I'm in the middle of a strange phase in life. Strange because this has never happened before, and this was beyond the scope of my imagination. Phase because this has lasted a couple of months now. I'm at this point where I think I'm scared of sleep, and everything about it. I'm scared of falling asleep because of a series of thematically similar, disturbing nightmares that haunted my everydays for a few weeks straight, and exorcised memories of a good sleep out of my mind. They wore me out, they wore me down, and they were controlloing my subconscious to hold on tightly and close to things that I was working extremely hard to let go of. I realised that this was happening when I started delaying my sleep. Every night I'd go to bed with my laptop and binge-watch really well made mediocre (and occasionally funny or entertaining) BuzzFeed videos. I'd keep watching, lying in bed, until my body couldn't physically keep up and I'd get fatigued into dosing off. Resultantly I'd wake up tired and worn out, but oddly satisfied that I had evaded some strange horror. As I came to terms with this realisation, I realised that the problem was far deeper, and slightly scarier than I thought. I realised that once the dreams stopped (it's been a few weeks), I had no reason to keep delaying my sleep, and after a point I stopped going to bed with my laptop, but I'd listen to music and fall asleep to that, thinking quite positively that that was healthier. I think it was, until I realised that I had become addicted to this false sense of company that music or cheap gimcrack entertainment gave me. I realised that it was the process of falling asleep that was truly terrifying me, that I couldn't be alone, without any noise or disturbance, at that point of my day when the only thing that keeps me company is my mind. In that space, in that frontier at the edge of my brain that my mind reigns over freely and completely, I was too scared of letting it go into overdrive, I'm too scared of letting it be. Sleep isn't a function of my fatigue right now, but a function of my willingness to keep it away, to keep it at bay. The process of writing this too is only feeding into this hurricane, stoking its fire just enough to keep it alive, to keep me sane, and to make me believe that I'll be able to fall asleep tonight.
