As if this week wasn't fun enough already, I had the joy of living a Beatles Song title. For the better part of two weeks I've had trouble getting to frolic among raspberry daffodils, surfing the marshmallow river or having video tea with the orange orangutan. What I have been able to enjoy however is looking at the contours of the ceiling of my room, admiring the sequence of the small green, red, yellow, orange and blue lights of all the appliances in my room and breathing out of instinct rather than appreciating every ml of oxygen I’m so fortunate to breathe.
Fight Club had the best line of thought for this.
“This is your life and it’s ending one minute at a time.”
Gain a minute here, lose a minute there. It’s all dwindling away and all for the TV advert I’m sick of watching, the print ad that haunts me before reaching the sports page or the self mailer that clutters my mailbox. The past two weeks, my average sleep time has been 3 AM and that’s only because some days I was able to manage shutting down at 1 AM. I haven’t had this much insomniac fun since second year in college where I got to sleep at 2 AM and got up at 6 AM, for a full year.
Funny thing is that I know I’m not the only one. This isn’t an isolated case and thousands upon thousands of people lay there waiting for sleep to come their way. They take Lunesta, Xanax, Zoloft, Vodka, Whiskey, Marijuana, Quaaludes even. We can’t sleep even though our life does pretty much depend on it and in part is because we dream of work. Not even in the lands of Morpheus may we escape the dull glint of our professional purgatory. Oneiros misses us and we take for granted the joy of swimming the illogical amniotic fluid of our subconscious. We read, play video games, triple check our facebook just to make sure we haven’t missed an email. Gmail, hotmail, yahoomail, hi five, myspace, facebook, amazon, surfline, ebay, wavewatch, bebo, snap, linkedin, pandora and maybe a blog here and there. Anything that will get us to the mindstate we long to reach to be able to sleep and dream rather than work and work.
The five legged puppy with the walkman misses shaking hands with you. Sex dreams get tivoed in your brain drive waiting for when you have a chance and are in the mood to fuck in the ether. Memories of your passed loved ones combined with new information remain unspliced on the table of your brain. You flip open the cellphone and start looking at the numbers of all the people you have lost touch with. You read the fine print of your dreams and realize that there is an expiration date and what you didn’t dream that day, you won’t dream.
Licorice gryphons and ruby studded magpies plead to be let out to play in your brain, but your work has become an efficient dream hunter, killing even the strongest of dreams. You look at the ceiling and find nothing particularly fascinating about it and your Zen music coming off your iPod merely serve to give a panflute soundtrack to your dumbed out state. You want to sleep but can’t.
Mere fractures of a dream come to mind and you reminisce fondly of that time you raced up the chocolate stairwell to kiss a star. In their stead you see job orders, bitching executives, whiny drama creatives, a diluted and deluded creative director, a moaning traffic job pusher and the low energy hue of your art director. You see yourself falling away from yourself and landing on a billboard. All goes dark, creaks and cracking noises juxtapose with sucking and crunching sounds as a light fades a bit brighter and you see the shadow of yourself in the jaws of a hairy eight legged beast that fumbles about clumsily. It has one eye closed, one eye open and the other nine are crossed or going around in circles. Two hands hold you firmly but the other twelve talons hammer on ironic t-shirt wearing people, choke each other poking themselves in their hairy palms and do the unsayable to what looks like an enormous phallus of apathy that rains down its seed of lethargy upon the herded cattle that are your coworkers.
“It’s the ad monster.” You say to yourself. It dances clumsily and speaks contradicting sentences from each of its five mouths. You look in disgust and you stare into your own eyes as your life slips into the belly of the beast. “Wake up.” You see yourself mouthing from the jaws of the monster. “But I’m awake.” You call back. You see tears of frustration on yourself but then amid the tears and gasps as the beast feeds on you, enlightenment comes to your eyes as you mouth: “then sleep.” And you close your eyes and try to take your own advice, but the clock flashes its hateful 12:00 AM smile though you know it’s way past 4 AM.
It shouldn’t be this hard to dream.
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