I have be trying, today, to develop a healthier relationship with sleep, which means, no napping!

Good old Morpheus and his always ready realm of dreams and nightmares and all manner of pains and pleasures… but none of them real.

Which is the appeal, really. I have been using sleep as a blanket (and comforter) escape from reality, the furthest one can go from reality without dying, and who knows?

Maybe death is the realest thing there is, and not the escape it seems at all.

So I am going to try to cut down on all this napping. Here I have been bitching about how life seems to be slipping away from me faster and faster, and all the while, I am actively sleeping through as much of it as I possibly can.

These two things are not compatible. The only way I have at my disposal to slow my life way the hell down is to be awake for more of it. No more fast-forwarding through my life to get to the good bits… which are largely meals. How sad is that?

I eat to live, I live to eat. Pathetic. That is not who I am. It is just how I have been.

So I am going to do my best to nap a lot less. I probably will not be able to go cold turkey right away, but I can cut down pretty hard. For instance, no sleeping in the afternoon. Right there, a quarter of the day is cordoned off. After that, I will cut out evening naps.

I should be able to get all the sleep I need in the twelve hours between midnight and noon.

And I will try to go to bed at 3 am every night, and take my sleeping pill then, and not dilute the effectiveness of that sleep by napping all day. I might not ever be able to totally fit myself into the normal eight hours a night, at night pattern.

But I can move in that direction, and that could make a big difference in my life. I realize now that I have been living my life always on the doorstep of sleep, and therefore never being truly awake and alive. No doubt this is a form of self-sedation to deal with my depression, which is no doubt going to become a fiercer opponent now that I am going to be more awake.

That is the real challenge. Skipping a nap would be no big deal if I was not then left with hours to fill and a very tiny number of methods for doing so. I honestly do not know what to do with myself most of the time, and I am growing tired of the usual video games and Internet crap. I find them increasingly boring, unrewarding, frustrating, and unfulfilling.

They just cannot compete with real life.

You know, that real life stuff that I have been strenuously avoiding for most of my adult life. I mean, I have always been a head in the clouds kind of guy. The world inside my head has always held massive precedence over the world outside. Even as a kid, I would do crazy things like try to walk home from school and read a book at the same time. ^[1]

So it is not like reality and I have ever been more than nodding acquaintances at the best of times. But at least in the past, I had things forcing me to deal with reality, like for instance school, jobs, and the desire for ice cream.

But in this life of mine, I could practically live my entire life in this here apartment if I felt like it. Direct deposit on my disability checks, Joe and Julian buying the groceries, buying what I want online, not going out to dinner with my friends any more. Get a microwave for the bedroom and practically never leave except to see the doctor.

It is entirely possible. And a very sick and sad part of me thinks it sounds good. The part of me whose response to any form of stress is to collapse and retreat. It thinks “Yeah, that would be great! No stress, no fear, no challenges, no expecations, no reality pushing in and makes life hard. Just me, alone with my Internet, forever. ”

I recognize that part of myself AS part of myself. But only a part. Living like that would be a lot like suicide. I want to gain strength, not capitulate to my weaknesses all the time. I want to grow strong, and robust, and energetic.

That is another thing about my sleeping all the time. I have come to realize that I need to stick a very hard and counterintuitive lesson onto a nail and then pound it into this thick skull of mine : sometimes the solution to being tired is to do something.

Doing nothing makes people tired. The body assumes that if you are just sitting there for a while, it had better shut down a lot of your systems in order to conserve resources. So you slip into a stupor, and mistaken come to believe that this means you are tired and need to rest, instead of simply being in a lower gear, ready to pop into a higher gear as soon as you start doing something active.

I proved this to myself this afternoon. I was feeling very, very tired and the urge to nap was strong in me. But I had already decided not to nap this afternoon, so instead, I got up and loaded up the bread machine to make me some French bread.

And lo and behold, after I did that, I wasn’t nearly as tired and sleepy any more!

What? Effort can leave you feeling MORE energetic?

That’s as crazy as thinking you can spend money in a way that leaves you with more money later!

Well that is it for tonight. Maybe I will take a nap now, maybe not.

I am sure I will get around to it eventually.