I wish I could allow myself a night of solace, of peaceful, uninterrupted sleep but, anymore that seems like a far off idea or forgotten muscle memory. The difficulty I have in attempting to force myself to sleep at a normal time is immeasurable. It feels like I have some subconscious aversion to sleep, even if I am exhausted. I know I need to sleep, and I know it would be better for me to sleep at a reasonable time, and yet, I don’t.
I’m not even sure that it’s a subconscious thought. I know that my decision to sleep is fully within my control. And I understand that there may be variables outside my periphery playing a part in this struggle, but I’d like to talk about how my mind fits into this trouble.
I like to think that I have a good memory, or at least a memory better than the average person. It’s not something I flaunt or hold over anyone, I’m not that type of individual, and it’s not something I’ve earned. Nevertheless, my memory is something I value dearly, and the idea of losing it, or it being tarnished in any way, is quite unnerving to me. All this being said, I would often dread sleeping because of how I thought it might affect my memory. I have very vivid dreams, or I used to, I don’t dream as much anymore. But these dreams would be poignant enough that sometimes the memory of them would creep into my waking life. I would remember a sequence from a dream and have to separate it from what was happening in my real life. I would have to convince myself that something from my dreams was not a real experience, and it felt like fracturing and stripping away the feeling of a past event, real or not.
I understand that a dream is not real, that there was no real sensory experience to it, that it is parts taken from real things made to construct something entirely different. Yet, if I remember a dream as well as I remember an instance from years ago, is it not just as real? That’s where the fear of sleeping came from. If I had enough dreams that I could remember, eventually they would start weaving into the rest of past and muddy the whole thing up, until eventually there’s no divide. I grew to resent the idea of sleeping for the fear that that idea may come true. But, I don’t dream anymore, and those memories aren’t being diluted as much, and yet I still don’t sleep well.
Grub's Dirt 