Another nothing of a day, spent mostly in sleep or something like it. And it was totally by choice today. Even when I took my sleeping pill and went to bed at 6 am, I was not tired. I just did it because it seemed like the thing to do at the time. After all, it was 6 am!

But the pill had little effect. I could have stayed up for hours more. But I went to bed anyway, and the truth is, it was because the idea of staying up terrified me.

I am still deathly afraid of having to be conscious for hours and hours and hours on end. The idea of having to find something to do with myself for all that time just about crushes me.

What would I do with all that time? What is there to do when I am tired of using the computer and it is not time to eat yet but to sleep? How do I live my life in realtime, with no using sleep as the fast forward button to life?

What the hell do I do with myself, anyhow? The sleep is not just a fast forward button, it’s an escape, a safe haven, a retreat, a cocoon. I have felt myself actively yearning for this escape hatch and eagerly anticipating when I will be able to use it next. I find myself picturing going to bed as being like diving in to a cool, soft, relaxing pond where I can leave reality behind for a while and retreat into my secret lagoon where the world cannot find me.

When you think about it, for someone whose problems all stem from a pattern of responding to anything like stress or pain by retreating further from reality and deeper into his mind, retreating into sleep makes a lot of sense. In sleep, we live entirely within our own minds. There is no objective reality in dreams, only the contents of our own thoughts, desires, instincts, memories, and so on.

So by spending so much of my life in sleep, I am basically retreating as far as I can into my mind without removing objective reality as an option completely. The only step further into my mind would be complete and total catatonia, and believe me, there have been times when that has seemed like an attractive option.

Just give up on reality completely. Retreat into my mind and never come back out. Leave external reality to others. Maybe someone would find my physical body and care enough to arrange that my basic bodily needs are taken care of in some institute for housing vegetables, maybe nobody would and I would die of my diabetes within 24 hours when my blood sugar crashed for good.

I would not care. Maybe I would go directly from the dream world to the afterlife, if there is one, which seems unlikely. Maybe I would just fade away. Maybe I would die in a nightmare of pain, blood, and horror as my dreaming mind interprets the ravages of the disease on my body and brain. Maybe something altogether strange and unpredictable would happen.

That would at least be interesting.

But no matter what happened, I would finally be done with the reality that I find so hard to bear. I would have taken that final step and retreated completely into my mind. It would finally be over.

And to be honest, that idea has a lot of appeal for me. Deadly appeal, to be honest. I can completely see why an overdose of sleeping pills is the method of choice for many suicides. You imagine that you will just fall asleep and never awake up. What could be more perfect?

Of course, the reality is not quite so tragically perfect. A lot of sleeping pills have very nasty effects that are nothing like peaceful sleep when taken to excess. Instead of sailing serenly to the shores of sweet silver oblivion in a shining schooner. you end up fully awake, vomiting blood and in total agony as your nervous system tries to save its own life by counteracting the sedative with everything it has.

Still, just the same, given how I feel right now, I am glad I only have 1 zopiclone left. I might be tempted to do something stupid.

And yet, as low and sad and crushed under by life as I feel by life right now, I think this is a period of progress for me. I think becoming fully conscious of my abuse of sleep and my problems dealing with reality is the first step towards dealing with the problem. Right now there is a lot of pain and fear because I have seen the mountain I must climb in order to be free, and it seems impossibly tall a rugged from way down here in the valley of my despair.

But the secret is not to look at the mountain. Look at the ground beneath your feet. Decide in your heart that climbing is better than staying where you are, and that you are not going to think about how much further you have to go, or how high the mountain is, or any of that self-defeating crap.

Instead, you just start up the mountain, and are happy because now you are climbing. And any time the climbing gets too rough and it is hard to go on, you can always look down the mountain to see how much distance you have already covered, and say to yourself “If someone had asked me if I could climb this high when I was way down below, I would have said no. And yet, here I am. So I guess I don’t really know what I am capable of before I try to do it. ”

And you take that lesson to heart : that the predictions made in despair are wrong, and therefore you should not base your life around them.

Instead, assume that you can do anything you want to do, and all you have to do is keep it up.

And then, one day, you reach the top of the mountain, and look down the other side, and realize that the worst is over and it will be much easier going from now on.

And you did it all by yourself.

Won’t that feel wonderful?