My lifetime love affair with sleep

I suspect I have spent more of my lifetime sleeping than most people. I am not sure why I require so much sleep, at least when I want to keep feeling sane. Lately, I have been alternating between sleeping too little, to sleeping too much. I guess I shouldn’t say “lately” because now that I think about it, I have always done that.

Years ago, during summer school breaks, living at home with no real responsibilities, I would stay up until 4 am every night and then sleep at least until 4 pm every day. I am one of the only people I know that has ever slept 16 hours straight and woke up tired.

Now, I love to sleep in the “womb” at least that’s what lilmtty and I call it. The womb is our bedroom, and at the proper time of day in the summer, it can almost put me to sleep just by thinking about it. We have a large bed with cushy mattresses, crisp red 300 thread count sheets, a billowy white down comforter and four luscious pillows. In the afternoons when the sun is already on the other side of the house, the bedroom gets a fake “evening twilight” effect going on in it. Before taking a nap I love to draw the shades, air conditioner humming, turn on the fan to drown out the loud rental-house-next-door neighbor kids (which are never in short supply), and climb into bed. The safe secluded feeling in that room is like a drug and if I need a nap I can’t function. If I don’t sleep long enough, I wake up feeling like I took ten Valium. Sometimes I sleep and wake up feeling like my slumber was busier than the waking hours. I think it’s because I get so involved in my dreams.

I have been having some of the best synthetic chemical induced dreams of my sleeping life lately. (One of the better side effects of stuffing a steady stream of physician prescribed happy pills down your throat on a daily basis.) The dreams tend to boarder on bad B movies from time to time, and horror movies other times. Some of the dreams are so realistic, I wake up thinking some of the things actually took place. Often I think of something during the day, I then remember it didn’t really happen and only dreamed it. Once in awhile I wake up truly mad at lilmtty for something bad to me in some of the dreams.

Recently I had a dream that was almost traumatizing, and stayed with me for many days to follow. I dreamt lilmtty and me were sitting next to each other on an airplane flight. Suddenly the plane went eerily quiet because the engines failed in mid-air. Instantaneously a complete paralyzing fear came over me, followed by an absolutely tranquil calm fueled by the knowledge that there was nothing in the world I could do about the fact we were going down. A complete and utter loss of control and the only emotion that emerged from it was love. I leaned over and softly whispered in lilmtty’s ear that I loved her with all my heart. Then I woke up very abruptly.
Knowing full well what it feels like to think you are about to die and also to be totally loved.