Seems like my sleep debt is due for payment, and it’s not exactly optional.

I’m heaving one of my sleep days and this one came with a twist : one whopper of a nightmare to kick off the festivities.

As is often the case, I only remember the end of it. It involved a horrible, ogre like monster running towards me through a maze while sort of barking at me, but not like a dog would bark.

Like a very, very crazy person would bark out of sheer incoherent rage.

I was legit the most scared I have ever been in my life. Nothing else has come close. Not even other nightmares.

Thank goodness that woke me up. Left me in a pool of sweat, dehydrated and starving, with my heart beating like I had a particularly athletic rabbit running really fast in there.

Took a while for the pounding to slow down to a normal level, too. Eek.

But the worst part is…. and this is hard for me to say, but… I am pretty sure that the ogre was my brother Dave.

And that troubles me greatly.

Because why? It feels like a very obscure kind of betrayal. That’s why it’s hard to admit.

Quite honestly, I am ashamed of it. But um, don’t try to make sense of that. This is the world of dreams and dreams don’t need to be logical.

One theory is inane but worth recording, anyhow. For quite a long time now, my brother’s online persona has been an ogre.

Not in this sense :

But in this sense :

So in a superficial sense, the two things connect, but emotionally, that is a laughably simplistic interpretation of the phenomenon.

More likely, the answer is that there were a few choice times in my childhood when I was that scared of my brother.

Not exactly sure why, but it was probably something I said.

It still feels wrong, though. I love my brother and miss him terribly. We were very close for many years. Years in which we were each other’s only friends.

But like I said, dreams don’t have to make sense.

Oddly enough, I am sort of glad I had the dream. It blasted through a bunch of latent emotions all at once.

And such is the deep perversity of my nature that it feels good simply to have experienced any amount of raw, uncut, unmuted emotion.

Makes me feel somewhat alive, at least for a little while. Cuts through all that dead ice weighing down my heart and provides some much needed ignition to my blood.

Makes me want more. I like being alive. It feels good, even when the cause feels bad.

There is more to life than a simple hedonic calculus of pleasure and pain can contain. Painful things can make you feel better. Pleasurable things can leave you worse off. You can miss things that you hated at the time, and vice versa.

It still boils down to seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, but we humans can get pleasure and pain in some very counterintuitive ways.

I’ll think about that as I zonk out yet again.

More after the break.

False scarcity and the war on effort

Call it emotional austerity.

Like its governmental spending namesake, emotional austerity seems to make sense. In times of scarcity, you spend more carefully. Cut back on nonessential spending. Tighten the old belt buckle. Adopt a lean and hungry attitude.

So far so good. But there are some hidden assumptions.

For one, it assumes you know exactly what spending is nonessential. That requires knowing exactly how the machine works and are therefore competent to start tinkering with it to the point of removing bits you deem no longer needed.

That requires far more than an idea of what “seems” unnecessary.

Preferably, you have at least a casual knowledge of what the fuck you’re doing.

Once more I have digressed. Sigh.

Where I was trying to go was to address how depression forces you into this state of emotional austerity where you behave as though you have incredibly little energy and every single investment of effort, no matter how small, has to justify itself as “profitable” to an impossible degree.

Like real world austerity, it’s superficially plausible. Have less, do less. But doing less can lead directly to having even less and your ending up achieving exactly the opposite of what you were trying to do.

For example, moving less might make you gain weight, the extra weight leads to having even less available energy, you move even less, and so forth.

It’s great to save money on food but not if it causes the patient to starve.

So it goes with depression’s austerity. A lot of the things it drives you to do, like moving as little as possible, avoiding all things requiring sustained energy, and so on, end up causing your supplies of energy and inspiration to dwindle even further.

On the other hand, counterintuitively, if you do the opposite of what it says and start moving and doing more, you will find yourself with more vitality in the long run.

Turns out your body and mind have an energy budget and it is based on how much energy you have needed lately.

Need more, get more.

It sounds like topsy turvy lunacy, but it’s absolutely true.

Like I always say : depression lies. It lies all the time. Lies are its basic mode of operation because, like Fox News, it has to lie that much to maintain its tenuous contra-factual version of reality.

And like Fox News, one of its most powerful forms of propaganda is its ability to convince you that you already know what the truth is, so there is no point in checking to verify what it says.

That is what it is doing when it tells you there is no point in trying. It knows that if you DO start trying and doing and moving and getting things done, you will find that it has been lying to you for a really long time and that there never WAS a nuclear war and it’s been safe to go outside all this time.

The door is open. You can leave this dank and dusty bunker any time you like.

So the question is : do you really want to leave? Are you ready to go?

Either way, the only thing stopping you is you.

So make your choice,.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.