would get good sleep.

That is the fantasy, anyhow. My current sleeping pill helps smooth the way from waking to sleeping, but in my heart of hearts, I want something that hits me like a frozen sandbag and keeps me asleep until I am freaking DONE.

I am not sure what makes this kind of sleepy day harder : the sleep apnea, or the intense dreaming.

I have been forgetting my dreams more or less on purpose lately. When I wake up, I just want to clear my memory banks and get on with things. Remembering your dreams just clutters things up.

And it’s not like my dreams are all that horrible. Then tend not to have a single emotional tone, good or bad, anyhow. They are just… intense. Realer than real, sometime. They always take the form of something fairly mundane like walking through a mall or investigating a neighborhood, and they never include anyone I know, except in brief cameos, and that bothers me.

Other people have dreams involving those with whom they have relationships. The fact that I do not suggests that maybe all that isolation has led me to be someone who does not value interpersonal relationships very highly.

Things grow strange int he dark, after all. I do feel like I am excessively transpersonal. You need a balance of the personal and transpersonal in your life or things go out of whack.

You cannot live on the cold circuit of high ideals and intellectual values all the time. You are still human, and need the comfort of others of your species in order to feel safe and happy.

And I don’t know how to really let people in.

That’s all for me me today, folks.

Talk to you tomorrow!