Day Dreaming
Uploaded by mrscutiepie on Nov 28, 2007
Whenever I can't sleep and that is often, I lie on my back, staring up at a ceiling blank and white as a sheet of paper. At these times, I try to imagine the ink-dark sky above my house, with its spattering of stars, inconceivably distant. Everything is all right up there always, I think not as if it is down here, where vague anxieties seem to infect my every circumstance. However, thinking about the sky doesn't help. Moreover, the pillow beneath my head, the mattress beneath my body, never feel quite comfortable as I toss and turn. They irritate me, in fact, as if loose grains of sand littered the sheets. Repeatedly my mind replays scenes from my autobiographical movie: the old humiliations, the awkward encounters, the opportunities fumbled. In addition, my childish or adolescent memories rise up to tyrannize me all over again. With quickness, I wake up, well actually, I am already awake, but my mind continues to daydream, daydream about everything.
I have tried to medicate myself. I favor herbal concoctions green tea or, better, vicodian and they work for a night or two, and then stop. A week later, I will try them again, and they'll work for a night or two then stop. I don't know what my problem is, unless it's that I don't really want to sleep. Perhaps I'm afraid of those blank, unconscious hours afraid I'll miss something or annoyed by the silly, confounded dreams that drain away so quickly from my waking memory. (Trying to hold on to them is like trying to hold water in my hand.) Probably my mind is the problem.
As I lie in bed, my head is a hall of mirrors, reflecting an unceasing parade of daily predicaments they flash through my memory like over-exposed snapshots. Moreover, I think, "I should have done this; I should have done that." I tell myself to stop thinking so much. Then I become much too aware of the night sounds around me. Down the street, a dog is upset. A cat yowls in the alley like an angry baby. An ambulance howls urgently, as if in great pain, on its way to the hospital. In addition, somewhere, miles away, a train is rumbling its lugubrious way down the moon-silver rails. Click, clack, click clack. Then came that long, deep horn blast: Get out of my way! The noise scared...