Alright, so I'm reluctant to sleep. Aside from my persistent fear of darkness, which I'm sure you all know about by now, I've been having dreams like The Matrix on crack. They're insane. Things morph into other things, people die and come alive and then die again, corpses reanimate as cats ... I even had this dream where I had an argument with the 911 operator over whether the dead woman in my living room was dead or not.
"How do you know she's dead?"
"Her entire blood volume is splashed all over the walls!"
"Did you check for a pulse?"
"I don't need to! She's dead! It's obvious!"
(It sounds amusing now, but trust me -- it wasn't at the time. Especially not when I leaned over the corpse and discovered that the person in my living room wasn't just any old person that just happened to have been murdered in my living room like, la di da, no big deal, but was in fact my mother. And what did they do with her? Well, they wrapped her up in a bunch of winding sheets and put her to bed, and the next thing I know she's a tabby cat, and very much alive. Talk about freaky.)
I do not want to dream. I simply want to sleep.
And then there's this cough. I've had it on and off for weeks now, this barking seal cough that sounds suspiciously like someone's trying to crush my trachea. Now it has moved further down into my chest, and I have a sneaking suspicion it has become bronchitis. I already have an inhaler, one I rarely use but keep filled anyway just in case I should happen to need it, and in the past 24 hours that thing has seen more action than it usually sees in 6 months. (Yes, I checked the date. No, it's not expired.)
I tried tea, and that barely touched it, so then I went down to the state store, bought some Johnnie Walker, and made a hot toddy. The toddy helped some, but the cough isn't gone -- and now there's all kinds of gross stuff coming up with it, too. I've really been trying to steer away from over-the-counter medications as much as I can and make my own remedies from what I have in the kitchen, but I'm wary of another toddy: alcohol tends to have adverse and cruelly delayed reactions on my digestive system. It's looking like the only way I'm going to get a reprieve is to stuff myself full of Mucinex, for which I have to wait till morning. Joy.
And then there's the air in here. It's so dry, I wake up every morning feeling like a wanderer in the Mojave: my mouth is dry, my eyes are dry, my nose is so dry it hurts to breathe, and there's lovely crud in my eyes that feels like sand. Waking up in here is decidedly unpleasant; ergo, going to sleep is only a little bit better. Sleeping generally leads to waking -- for which, at 28, I really am grateful. I'd just like not to wake up so ... reptilian.
So now that I've whined about all the reasons I can't sleep, I'm tired enough to try. Go figure.
