[Suzerain of Sheol]

I almost never respond to these threads, but I can share my messed up sleep issues here, I suppose.

So, I can't sleep at all without sleeping pills, and even then, I have to stay awake until I'm on the verge of passing out from exhaustion, after which I collapse into a coma-like sleep for 10-12 hours, waking up feeling like no time has even passed. Suffice it to say, if I dream, I have no experience of it in my memory, but it usually feels like I might as well have been dead I'm so deeply asleep.

In the 20-30 minutes where I'm losing consciousness, though, that's when it gets bad. What happens first, while I still retain my rational faculties, is the involuntary conjuring of just dozens upon dozens of ways my life could be horribly altered, how I could die, how my parents could die, just horrifically traumatic exercises of the imagination that I can't control.

But at some point, the grip of my conscious mind will subside as sleep begins to claim me, except that same hyperactive thought process is still running, and my brain just starts spitting out insane streams of thought, ideas and sentences that make no coherent sense, random images and disconnected false memories, like the lights are on in my brain but no one's home, and frankly it's a really awful feeling. It's like I can feel sanity slipping away and there's nothing I can do until I'm just dead asleep, and then I wake up and I'm fine.

I don't believe there's any meaning in dreams, I think we're all a species of helpless, pathetic animals with a desperate drive for self-importance with brains that force patterns onto anything they can, but god damn it I'd take narcissistic fantasies over this evocation of hell in my mind any day.