Holy crap, has this been a Sleepy Day to end all Sleepy Days.

I went to bed at around 3 AM. Could not get to sleep right away, felt too restless and keyed up even though I was also very tired. Remembered that I had forgotten to take my sleeping pill, my Zopiclone. Well, that would do it. So I got up, took the pill, fucked around on Facebook for fifteen minutes while I waited for the Zopiclone to kick in, then went to bed at a little after 4 AM, confident that I would be awake in plenty of time for my noon appointment for therapy.

The next thing I know, Joe is waking me up, telling me it is ten minutes before noon, and don’t I have a therapist’s appointment? Uh… yeah. Whad dee fug mang.

So we call my therapist and he offers us tomorrow at 12:30 PM. I am acutely embarrassed because I hate being late for anything, but that is blunted by the fact that I am still extremely sleepy.

And that has still not let up fully.

So all day I have felt like this :

I guess I have hit a time of major payment on my sleep debt. I don’t feel bad, in fact, for the most part, the sleep has been quite peaceful and calm and the little periods where I manage to eat drink and eliminate before having to go right back to sleep have been pleasant enough. Kind of hard to concentrate in this mode, and I am sure I missed a third of the TED Talks I have watched because my mind kept wandering off into La La Land.

But otherwise, it has honestly been kind of nice. I am a little annoyed at Joe for not waking me up sooner, but the responsibility is primarily mine. Usually, it is I who signal Joe that it is time to go for something by emerging from my room and making my presence known.

This time, I was fast asleep! Oh dear.

Well, not exactly fast asleep, actually. I have this vague sense of being slightly awake, suspended in that mode of sleep where you are mostly sleep but just slightly aware of your environment. I think I stayed that way for quite a long time, unable to fully awaken, or perhaps just enjoying this rare island of calm peaceful sleep so much that I was unwilling to leave it for the harsh bright realm of reality until it was absolutely necessary.

And maybe a bit beyond that, as it turns out.

I have to admit, I wonder what role Zopiclone played in all this. Normally, its effect is quite mild, just a general sort of soothing, relaxing effect which makes it much easier than usual for me to slip from my usual mental cacophony into the cool calm waters of somnolence.

And no doubt that is all it did this time, but I don’t know for sure. I keep wondering if I accidentally took it twice or something. That would explain a lot.

But then again, I have had the occasional day just like this one long before the big Z came into my life. Days where I felt like my limbs were very heavy, and my bed called to me like a lover, and I had little choice but to spend most of the day dissolved into the deep dark waters of slumber.

I must say, I don’t think I ever had one that was this calm and pleasant though, and where I woke groggy but not utterly incoherent and covered in sweat and vaguely terrified.

Perhaps that is the Zopiclone’s contribution. It eases the path and makes it so sleep is not quite such a rough trip for me.

If so, thank you, Zopiclone! It was been quite lovely. I hope we can continue in this vein ad infinitum. It would be marvelous if this had somehow sensitized me to the drug and now it will have a nice firm solid effect instead of the subtle but still quite nice effect it had before.

As I have mentioned before in this space, that is what I really want from a sleeping pill. I want to feel secure that I will be able to sleep when I wish to sleep and awake refreshed, ready to face the day. That sounds a lot better than the nebulous netherworld where I feel like I am never fully awake and my sleep is rough and difficult and traumatic, and not really all that restful.

A lot of my daily constant anxiety has to do with sleep. I worry that I will not be able to get enough good sleep before it is time to do something all the time. And because I never fully rest, I am always sort of sleepy and that leads to greater anxiety the further I am from the opportunity to sleep at the exact moment when I feel like it.

That is a particularly limiting one. I suppose I have grown spoiled by spending most of my day either in bed ore only three feet away from it. I use sleep for a lot of reasons, the worst of which is simply taking a nap because I am bored and do not know what else to do with myself.

But I am slowly unlearning that. Baking helps. It gives me something to do when I am bored with the computer besides taking a nap. I can go play with the bread machine and make bread. And soon I will have an ice cream machine to play with too.

And that is progress. Honestly, anything that keeps me from abusing sleep is a good thing.

But what I really want to do is start focusing extra energy into projects like sending my writing out to publishers and writing fiction and getting all my technology working again.

That means really leaving my zone of comfort, though, so that is going to take some time and a lot of work before I can go there more often.

Frankly, the real thing scares the shit out of me.