I am slowly convincing myself that I’m going a little crazy. Most of the telltale signs I would attribute to winter and my rather evident sad problem. But there are two major things I can’t fit in anywhere but in the place I don’t want it to go.
The first one is that the whole world seems to have shifted about two degrees to the side, the right side. This can be taken in a few ways so I’ll explain what I mean. My perception has slipped a few degrees right towards ‘not well’. When people talk to me there are all coming from a different place than me. Even day to day stuff seems slightly skewed. The whole world at times seems to physically be twisted. I get dizzy a lot lately. My own reactions to the world have also altered. I am becoming more irrational and obsessive to the world and about the things I care about. But it all seems perfectly normal. I know that if this goes on I’ll lose this ability I still have to know that my axis is off. I can still see and feel the slant, I know I'm off kilter still. I still tilt my head at times to see if I can ground myself a wee bit. It only seems to work for a few seconds at time though, but it’s when I start believing that this lopsidedness is normal that we hit trouble.
Anyway the second symptom is my dreams. Dreams are a very sore subject with me. About two winters ago something similar happened to me and to cut a very long story short I spent the up until lat year bouncing around the local medical system talking to a load of people and picking up various different prescriptions. The last one we settled on was lamictal. They worked. They managed to successfully balance my moods and put me into that grey static zone until I could deal with the world. I didn’t like them, mainly because they were fucking with my brain chemistry in a way I couldn’t dictate. This lack of control on my own emotions and actions pissed me off. But indoubtley the worst, worst thing was my lack of dreams. I stopped dreaming. Now before anyone says ‘just because you don’t remember them doesn’t mean you don’t dream’ let me explain. When you wake up regardless if you remember what you dreamt or not there is always that little feeling in the back of your mind that tells you have, it tells you if it was good or bad or refreshing or if the wet patch has dried on the sheets it reminds you about the fun you had. You always know you had a nice dream even if you don’t remember anything about it. These pills took that away from me. Somewhere deep inside my brain something had been altered and I had lost my dreams. I woke up every morning blank. When I tried to think about it, to evoke this memory I always seemed to hit what felt like a very large wall. I got pissed off, I got upset and eventually I stopped taking the pills and felt better than I had in years. Yay for drugs!. Best of all, I slowly recovered a few of my dreams. Up until recently.
I still have them but they are fucking weird. And scary. The details are always vague but they almost always involve trees and walls. Not nice trees with swings and apples and stuff but nasty trees that grab and poke and eat children. Nasty trees that whisper. They whisper the deep horrible secrect things you don’t like to hear and you can’t stop them, on the edge of hearing you make out a few random words here and there but you know what they are saying and you know it’s about you and all true. The whispering is driving me crazy.
The walls are there to climb. They look climbable, they almost beg for you to have a go. They invite me with convenient and easy footrests and hand holes and then they knock me off. So you do. And then half way up invariably they knock me back down to the ground. Bruised, defeated they see me and they laugh, and I try again, and I fall ad nauseam.
Now you see I wouldn’t mind all of that shit if I didn’t know it was my own fucking brain playing games with me. As I have wrote elsewhere I’m rather pissed off with this whole thing. And sleep depravation because you’re afraid of your dreams will not put anyone in a chipper mood.
I am just glad that I have no reservations at all in fueling my strong and healthy case of alcoholism and can pass out drunk once in while without having to deal with walls that laugh and tress the whisper. Because seriously I'm am not going to let my sleep turn into a bad Stephen King novel.