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   It is one of the most difficult things for me to do. I find it to be such an agonizing task that seems to be so simple for others. I arrange my body, and readjust again. I peer deeply into the spattering of orange light for patterns and images. I look for anything that moves, anything that could begin the story, the montage of my memories. A sudden sound and I am interrupted. I have to start over again. How many times? How long will it take? I look again. I see movement, but nothing that makes enough sense to build on. There is nothing there yet. What is the secret? I have done it before almost without effort, but not very often, and I don’t know how make it happen. If I could only figure out the formula, a method, or maybe I am just trying too hard. I try to relax, breath deep, maybe if I reposition myself. I look again into the void. A random fire of light dances in front of me. Then I see something moving, something coming together. It’s a face. It seems to float by. Other things are coming into view now. I am not sure what they are, but it is what I was looking for. I am beginning to dream. Soon, at last, I will fall asleep.

    Every room is the same, connected in a long structure that I am sure goes on forever in each direction. There is a staircase at each end of the rooms leading up to a catwalk with a door on each end. There are another set of doors at the bottom of each staircase, four doors leading to the adjacent rooms, two on each end. A vampire and a cyclops are in pursuit of me. I know I am dreaming. The vampire is on the catwalk above me. I head for the next room to the east. As I open the door, I see the vampire go through the door on the second level. I turn back and head the other way to the opposite door. I enter the next room and turn to climb the stairs. The cyclops is descending from the second level after me. He is a big clumsy oaf with a blank expression and the mentality of a child. Why not? He can be anything I want. I created him, from some deep place in my mind. I know he can’t hurt me. I am safe in my bed. With a crooked smile on my face, I look him straight in the eye and tell him “Go tell the vampire I am getting away”. He stops dead in his tracks, and with a slight look of confusion, he replies “OK” and turns to follow the vampire. I make my escape to the room on the west. “What a silly dream” I think to myself as I rub my eyes and laugh. I probably won’t get back to sleep at this point. It’s almost time to get up anyway.

    I love my dreams. I get great inspiration from them for my artwork and my music. Sometimes I have even solved problems in my sleep. There are times when I would find the logic I needed for a subroutine in a program I was working on. I would wake up and head straight for my computer to write in the code. Most of the time, my dreams are nothing more than a jumble of my thoughts, so scrambled and illogical that they escape description, and yet, in the realm of sleep, they make perfect sense. Other times, like when I am sick, I have fever dreams that present me with unsolvable problems. “How many oranges will fit in a matchbox?” I stack them vertically, arrange them in squares, pyramids, nothing works, and yet I am sure they will fit. All night long is too long for such a problem that is only impossible after I wake up. I have dreamt in black and white, in line drawing, in color and 3D. I have had dreams that were upside down, dreams of objects that were tiny and huge both at once, and of objects spinning in two directions at the same time. I have dreamt that I could fly, that I was on a space ship and living on Mars. I have dreamt thinking I was awake and I have dreamt knowing I was asleep. Sometimes I dream with no picture or sound at all but just pure thought. Sometimes I begin to dream just before falling off into sleep. Other dreams are so vivid that they border reality. I remember a dream where I was at a sidewalk café in Paris, the Eiffel Tower visible in the background. Across from me sat the prettiest girl in my high school. Everyone had a crush on her including myself but she was at least a friend of mine. She was talking to me but I was too distracted by the fact I knew I was dreaming to pay attention to what she was saying. I decided to try an experiment to see just how real dreams could be. A glass sat on the table on a paper doily in front of me. I picked up the glass. It had weight; it was solid, smooth and cold. I tapped it on the table top. It was as real as any glass could be. I sat there amazed at just how real a dream can get. This was one of my first lucid dreams.

   Recently I have been able to conjure up full color 3D images while I am still awake. I believe this is my minds way of allowing me to delve into the other side of my thoughts, to break the glass of the mirror that divides reality from imagination, even when sleep eludes me. Dreaming allows a person to perceive an amount of time of being asleep. Without dreams, one would sleep in what would seem like a fleeting moment, and then wake up feeling fatigued. I, on the other hand, I wait for hours, sometimes all night knowing that each moment brings me closer to the time I have to get out of bed. It is torture for me. Why does sleep elude me?

