How Truly Fucked-Up I Am
I'm a bad sleeper. And by "bad" I mean a variety of sleep-related maladies that have afflicted me for years. Depending on the phase of the moon, the time of year and my over-all mental state, I suffer from one or all of the following:
Insomnia, where I go 3-6 months without sleeping, save for the last 2 hours before I have to wake up. When this happens, I fill the endless hours with exciting activities, such as worrying whether there is a serial killer outside my bedroom door; whether someone is breaking in through the back where I won't hear them; whether a plane will freakishly land on my house; whether we will be victims of a surprise nuclear attack by Iraq, China, or any other anti-American, crazy-ass country; what I would do if my parents or other loved ones died suddenly, or in the near future, etc. Nothing works during this stage. I just have to sit there and work myself into a frenetic state of mind that positively kills me, and then hope that in a few months I can rest again.
Physical discomfort. I toss, I turn, I bury my head under he pillow, I throw my pillow, I'm covered, I'm not, my back hurts, etc. No position is comfortable. It's insufferable, as it usually leads to a few nights of insomnia (see above).
"Constant Conversation" Syndrome. If I wake up in the middle of the night to pee, drink water, or any other activity, I run the risk of not sleeping again that night. It could be 10:00 p.m. or 4:00 a.m., it works just the same. What happens is that when I return to bed, 1,000 conversations spring up in my head, and the noise is deafening, preventing me from sleeping. I re-hash conversations I had that same day, or possibly conversations from six years ago; or, I re-hash them and then go back and insert all the things I should have said but didn't, either out of fear or lack of wit. I talk to my mother, God, my deceased dog, my ex-boyfriend, Fidel Castro, some jerk who cut me off in traffic; I respond to totally biased articles I read in the news, or to the typically intolerant and hateful messages I see in message boards. Whatever I do, it's very noisy and plays over and over again in my head, so that I don't stand a chance of falling asleep again.
Nightmares. Not the kind with ghosts and serial killers and supernatural stuff, but the kinds that deal with real people and real situations and are therefore absolutely terrifying. I've dreamt the death of my father and woken up sobbing, my pillow literally soaked in tears. Usually though, the dreams are not so much dramatic as they are painful. And here is where (finally) the title of this piece comes in to play.
I don't know shit about dream interpretation. But I know that at least in my experience, I have very bad dreams about issues and situations that in my waking life are painful to deal with, or events of which I have no closure. My subconscious fears come to life in these nightmares, and the sheer vividness leaves me, hours after I've awoken, still wondering whether they were real or not.
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