Dear Sleep

For someone with anxiety issues, sleep can be a blessing.  If I am able to get my body calmed down for long enough to let sleep take hold, I am almost guaranteed several hours of uninterrupted stress free time.  Unless work calls and wakes me up in the middle of the night, that time is mine to relax and let my fragile-frankie body and mind revive itself for another round of grief the next day.  As a bonus, ever since I started taking pills to make my brain ticks and chiggers whither and die, my dreams have been much more vivid and exciting.  One of them is even the basis for an entire subplot in the novel I pretend to work on between blog posts.  Much like most things in my life, I should have tempered myself when a good thing showed up, because inevitably it would be used to harm me.

It started off so grand.  I had dreams in amazing locations, bursting with vibrant colors I hadn't seen in my dreams for years.  One dream the other night, I moved to a wonderful theme park type city where everyone had videogame powers.  I took special pills that gave me super jumps, and I could bound across the land, and hop from rooftop to rooftop.  Basically, I lived like Nicholas Cage thinks he does.  I had another dream where I was hunting monsters through a gigantic warehouse.  That was intense, but so much fun.  You haven't really slept until you've obliterated a nest of leprechauns using a coffee can full of homemade napalm.  Little bastards couldn't find the end of that rainbow. 

Other dreams took me back to places from my past.  Several dreams involve some semblance of the house I lived in when I was in Delaware, albeit with odd new floor plans and hidden passages.  I have dreams involving friends I haven't talked to for quite sometime every so often as well.  These dreams sometimes give me insight into our relationship that I had never thought of while waking.  Several of my friends have received "Had a dream about you last night, that means its been too long" emails.  Most dread the "I had a sex dream about you last night" email I send as well. 

The worst came a few days ago. Sometime around 6:45AM, I started to have a dream where I was still on my high school baseball team.  I had roped a shot out into centerfield and somehow pushed my tank of a body into second base for a double.  Since in this dream I was clearly the great white hope when it came to running, I took a gracious lead off of second and tore off on the pitch to steal third.  In fact, I was so fast in this dream, that no sooner had I leapt from my lead, I crashed headfirst into the third baseman and laid on the floor in agony.

Unfortunately, this was not all just a dream, only the stuff leading up to head injury.  Sleeping on my stomach, and apparently in a half sleep, I brought my left leg underneath my chest as I prepared to steal third in my dream.  When I took off in the dream, my real body used the coiled leg to catapult my body forward, which just so happened to be where the wall behind my bed lives.  The wall and my head did the favor of denting each other before I grabbed my head and fell out of bed to the floor.  Not only was my head gashed and openly bleeding, but two toenails on my foot ripped out as my foot pushed off the bed.  I lay on my back, on the carpet, dazed and bleeding from my head and foot.  I could only assume I'd been thrown out and disgraced the team. 

That's right, I even injure myself in my sleep.  Even crack addled balloons in a razor blade factory have a longer expiration date than a man that slams his head full force into walls when he is supposed to be in blissful slumber.