Some days you just wake up evil. At least, I do. And by evil, I mean angry. But it doesn’t start that way.
The REM cycle doesn’t seem to agree with me. Put differently, trying to catch up on chronic sleep debt in one night never makes me feel good. Either way, I got eight hours of sleep last night and I think I would’ve been acutely better off with six instead. That’s the most annoying thing about bad habits—how you grow into the shape they surround you with. You try to fit into something healthier and nothing sits in the right place, at least at first. I’m a fluid expanding to the edges of my bad behavior; I’m a noxious gas in a bad habit room.
Somewhere around hour seven of an eight-hour night, in the throes of REM, I always dream surreal, bothersome things not worth mentioning. Dreams are the kind of thing that are usually only interesting to their subject, after all. That said, without specifics, broad themes include violence, shame, misbehavior, strange symbolic dialogue from unlikely sources—a hall of mirrors in a Tarantino film, type stuff. They’re shades in the night, passing phantoms, evaporations of tiny daily fears unworthy of worry or deep contemplation, despite what some therapists might say—and what some have said in the past. And when I wake up, the images cling and the negative emotion manifests as nausea, or sadness, that then sublimates into the more socially acceptable and masculine emotion of anger. Which makes me evil for half a day before I shake it off somewhere around coffee three.
To the outside observer, this appears as me being a jerk until noon at worst, and quiet and resigned all day at best. I didn’t even want to do this performative journal today—am pushing myself to do it even now. But good habits, like bad habits, are also shapes that grow around you. I’m trying to keep to this shape, even if I have to contort and reshape myself to do it.
Last night before sleep was peaceful. And yet, I woke up this morning out of a dream that [redacted] and I were [redacted redacted redacted redacted] before he [redacted redacted redacted redacted], and that I was being admonished about it by [redacted], and was then [redacted redacted] by a [redacted] in such a way that the dream seemed to be enacting karmic justice. All ridiculous images and concepts when viewed with a waking eye.
But dreams are less seen than embodied, less dreamt than lived.
And the rest of it—the reaction, the nausea, the sadness– that’s all chemical and hormonal. The nervous system is fast, moves at an electric pace. Chemicals and hormones are slow—think trees speaking to one another on the savannah, rather than a hand burning on a stove. Chemicals drift on the wind. Electrons move on neuronic superhighways. So waking up out of horrendous dreams to your feelings all out of wack is just slow to come back from.
You write your journal, you put in your eight-hour day. Try to exercise, fake a smile now and then. And tonight, you stay up a bit later so an eight-hour night shortens to six. There are more important things happening than the ones happening inside your head, no matter what your body tries to convince you. Look outward, for once. You’ll feel better.
matt nilsen 