So it has reached that time of night when I have had a day filled with events and random come downs where my body has taken what rest it could while a fevered mind ponders the multitude of contrasting elements that is must engage with when I realise that sleep isn’t so much taken from me but confined to a wilderness that my resting soul cannot share…
In other words, it is 01:42, sleep hasn’t arrived as I have been engaged with a computer all evening and now I wish I had closed my eyes two hours ago…
On the other hand, I am lying in bed next to my young and beautiful wife, there is some classic British comedy in the background, I am catching up with writing, picture editing, and some promotion/conversation in online life and so it isn’t like I am lying here staring at the ceiling…
But I still wished I had closed my eyes…
You see these days I don’t drink caffeine, well not much, just on the special occasions when I want a really good coffee, or when I really need to perk my brain into semi-semblance of activity and it is refusing. I had to give it up, I was getting old, it was affecting my mood and my sanity, and mostly it was preventing me from sleep.
There are some people who claim that caffeine doesn’t affect them that way, biologically that is wrong, though biology can adapt as can perception and environmental adaptation (mostly biology again but this time intentional), but it is still wrong, but right with the correct mitigating factors.
For me, that has never been true. caffeine has always had the correct knock-on affect.
So I gave up drinking it and switched to decaf (please stop shuddering and claiming that you would prefer it if an elderly syphilitic goat had just urinated in your cup), and that gets me through the day. Insatnt decaf, good blends and good beans only, are an acceptable alternative to caf., eventhough they are a travesty and a rape of all things nice and bean like. Though I always did like strong blends, rich roasts, and they always contained less caffeine anyway (the richer the roast the more caf. is burned away).
I still wished I had closed my eyes…
Because then I would be dreaming (in song lyrics I would be “made winding through her hair”, or wanting you “in my arms” or even making her “the cutest that I’ve ever seen”, wait she already is that…) and I like to dream “perchance to sleep”, I have always thought of it as “what is man, what is he not, man is but the shadow of a dream” (Pinder [apologies as it should be ‘person’ not ‘man’ but it is a quote]).
I have always been a lucid dreamer, and I have noticed patterns to how my dreams form and when I can remember or engage with them, and one of those patterns is not being up this late as then the over-tiredness will kill either the conceptual space in which I am lucid or the recollection of any lucidity.
So I wished I had closed my eyes…
Thanks for reading.
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* Apologies to the Cure. Also it should be a Wednesday morning, but the song has night in the title not morning so I took liberties, “drip, drip drip…”