A noise from the sickly green smog arising from this fetid swamp? A stirring, a rumbling, a sound like a broken washing machine spraying soapy water in huge, sobbing bursts of sudsy doom! Could some unspeakably grotesque spawn of the seminal juice of this rotting sea and the ever fertile womb of the tomb of thousands of foul beasts be just now emerging from its wretched den to feast upon the living?

Nah, it’s just me after a long, hard day of long, hard sleep. So relax.

Yup, had one of my Sleepy Days today, and that means today has been sort of unpleasant. I sort of brought it on myself a little, I suppose, with the new no-napping policy. But seeing as I was having these days when I was napping at will anyhow, it probably has nothing to do with napping or not, or even the Zopiclone I took this morning.

It’s just that I do not yet get enough REM sleep, so sometimes my body just put our foot down and says it is time to pay off that sleep debt, in full, right now. And I will keep on being sleepy and needing sleep until I am all caught up.

Even now, after sleeping for most of ten hours (minus pee breaks) today, I still feel like I need another solid session before I can even approach the thought of being back to normal. The burden of sleepiness weighs heavily one me, and I have to keep moving or I will slip back into slumber no matter what I am doing.

I suppose the Zopiclone plays some small role in making this a little worse, a little heavier than the Sleepy Days I had before I started taking it. Before the drug, I did not face quite this much danger of just drifting off no matter what I am doing, like I just did between this sentence and the one previous to it. I just had to yank myself out of dangerous reverie where my thought began drifting and I could feel myself falling asleep as I drifted off with them.

And of course, I had me some fucked up dreams.

The biggest one took place, of course, at some kind of science fiction convention at a big hotel, and the plot revolved around me finding out that there was going to be an “all male” (nudge nudge wink wink) party in a private room, and I was invited.

Well, I got myself invited by being really flirty and cute with this one cute guy. (So, score. )

And so the Horizon Goal (in that you are always approaching it but never reach it) was this party for me now. It sounded like an awesome place to be, a party full of gay geeks like me. Fuck Ing A.

But then, of course, stuff kept popping up between me and my goal. First, the problem was that the person who told me about the party and from whom I charmed an invitation did not exactly remember what room it was happening in, and so I had to go around looking for people whom I knew and who might also have been invited so I can get the proper room number.

After all, you do not want to be knocking on random doors asking for the gay party room, do you? Might get some pretty snippy answers.

Also, while I am going around and around this hotel, I keep having what I can only describe as psychic visions of a tragic scene in which an adorable tawny tabby kitten is exploring a freeway overpass and goes through a crack in a piece of junk wood lying there, and plunges to its death on the freeway below.

The last part of the vision is always me looking down at the shattered body of tjhe kitten, and thinking “I dropped it… ” with a terrible feeling of guilt.

But somehow, I knew this was someone else’s memory, not my own, but as I progressed through the dream, the visions came stronger and stronger, so eventually, despite the fact that I was with someone who was my date for this party at the time and trying desperately to get my shit together and not mess that up, I had to basically stop in place and let the vision totally take me, and just describe what I was seeing to the people around me just like a psychic on TV.

And when I did that, one of the people who worked for the hotel said “We have to put a stop to this!” and another replied “It’s too late… they already know. ”

And it turns out I was diving some sort of deep dark secret about how the hotel was built, or something like that. It gets kind of indistinct after that. Dreams do not need to worry about clearing up loose plot threads. They are like bad movies that way.

The other notable sequence was one where I turned around to back down the corridor with my hotel room in it, only to find that it was now filled with a weird sort of combination buffet and trade show, with people showing off various foods (including dark purple lobsters, WTF) like they were people working a station at a buffet restaurant, as well as people who had trade fair type booths.

And they were really packed in there, so that it as a bit of a squeeze to go through the corridor and I had to sort of smile and greet the presenters as I went through.

At one point, I ended up in conversation with some guy trying to sell me on some amazing new diet product made from eggs, and I listened politely for a while, but then I told me that I did not find his claims plausible and that it just seemed like another bogus panacea to me.

Then the next booth over, they were selling some kind of fun science-toy type product where these tiny little crystals would turn water into this clear goo that bounced like a rubber ball and has a neat weird wobbly squishy texture. Much more my style.

And that is where it all ended. There were other bits and pieces, the usual wondering where I left something or going back for something I forgot or whatever, but they were all dull and routine, not worth noting at all.

Other than that… I guess I slept well?