can't sheep

I can't sleep because, as the mind does, I'm replaying the moment when Rudy seriously asked me if I dream. Odd that he comes back to me years later with the question that would keep me from dreaming, but he had asked me out of sincere disbelief when I told him that dreams came to me as often as toe-nail clippings, and even then they were so lucid and overt that interpreting them wasn't illuminating. One that stuck out was an adventure I took on a sailboat, an adventure in a swamp, in which I took my vessel out of the water, floated above the treetops, landed on the I-10, navigated through traffic, and woke up. Isn't it obvious? Not dreaming is keeping me up because it supports the scary thought that I'm vapid. Pillow is wet.

And in true Lynchian fashion the secondary characters of my play, the acquaintances and passing fancies, surface in my dreams in a way I feel is self-condescending because the faces only denote how repressive I am, forcing me to grapple a persona, no matter how incidental, and the fear or attraction they induce. In dreaming I cannot hide from the feeling, slapping myself asleep and showing a photograph--"admit you're obsessed." The purest, dreamy part of me may only come through in unrestrained doses of REM, the release of what lies asleep during the waking cruel day. I've been deliberately sleeping longer, finding coolness for my arms beneath the pillow , waking, and staring into the wall to talk myself into the day's commitment. My search for personal sincerity is constant and tiring. I'm tired, so tired, ready to nap and find my honesty residing in the blackness behind the lids, the riots of shapes and colors before, in a sense, dying-- drifting below the surface, my dream waiting for me.