I hate sleep. I’ve always hated the sleep. I remember when I was very young, I’d stuff a towel in the crack under the door when I was supposed to be in bed. Then, I would read until midnight or later, rinse, lather, and repeat. There were several reasons for this and it set me up for a lifetime of not being able to sleep before midnight. There are other reasons including a mischievous thyroid, but it set me up for a lifetime struggle with Lord Morpheus. In fact, it’s such a big part of me, I really identified hard with The Sandman, a graphic novel series by Neil Gaiman. A friend hooked me up with the compendiums and I devoured them with an eagerness that was almost frightening. I was immediately antagonized by Dream (Morpheus) and wanted to punch his moody lights out. Desire both intrigued me and repulsed me as desire was so oft wont to do. Death was amazing, of course, and Delirium broke my heart. Despair was grotesque and scary, whereas Destruction was hot as fuck. I was so enamored by them, I wrote a novel with them as main characters.
When I was in college, I slept maybe four hours a night. By this point, my thyroid was destroyed so I was hypo instead of hyper. I was also deep in an eating disorder my first year in college, which did not help my metabolism at all. When I went home from college for breaks, I would crash for fifteen hours the first night and get sick. Every time. There was one day that stands out in sharp relief. I had a portable alarm clock that I kept on my desk by my bed. One day, I got up and couldn’t find it anywhere. I looked all around the room several times and it was nowhere to be seen. After ten minutes, I shrugged and gave up, still befuddled. I opened the mini-fridge to grab a Diet Pepsi and there was my alarm clock. I had no recollection of putting it in there. After that, I put it on the sink across the room so I wouldn’t do that again.
In my late twenties, I had nightmares upon nightmares every night. Four or five was not unheard of and they were incredibly graphic. There was a stretch of time where my friends were dying in my dreams on the regular. It became a joke that if you hadn’t died in one of my dreams, then you weren’t really my friend. It was funny in retrospect, but at the time, it was exhausting. I also had a nightmare in which I actually died. I was lying in bed (in my dream) when a Snuffleupagus-like creature comes up to me. Hey, I know that doesn’t sound bad in the light of day, but in my dream, it was terrifying. It crept up to me as I was rooted to the spot and then it started stealing my breath. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything but lie there. It kept stealing my breath until I couldn’t breathe any longer–and then I died.
So, yeah, the adage that you can’t die in a dream isn’t true. It wasn’t fun at all. It wasn’t painful, but it wasn’t fun, either.