Ya know I am low on mental energy when I name my day’s column after the day of the week it’s on.

Anyhoo. Just finished watching the Penguins Of Madagascar movie. For the uninitiated, the Madagascar series of animated movies have a team of four penguins who are quite funny and popular in them, and they got their own movie.

Kind of like the Minions from the Despicable Me series.

Quick review : Recommended! It’s not hilarious or amazingly moving, but I enjoyed it. The characters are engaging and fun. The humour is quick and at times even witty. Animation is, to my eyes, superb. Not bad for a kids’ movie.

John Malkovitch voices the villain, a penguin-hating octopus named Dave. Nice to see him doing voice work. It allows him to be funny and wacky and fun without his high inherent creepiness factor making it all weird.

So yeah. Good flick.

But tonight, I force myself to go back to talking about myself. It’s been a nice little vacation from myself, this time of reviewing movies I just finishes, and I will do it more in the future.

But self-therapy takes precedent. Even though part of me is screaming for me to take the easy way out.

Yell all you want. I got stuff to work on.

Something odd happened late Wednesday night/early Thursday morning. My week had been (for me) nicely busy, and then Thursday was going to be a day with no particular “thing” to do, and that should have been a good thing.

But I was pondering the day to come before bed on Wednesday night, and I had the thought “I am not looking forward to figuring out what to do with myself tomorrow.”, and with that thought, it was like something that I had been holding back without knowing it broke loose and flooded into my mind like an avalanche.

It was this heavy, lugubrious feeling, and at first I couldn’t identify it. But when I was dealing with it the next day, I soon recognized the feeling.

It was the feeling of time being something to endure rather than something to enjoy or even to use. Without realizing it, I had been suppressing that feeling and finding at least some meaning in my days for a long time, but it had been building in the back of my mind for a long long time, so that by the time Thursday night rolled around, all it took was a thought to let it loose.

Can’t say I am too happy with it coming back. Especially because it brought its favorite tool with it : sleepiness. The urge to fast forward life via sleep (because what’s the point of staying awake? For what?) is back, and I really, really didn’t miss it.

The best thing I can say is that its return has made me keenly aware of it and able to react against it, and that’s the first crucial step in overcoming it permanently.

Now I could just be overdramatizing things. I have had these sleepy patches before without it being a catastrophe. Maybe this is just one of them, and I have been sleeping a lot because I need to sleep a lot in order to catch up on my REM sleep.

Kind of hoped the CPAP would take care of that, actually. But as I learned at my Coastal Sleep appointment yesterday, my CPAP use has practically eliminated my sleep apnea. With the adjustments to the setting, my sleep lady Marielle and I hope to eliminate it completely so that I will be actually sleeping like a normal person for possibly the first time in my life.

So I dunno. Maybe this is my last REM backlog burn-through. But I somehow doubt it. As I have been using the CPAP, I have felt like there was something missing from my sleep, something I wasn’t getting. This feeling of deficit, in turn, would make me want to sleep without the CPAP on.

Hence my not quite sufficient compliance rate. In order for the BC government to buy me this CPAP device, my compliance rate, which is defined as how much I use it for four hours or more in a row, has to be at least 80 percent, and right now it is only 71 percent. So I will try to use it more from now on.

But the question remains : what the heck am I missing? I think it must be REM sleep. So either I have a sleep issue entirely unrelated to my sleep apnea, which would really suck, or the CPAP machine is somehow messing with my REM sleep.

I am pretty sure it must be the former, because I have had this cycle of low REM leading to “sleepy days” for a long time. I thought it was related to my sleep apnea, but maybe not. Maybe there is some primal psychological tension in my mind, some excess of left-brained control over the right, that makes it hard for me to let dreams happen, even in sleep.

It’s sad how plausible that is to me. At least I know I am too left-brained for my own good.

As often happens during these sleepy times, I find myself getting really mad at the sleepiness. I don’t want to slumber through life, I want to live through it. But sleep is so tempting an escape.

Probably my best course is to stop fighting it and just sleep as much as my body wants me to sleep until I am done. The idea that sleeping a lot represents a form of moral backsliding is probably bad for me. It’s just another example of how depression sets up these situations in the mind where the task is defined so rigidly and with such absurdly high standards that failure is guaranteed, thus protecting the depression’s hold on you by convincing you that trying is futile.

My sentences are just crazy complicated tonight.

Anyhoo, I will do what I can about not being so judgmental about myself, and instead letting things work themselves out.

Hopefully, going to Kwantlen 4 days a week will help work some of this shit out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.