Not Really Going Anywhere At All

Oooh, dreaming.  To dream intimates to sleep, yes?  No?  Maybe...

Funny things happen when one doesn't sleep as much as one might like, as much as one ought, as much as one needs.

One night, perhaps two, make for tired days, perhaps a short temper.  Build on that foundation, though, and there are colors never tasted, visions of things not quite there, sounds that warp themselves to bend around walls and seep through vents until they sound like the whispers of the Sidhe just beyond ken.

Lose enough sleep, fall short enough of the need to process the days into dreaming, and thought becomes tangled, embroiled in a fractured process, sloughing through the dregs of intelligence that sleeplessness left behind when it stole the best away.

When I do sleep, such dreams I have!  Once or twice (or three or four times, maybe) in the very distant past, far beyond the statutes for such things, I may have ingested some LSD.  In that long-ago time, what I experienced was exactly nothing like the media portrayals of such ingestions.  No ravening beasties, no loss of control, no mania, no psychotic breaks, no sudden conviction that I could fly, nothing deleterious at all.  Mostly, I laughed a lot.  The dreams I have of late?  The things my own mind creates out of fragments of memory?  As chaotic a maelstrom as any "bad trip" ever imagined by the fevered minds of the collective and disapproving media!

I do not have nightmares.  It's true!  I have some intensely weird, unpleasant, bewildering dreams, but nothing like what I am told a nightmare is.  I always know I am dreaming.  I am never so lost in what my brain is producing that I feel fear.  Perhaps that's why all those horror movies based upon dreaming don't interest or bother me much.  I am too aware, when sleeping, that it isn't real.  Sometimes I can, figuratively speaking, sit back with some popcorn and watch the film unfold before me.

I am angry a lot, and lonely, and sometimes trying to find my way through some sort of tangle or maze that continually shifts around me.  I am sad.  I yearn for something just beyond my reach. Sky and ground are fluid, trading places.  No up, no down, monochromatic.

Last night, in the shifting landscape that occupied my mind for a scant few hours, there was a song.  Not unusual, that.  So much of my life is music.  Dream A Little Dream played on an endless loop, and I missed my Someone intensely while I sat in a grey room full of grey air that tasted of dust and shadows.

This morning, when I woke, the rain-darkened day seems inordinately bright,muted colors were vivid, and my daughter's laughter shattered the stillness, tinkling into the corners and bouncing back to the bed in waves as she bounced and giggled and told me it was time to get up, get up Mama!

Here in the waking world I am, to use a colloquialism, dog tired.  I'm getting used to it.  When the walls begin to breathe and colors begin to run, I'll begin to worry.  Until then, I shall muddle on as usual, and as usual I will use the extra time provided by insomnia to do something useful, like watch entire seasons of television on Netflix (House of Cards, anyone?).

Dream a little dream of me...