You can dream in any stage of sleep, but REM sleep is the point at which you have the most vivid dreams. It is also what your brain tries to catch up on first when you haven’t been getting enough sleep. If you don’t catch up, you get daytime hallucinations. I do everything I can to avoid driving when I am this tired. I have been in an accident before, albeit, it was plain old falling asleep behind the wheel, it wasn’t braking for a phantasm. I’m terrified of doing that—braking for a person who isn’t really there, and getting rear-ended by a person who is.
Category Archives: Insomnia
18 Sept, 2020
There’s a sickness that goes with sleeping three hours a night, a week at a time. It’s nausea, or actual vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain; headaches that border on migraines. Your joints ache; your muscles are tight, especially through the shoulders; your vision is blurry. Sometimes you see double. Food tastes odd. Your hands shake. Sometimes your whole body shivers. You drop things, you trip over things. Periodically, your heart races with no apparent provocation.
If you told me for a fact I would never sleep more than three hours a night for the rest of my life, I would kill myself, and it would be a perfectly rational decision.
13 Sept., 2020
This could be a prime piece of quackery, but I want it to work. A radiator for your pillow. Your pillow always on the cold side.
1 Sept., 2020
It hurts to be this tired– you’d think that at such a point I’d sleep from total exhaustion, but nope. When I woke up at midnight, I woke up shaking. It took a couple of minutes to stop. Would Tylenol make me feel better? or migraine medicine? Sometimes caffeine helps. Sometimes food helps.
What about the day when nothing helps?
21 Aug., 2020
Sometimes I really wish street drugs made me feel good. They don’t, so I don’t take them; I have always been jealous of people who can get toasted on pot, and shut off their brains.
10 Aug, 2020
I cannot power down. I’m describing it like I am, because that’s my subjective experience, but I know there are a lot of people who would call it a lack of willpower. “Turn off the light, lie down, go to sleep.” But I can’t.
30 July, 2020
The motto my brain lives by is “Get behind me or get out of my way,” while I’m more of a “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor,” which my brain finds quaintly entertaining, like a puppet show.
24 July, 2020
I talk to myself a lot, and it almost always ends up in an argument, because my brain is a class-A jerk, who doesn’t feel the pain of being tired, and doesn’t care when it keeps me up all night.
The Little Hours 