tired

i am really hoping this isn't any sort of bad sign. i didn't really think about it until this morning, but i have been unnaturally tired for the past couple of weeks. night before last i went to bed at 9:45pm and pretty much went straight to sleep. granted, i had just spent half an hours in a bath with chamomile and lavender, so a little sleepiness isn't totally unjustified, but when one goes to sleep before 10pm, one should be able to rocket straight out with the alarm at 5:30am. this did not happen. last night, in bed and asleep before 11pm, and had a little trouble dragging it out today until 5:45am or so. it's just not like me, but i suppose i have a right to be a little worn down these days. i just hope it's not diagnostic.

truly, i think there's a whole mess of reasons i'm tapped out. work's been crazy busy, and with big projects that are very important from a strategic standpoint. many of my days have been filled with pondering the great imponderables, and that's both mentally and emotionally draining. and last, and very likely the furthest from least, my dream life seems to have gone off the charts.

my whole life i've never had much of a dream life at night; it seems like i've always done most of my dreaming while wide awake. it's always been one of B's biggest frustrations with me (the daydreaming, not the lack of nighttime storytelling). i simply have just never really been one to remember my dreams, certain creepy blue-skinned ones notwithstanding. but of late it seems i'm waking every couple of hours with some new thing jammed into my recumbent melon that has so jarred me by its presence that it brings me to full consciousness. it's not like there's a raft of nightmares waiting for me on eyes closing - in fact, these dreams are for the most part nonsense or at the least non-threatening. but man, oh man, they just don't seem to let up. and i think i'm just not used to it.

i have a theory. i understand that every living soul dreams at night. it's a part of our mind's mental reboot, a required part of the resting process, without which we would never feel rested and - by some hypotheses - would actually go insane. so i know full well that i have dreamed my entire life. i just have never had them wake me, and i've never remembered them. i believe this to be because of the walls i have built inside my own self, walls that divide off my fears and hopes and dreams from my thinking and feeling mind. i have effectively walled off my unconscious from my conscious, and as a result my conscious self is never allowed access to the things that might stir my emotions, the things that leak out of the mind at night. until now, it is only the most powerful things that have made it through.

that dreaming self is the animal part of us, the most basic bit of our nature where all of our native instincts rule and play freely with our hearts and thoughts. this is the world of little more than fight-or-flight and pure creativity, where any story may be told and our logic has no dominion whatever. it is a place of pure fantasy and where we can show ourselves literally anything. for someone who fears his own emotions and whose sense of self-worth is so tiny as to be self-flagellative, it can be the most terrifying place of all.

i now am spending a lot of energy and effort to break those walls down. i am intentionally punching holes in them, tentative ones right now to be sure, but holes nonetheless. the barrier between my conscious, careful self and whatever lies beneath is coming down one miserable but safe brick at a time, and that other world, dammed up and held at bay for so long, is now spilling over and through and around that wall like so much water that has been set free. and now my poor mind is awash in imagery and fantasy and fear and hope and beauty and ugliness the likes of which it has not had to see for a long, long time and it is, frankly, overwhelmed.

i should start a dream journal, because i already don't remember most of these dreams (except a rather peculiar recurring one where i am imprisoned in a desert, with nothing but a structure like that of a playground and a series of black rubber paths through the sand which hides a collection of particularly nasty, rusted but highly-effective mechanical dog-beasts that are the guardians and methodically chew alive those who wander into the sand - ok, that one is a little creepy, i have to admit) and i think they may be telling. but they are very intense in a way i haven't really experienced outside of the blue lady dreams, and some are truly beautiful. it is not all threat and fear. but it is all foreign and alarming for that.

however this is working, whatever the purpose or cause, they are short-circuiting my sleep to a point where some mornings i feel as if i have had little or none. i remember B saying something about this once when she was making a breakthrough. in time, i expect it will fade into a part of my normal nighttime landscape. but for now, it's exhausting.

of course, i could also be wrong. maybe there are no walls coming down at all and my brain's just on some IT-quality trash dump. there's a lot of garbage files in there, buddy.