Well, it’s the first half of my day’s blogging, so I must be sick, tired, and depressed.
I just checked. Yup.
One new wrinkle is that have developed morning insomnia. I just can’t sleep in the morning any more.
What happens is that I play video games until 6 am or 7 am, like usual, then eat breakfast, then go to bed.
It’s been my routine for years now, and until recently. it worked.
But now, when I lay down, I get this sudden attack of tension and a surge of energy and together they make sleep impossible.
Patient readers will recognize this as something that has happened to me before, but not very often and totally randomly.
But now it’s every damned morning and it is stressing me out.
The morning sleep period is usually my longest and best one. It’s when I get my high quality dreaming done, as well as body maintenance, and so missing it is really dragging me down.
I still get a nap in the afternoon and another in the evening but that’s maybe five hours total, tops, and that’s not enough.
So I think I am going to have to bite the bullet and take the fucking pill again.
Actually, it’s not so bad. I think I can distinguish between the issues caused by my sleep apnea and the ones caused by the Mirtazapine now, and the conclusion I have arrived at is that the sleeping pill doesn’t cause problems but it does make them a lot worse.
Its hard enough to fight through the effects of the sleep apnea without also having to fight through a heavy, clinging fog of sleep drug.
Basically, my problem is the same as it always has been : sleeping pills don’t help me get to sleep, they just make it harder to wake up.
Well, and they help me stay asleep. That’s the genuine benefit. Wish a decent sleeping pill, I can sleep for four or five hours, which is way better than my usual 2 to 2.5 hours.
Deep REM cycles and all that.
But having so much trouble waking up and staying awake stresses me the fuck out. I wish I could find a sleeping pill that just does its job and then fucks right off.
Ironically, the heavy resistance to waking could be a sign that the drug is doing its job. It could be that with the conscious mind sufficiently subdued by the drug, my subconscious is finally free to dig into a huge backlog of medium term memories and process them into long term memories, and that is such a heavy job that it wants me to get right back to sleep the minute I take a leak or eat or do whatever else it was that made me have to wake up.
But no, I have to be stubborn and try to do stuff. At least for as long as it takes for my bed to air out some.
I tend to wake up very sweaty when I have been having that kind of sleep.
Of course, what I really want is to be able to sleep like a normal person. Eight hours a night, while it’s dark, wake up refreshed in the morning.
But that feels like it happens in a parallel dimension, the one where all the normal people live normal, happy, balanced lives without ever knowing about us sprain-brained losers who dwell in unfathomable darkness all alone and afraid.
I want to live in their dimension. I really do.
But for now, the best I can hope for is to look into their world, and wonder.
What is it like to be sane?
I honestly have no idea.
More after the break.
Lost in time
And lost in space. And meaning.
Just had a bad period of temporal dislocation. Finished a session of Assassin’s Creed 2 : No Subtitle and looked at the time and it said 7:28 and for the life of me I had absolutely no idea whether that was AM or PM.
And yes, there are ways to figure that out real fast. That’s not the point. It’s a problem that is easily solved when your brain is working right…. but mine wasn’t.
So I was terribly, terribly confused and frightened. Most people will never experience the kind of temporal dislocation I just did, and if they do, they probably have a much stronger connection to reality than I do and thus could just shrug it off without effort.
Therefore, they have not experienced the intense existential terror that comes from that kind of dislocation.
But I have made progress.
At least I don’t see that kind of thing as normal any more.
I never thought everyone went through this. So that was never the issue.
It was more a matter of having the metacognition to stop and say, “Hey, this sort of thing is probably, like, bad. I should maybe talk to a medical professional about it. “
Most of the time, just plow through whatever bullshit life and reality throw at me and fight it till I get back to reality as I know it, then forget all about it so I can put it behind me as soon as possible.
That works as a minute to minute survival strategy but in the long term it is, of course, terrible. The problem is never addressed.
It’s hard to address and solve a problem when you barely remember it. I mean, I don’t exactly forget these things but they are filed way, way back in my mind and are therefore unlikely to pop into my head when I am thinking about my problems.
Which is kind of the point. I am increasingly convinced that I am far, far sicker than I normally realize and that a lot of my mind’s distraction and compartmentalization and fragmentation is there to keep me from having to face the full horror of it all.
Or maybe that’s just my latent hypochondria trying to make a comeback. I dunno.
All I know is that I have been utterly lost for so long that I cannot imagine what it is like to know where you are and what you are doing any more.
And that’s probably not good either.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.