No, not this “Under the Sea” :

… no, not that one, but my usual casual keelhauling by the forces of super deep sleep.

Yup, it’s been one of those days. One of those days where I spend more or less the entire day in that special deep dark sleep that leaves me feeling drained and disoriented and dizzy, and yadda yadda yadda.

This is a good sign, that I am at the yadda yadda stage with this phenomenon. Those yaddas mean progress! Specifically, progress toward overcoming my futile resistance to this phenomenon and my worse than pointless panicky angry depressed reaction when it happened. Like each time it happened was a fresh and brutal tragedy, to be mourned anew.

Yeah. Fuck that.

Sure, I could bitch about how I had plans to accomplish useful things today, like writing my LOC for the latest issue of BCSFAzine (which, incidentally, had one of my stories, One Average Meeting In Space, in it), and getting a good start on my project to go through the archives of this site and submit links to the good stuff places and archiving said good stuff to be part of my writer’s portfolio, and catching up on my correspondance, and blah blah blah.

But you know what? They are just plans. They are not the laws of the universe or edicts from God. Plans are great, and I will always be a planner. When you don’t handle the unexpected well, planning is more or less your only option. But they are just plans. If things don’t work out that way, you just make different plans. You cannot truly control the future via planning.

It just gives you a better chance at handling things.

So I will do all those lovely things eventually. Just not yet. Soon. But not yet.

This is a far more useful and mature attitude than previous catastrophic ones. I am glad that I am getting over feeling like each time this happens, it’s horrible.

It’s not horrible. It’s at best just irritating. Sure, maybe I don’t operate like other people when it comes to sleep, but then again, I don’t operate like other people in damn near any way. I am a one off unique creation, denied the comforts of the herd but given my own special brand of magic in return.

It is not necessarily the road anyone would gladly choose, but it has its own strengths.

And I am slowly working my way towards believing that it just might be… enough. Not a lot, in many ways, and a far more eclectic collection of bits and pieces than the standard model of life, but still, when you add it all up, it just might be “enough”. Sufficient.

I might just deserve to live after all. And that is a bold new concept for me. Me, an actual worthwhile human being, not just a worthless useless thing hiding from the world and trying to beg, distract, or charm the world into letting me live just a little bit longer, even though I clearly don’t deserve it.

To be honest, part of me wonders if I can take the pressure.

But then again, I’m gay. I’m different. Just like these :

As for the usual dream harvest from these periods, this one is a little sparse. I only remember one part of one of my dreams, and it’s not particularly dramatic, although it is, of course, quite weird.

I was having one of my dreams where I am wandering around some enormous mall, looking for someplace to eat (I woke up real hungry, too… must have been low blood sugar), when suddenly I stumbled across Bill Cosby sitting at a cheap plywood table, like the type your church community center uses for meetings.

Yes, Billy Cosby. That Bill Cosby. Comedian, 80’s sitcom legend, temporary total embarrassment, and current rather impressive social activist for higher educational standards. That guy.

He was sitting there kind of like this was a book signing, although there was no books around, and there were people sitting at the table with him (the table was perpendicular to me) but I don’t recall any of them. They were just background.

So I end up within a meter of Bill Cosby, comedy legend, and a lot of possibilities flash through my mind (like telling him how much I admire his standup work, or asking for his autograph, or maybe trying to ingratiate myself so he will recommend me to someone, or whatever) but instead, what comes out is me telling Bill Cosby that I feel really terrible and depressed and ill, and I do it in this weird whispery little kid voice.

That is when things get weird.

He immediately gets up and takes out one of those flashlight things that doctors use to check your eyes, and checks my eyes, and mumbles something about my conjunctiva and this being a classic sign of something. He does more medical type testing of me, and the next thing I know, I have been admitted to the hospital and I am in some kind of mental ward.

How did we go from mall to hospital? Dunno. How does Bill Cosby have the power to admit me to a hospital? Dunno. I mean, he is, technically, a doctor, but he’s not a medical doctor. His doctorate is in, of all things, physical education.

Even in my dream, I wondered about that. I remember thinking “Wait a minute, he’s not a REAL doctor!”

I don’t recall much about the mental ward besides wondering what they were going to do to me and some vague impressions of the droolier kind of mental patients. But then somehow, I ended up wandering out of said hospital, and lo and behold, it is a hospital (or at least a psych ward ) located in that very same mall I was in earlier.

And I can’t find my way back to the hospital. So it turns into one of my dreams about trying to get back to where I just was, but now I can’t find it, it’s disappeared.

One last thing : this mall somehow not only had a hospital in it, but it had a store where you can buy equestrian products, including the actual horse, and a place where you could rent a horse and ride it around in an indoor park.

Oh. And it had an airport.

And that’s where the dream ended, me lost, trying to get back to the safety of the mental ward.

Mental wards hold a terrible fascination for me, so I am not surprised to see one in my dreams. Part of me thinks it would be so very nice to be in one, and have that kind of official permission to be withdrawn from the world, taken care of, given care and attention and therapy every day, and never have to worry about coping ever again.

But that, to me, would be a kind of suicide. I want to go in the other direction, towards the world, not away from it. I want to wake up, not sleep deeper.

It’s just that there’s so much to do, and I’m tired of sleeping.