🧠[01.02.24]-SLEEP&DREAMS-Thinking Thursday! Musings w/ Chasey Delaney 🧠

A little self-talk type up, a new poem, and a couple of bits of 'Stuff That Makes Us Think' in my Series: LET ME THINK ABOUT IT!??

Feb 03, 2024

I can’t win whatever the fuck I do…

I’m either doing it wrong or should not be doing it at all. Waking up at 6.00 am with stomach cramps and half of a horrible dream still vaporising inside my head, going to the toilet seems to be the most effortless yet the hardest thing that I have to do for myself this morning. I hope it ends there. I hope that by staying awake and not going back to bed to sleep again, even though my eyes are still stinging, even though - maybe in spite of - that dream still calling, I’m tired yes but I also know, that I wont get another 75 minutes of rest out of it before our puppy will want back out again, or to lick my face incessantly, or she’ll be nudging her rubber snake in my face, or i’ll hear her gnawing on some unnamed something at the end of the bed and at some point will have no choice but to pull myself back up and put everything into gear which will be stiff and sluggish as my body won’t know that I’ve had to cancel the sleep cycle. Yeah, ever since I heard that if you allow yourself to doze back off to sleep after a night’s rest, even just nodding off for 3 minutes while the snooze is hit, then your body begins a brand new sleep cycle and you go back in deeper, harder, meaning more peacefully and its so nice - until you’re rudely awakened again; by the alarm clock, or an annoying husband who wants you out of bed and doing stuff so he can roll over and fart his way back into his fourth sleep cycle, or in my other case, you may have to get up and be a responsible parent to a bubbly baby / puppy dog who knows no different, only that they’ve been a good girl for what feels to them like an entire week. They enjoy their one sleep cycle. They open their little tiny eyes and can’t wait to play. If I had allowed myself even 5 minutes extra sleep my body would have began another sleep cycle and even fighting it and staying awake… would have made life harder for me to tackle. My body clock would still be on snooze for at least seventy-five minutes meaning walking around with a fuzzy head, marshmallow strides back and forth from the kitchen to the office and anywhere else around the house. Just carrying the dog’s water bowl now feels like my elbows are beginning to melt from the burning tendons in my arms. My eyes are not seeing they are seeking out shapes from shadows and light, my mind would be dreaming of dreaming asleep on the pillow.

My heart would be wishing on the stars still fading…

in the crack of dawn morning sky for a bit of peace and respite and in the midst of every other task that I have to do or try to do, I am struggling to focus, to enjoy this to get anything done under the pressure of managing my blinking status and the longer I can keep my eyes open the less that I can see, the more I need to ignore the feeling of closing them properly. My body in sleep mode is the worst annoying distraction and demanding motherfucker that I have ever met and know. I try to keep my eyes from sticking shut so in the back of my mind.. I’m already, angry, withdrawn, pissed off, upset, pessimistic about the day, wishing it over at 6.30a.m. the only planning ahead I want to do - is playing reruns over and over inside my head of me taking myself and my sleep back off to bed and making peace with both of those bitches in one fail swoop. I get out of bed and decide to cut my losses; I’ll just stay awake.

I hear him roll over in the bed and fart…

and just as I’m guiding the surprisingly still-sleepy puppy back into bed after her little trip to the garden - not a snake in sight - seems she likes to crawl back into my hot spot in bed and promptly go back to a blissful sleep; he mumbles “why are you up already, you’re not getting enough sleep”. Great.! If I had gone back to bed I would have been one of the laziest bastards in the world. According to him, I should have gone to bed earlier the night before and wasn’t I even aware that I have responsibilities to be getting up for? Like I said at the start, I just can’t do right from wrong. Today feels right for me though. I didn’t allow that sleep cycle to kick in and being awake now doesn’t feel like such a hassle. I like typing on glitter lamp light when the morning is still dark outside, when it would be cold only I’m wrapped up and hardly feel the cold in the mornings. Once I am out of bed and acclimated to the temperature, I retain the heat from previous sleep. I made a conscious effort not to check my phone yet. I have an empty head this morning and don’t want to start filling it up with content.

I haven’t a single idea of what to write…

for our THINKING THURSDAY newsletter yet (you might end up just getting this shit that has had me thinking all morning, I guess it counts). I thought about writing some morning pages at midnight last night but I read a comment somewhere that morning pages ended up being counterproductive for someone who was writing a novel and it got me thinking in agreement. I have no big project but still I don’t want to ‘waste’ what little brain power I have, writing in a notebook when I could be typing something directly to my audience. I love notebooks and the idea of writing more than just tracklists and quotes in those that I have already. Going through some old little books that I’d scribbled in constantly had me back in the mood for writing a contemporary journal…. Then I realised that time could be spent typing my thoughts instead of writing them by hand and NOT being able to decipher them again for later use. I couldn’t think of much to think about afterwards.