   I am in a room with a dirt floor. There are doors all around the room. There are no windows and the room is dark. On the other end of the room a door is open. I can see my friend Anita in a kitchen standing at a stove. I look in my hand. I am holding a calculator that is displaying a countdown timer that is about to finish. I say “Goodbye Anita” as the counter reaches zero and everything fades to black. I wake up in need to go to the restroom. My bedroom on the second floor has a restroom within the bedroom and so I only have to walk around the foot of my bed to the restroom door. I open the door and am startled to see that the entire restroom is stuffed full from floor to ceiling with dirty clothes. I look back around the corner to my bed and see myself still asleep. I fade to black and wake up in my bed. “That was strange” I think to myself. I get up to go to the restroom again, or what seems like again anyway, and open the door. To my horror, I find that the clothing is still there. At this point I panic. I know I am still asleep and I can’t wake up. I run for the stairs that for some reason are not where they belong. Finally locating them, I run to the bottom of the staircase and open the door. I find myself in a dark room with a dirt floor with doors all around, no windows, the same room I started in. I fade to black and find myself back in bed. At this point, I am not sure if I am still dreaming or not. With fear and anticipation, I go to the restroom door and open it. The clothes are gone. I am awake.

   Insomnia is defined as the chronic inability to fall asleep or remain asleep for an adequate length of time. Some people seem to think that if I can’t sleep, I don’t need it. The fact is that most if the time I feel fatigue and am not running at full thinking capacity, which is really a drag for me because thinking is something I really love to do. The scary thing is the insomnia can actually cause many health issues. Studies have shown that it can dramatically shorten your life. It can kill you. It’s bad enough that I already have many physical problems working against me. The carpel tunnel syndrome in my hands keeps me awake with pain and discomfort. My colitis wakes me up with nausea. I have a heart condition and doctors have told me “No more coffee” and yet my job demands that as a security guard, I stay awake and work crazy hours. Then, there are sudden sounds of traffic, noisy neighbors, barking dogs, all working together to keep me from my badly needed rest. I am sure I won’t live long.

   I am walking along the inside fence line at an excavation site where a huge hole is being bored into the earth. It is night time. I see something move from behind a building. I move to my left a bit so I can see around the barrier. It is a cat. Not a real cat, but a 30 foot inflatable on top of a building in the distance. It is dancing and juggling a pillow or a bean bag, heck, for the size of the cat, it could be a mattress. I am walking down Broadway now. It is cold. There are still patches of snow on the sidewalk that have not melted from the last storm. I suddenly realize that I need to get back to the excavation site. I am ten blocks away from where I belong. I find the fence and climb over only to find an even taller fence that I can not cross. How can I get back inside? I wake up. I am in the curser at the excavation site. Holy cow, I fell asleep on the job. If anyone caught me like that I could get fired. I get out of the car and walk around. The cold air wakes me up.

   I used to take melatonin which is a natural substance produced by the brain when it gets dark and makes you go to sleep. You can get it in pill form. It worked for me for awhile, but eventually I grew immune to it. I have also taken a half of a Tylenol PM which would help me get to sleep, but not keep me asleep. If I take a normal dosage of sleeping medication, I end up feeling really tired in the morning and so it seems useless. Maybe some Nyquil will work for me. I have to do something. I don’t want to resort to such measures, but I am at my wits end. I am off tomorrow and I plan on getting some much needed rest. A friend of mine had some prescription sleeping pills that he gave me. He said that they are not that strong and he usually takes three, so I took four. They are starting to work and I am feeling relaxed. Finally, I am going to get some sleep.

   I close my eyes and drift off. I feel myself lifting from my bed. I can look down at myself, a really creepy feeling, but it looks like I am sleeping soundly. There are two men with white hair and white clothes. They ask me to come with them. I follow along with them, one on each side of me. I see many people approaching me. They look happy to see me. They are people I know. I know everyone there, even people I have never met. I see my parents and they are young. Everyone is young and in perfect health. There is a soothing bright light everywhere, colors I have never even imagined and amazing music. I feel joy like I have never felt before. I know I am not dreaming. I know I am not asleep. I will never have to sleep again. I have achieved rest.