I'm regularly waking up about 2 hours after going to sleep, and then lying in bed in various states of consciousness or sleep for hours and hours. Sometimes just lying there, sometimes I'll play a CD on sleep timer, and if I'm still awake when the timer shuts the damn thing off, I'll get up and re-set it and listen to the rest of the CD.
The insomnia bouts can last up to 8 hours, as it did last night, getting out of bed at 1 p.m. after initially waking up at 5:18 a.m., after going to sleep just before 3 a.m. I want to call the experience during the insomnia bouts interesting, but I really don't want to encourage them. Insomnia's still bad, m'kay?
There are dreams and since whatever sleep they occur in is so light, I remember them when I wake up, but they're totally meaningless and nonsensical. Even though I've put my micro-cassette recorder next to my pillow, the dreams are too incoherent for me to push record and recite any reflection or memory of the dreams.
Something about me being a back-up to a black cop and us going into a room after a suspect who is a big, black psychopath who becomes like a bull whenever he sees me and comes charging at me while the cop tries to fend him off. I'm scrambling to keep the cop between me and the goon and to get the hell out of the room. The cop gives me a weapon for protection – a grenade. Thanks a lot. Useless. I get out of the room just as I'm hearing shots fired and I don't stay to figure out what happened. The rest of that dream is trying to find my way out of the building, which is the Golden Gate University building in San Francisco, even though in the dream it looks nothing like it really does.
Something about a food gathering, which may have involved people from my first Mandarin language class in Taiwan. I've forgotten details that I remembered when I woke up, should've turned on the recorder. I do remember a huge Man vs. Food challenge type burger that was on the back of a . . . a flat-bed truck. Random.
But then I've also encountered something between waking and sleep, sort of a watery, metallic, plasma-like in-between. I've tried to see if it was lucid dreaming, but I don't think it was. I wasn't consciously navigating through a dream state, I was more conscious without knowing that I was in a dream-like state. Sometimes it would happen naturally and I would think I was lying there awake, but then I'd come to full consciousness and I'd be pretty sure that hadn't been quite awake. In fact, I knew I had been dreaming.
Sometimes I can induce it by sort of "falling asleep" during lying meditation, which is lying strictly in a specific pose – flat on back, arms at sides, hands facing down, head facing straight up, legs also straight out – and then going through the same mental processes as in sitting meditation.
This is very hard to do and not fall asleep, so I mostly do it in order to fall asleep. You know, I have insomnia so I might as well make the most of it and get some lying meditation in, but in doing so I manage to put myself to sleep. I love tricking my stupid brain.
There is one significant "dream" during one of these semi-conscious episodes. I was in the water. Then I realized I was in the water just off a shoreline, so I was in the ocean. The perspective was that of a camera just on the surface, sometimes above, sometimes going under – a little more under than above.
Then I realized this was my long-time-coming attempt #2, and if I was in the water, then I had already taken the sleeping pills and downed the bottle of alcohol, and I should've been clinging to an inflatable ring. Yup, it's here, and it all seemed very right, and I remembered the alcohol effect would be immediate, but I had about 20 minutes before the sleeping pills had any effect. And I thought, "To not leave a body, swim out as far as possible", over and over.
When I came out of it, for a few moments it didn't feel like I had been dreaming. It felt like I really had been there in the water and there was a huge disconnect between finding myself there in the water and everything else that came before it.
There was a threshold that I haven't been able to cross. I've traveled to shorelines, I've gotten to shorelines, I've been in the water, I've inflated the ring and held the pills, but I couldn't get past the threshold where I would've been in the position in that state.
And that threshold is the hardest thing, because everything before it is my life, all the things to which I'm accustomed and attached. To. And the reason I've never been successful is that attachment, and succeeding would mean letting go of myself.
If I could just transport myself across that threshold into the water, everything would be great and fine. But the whole point is that I cross that threshold on my own accord, according to a realization of my own understanding. And the whole point is that my mind achieve that will and destiny to do what's necessary to cross that threshold.
Hmph, there's a reason this has been one of my favorite songs ever since I heard it decades ago:
I'm woven in a fantasy, I can't believe the things I see
The path that I have chosen now has led me to a wall
And with each passing day, I feel a little more like something dear was lost
It rises now before me, a dark and silent barrier
Between all I am, and all that I would ever want to be
It's just a travesty
Towering, marking off the boundaries my spirit would erase
To pass beyond is what I seek, I fear that I may be too weak
And those are few who've seen it through to glimpse the other side
The promised land is waiting, like a maiden that is soon to be a bride
The moment is a masterpiece, the weight of indecision's in the air
Standing there, the symbol and the sum of all that's me
It's just a travesty
Towering, blocking out the light and blinding me
I want to see
Gold and diamonds cast a spell, it's not for me I know it well
The riches that I seek are waiting on the other side
There's more than I can measure in the treasures of the love that I can find
And though it's always been with me, I must tear down the wall and let it be
All I am, and all that I was ever meant to be in harmony
Shining true, and smiling back at all who wait to cross
There is no loss
- The Wall (Livgren/Walsh)
I fear that I may be too weak. But what then? And the answer to that gives me encouragement.
