Day 22, Coffee #5…
… or is it 6? 7? 8? I don’t fucking know anymore. You’d think I owned stocks in every coffee grower in the damn world with how much I’ve sucked down. It’s the only think that keeps me from closing my eyes for too long. At least, for now it does. Eventually, it will wear off too. Or stop my heart. Whichever comes first. To whoever’s reading this, you’re probably wondering what the bloody hell I’m rambling on about and why it sounds as if I’ve been up for days on end.
Well, I have been up for days, despite my family telling me I need to stop being so damn paranoid and get some sleep or go see a specialist. Ha! Specialist. I’ve seen plenty over the last month (I think), and none of them can give me the solution I’m looking for. At least, not one that isn’t so permanent, if you catch my meaning. All I’ve managed to catch were those micro naps and even those scare the hell out of me so much that I end up jolting myself awake after ten minutes or so.
Ugh! Eyes getting heavy again. Where’s my coffee? That’s better. Gonna need to make some more soon. Oh? Still here, are ya? Guess I should tell you how I ended up in this beyond-hot-mess.
A month or so back, I’d started exercising again because I wasn’t getting any younger and I wasn’t exactly happy with how I looked around the midsection. I found some simple things I could do along with small diet changes, blah, blah, blah… you get the idea. I also opted to throw in a simple yoga pose to get warmed up. You know. The one that looks like you’re meditating. I’d do that first then move into the stomach crunches. Anyway, it was all pretty mundane at first as I’d finish the routine in about 15-20 minutes then go about the rest of my day doing… whatever.
As I continued and the “meditations” got longer, I started to notice something: an odd tingling sensation where the “third eye” is supposed to be if you’re into chakras or whatever. I never thought much of it as I was never good at visualizing and just figured it was my body’s way of compensating for the temporary lack of eyesight. Hot damn, was I wrong!
(Coffee brewing break, much to my husband’s annoyance at it being 3 AM, but he’s part insomniac anyway.)
Holy hell, this stuff’s bliss! I’ll have to buy more for the next month. Now, where was I? Oh yeah. The “third eye.” Like I said, I ignored it as long as I could until the tingling became an annoying pulsing. Rubbing the spot only briefly alleviated it as it always came back with a vengeance until I opened my eyes to start the next part of my routine. It seemed to disappear until I would start the cycle over again but would die away when my eyes were open. One night, however, it started while I was attempting to fall asleep, and that was when I caught my first glimpse of it.
I say ‘it’ because I can never tell if it’s male or female but it’s humanoid in form and seems to wear something resembling armor from a game like Star Wars or World of Warcraft. Weird, I know, but I’m just putting down what I saw. It couldn’t have been no more than a few yards away from me, just standing there in some landscape that would’ve been a wet dream for H.P. Lovecraft or Clive Barker. Before I could process the thing further, I snapped awake, the clock reading 5 AM. I grumbled and rolled over to go back to sleep but every time I closed my eyes, I saw the thing. As you can probably already guess, I didn’t sleep much more before my alarm went off at 7. That was the first day/night, and obviously, things haven’t gotten any better.
Fast forward maybe a week or ten days. I’d given up on the “meditation” part of my exercise routine as the visions or whatever you wanna call them started to really freak me out as the thing would slowly get closer every day. It brought relief for a little while as I started taking melatonin or, when that didn’t work, that ZzzQuil stuff usually did the trick. Of course, these started to wear off as I developed a tolerance for them, and the doctor I had at the time told me too much of either substance could be dangerous. I told her repeatedly what I’d been seeing but she just brushed it off as me being overly stressed. Overly stressed? Seriously? Not even close before this nonsense started. She did tell that if I was that concerned about it, I should go see a sleep/dream specialist. Well, like I started before (I think?), I saw at least a dozen of them and no one could help me without doing some serious slicing into my brain. I doubt that would work anyway.
(Chug the mug and get a refill.)
Well, against all the advice of the medical professionals, I kept up with the sleep aids ad best I could without any accidental overdosing, although I came close a few times. It was when my husband told me to quit that I finally did but I also had to amp up the coffee intake. I was sleeping maybe five hours a night if I could fall into a dreamless black hole but that was a pretty big if. Most of the time, the thing, apparition, whatever, was in my dreams, just staring at me, except for last night, it actually moved. Like, I saw it move! And not only did it move, it talked! I thought I was going to be one of those people that had a heart attack in my sleep and not wake up from it, but thankfully, (if that’s how you wanna look at it) that didn’t happen.
My dream-self stood there as the thing reached out a hand covered in grayish armor and said, what the hell was it? I wrote it down somewhere. One of the sleep gurus said I should start a dream journal as it’s supposed to help me understand what’s going on when I sleep. Like that did any good. Here it is! “You’ve opened the door and let me through. It was a one-way trip and the door is now locked. Now, I’ll always be here when you close your eyes, and one day, you may pass my way,”
I don’t know what the hell any of this means but it can’t be good. My family, even though they all think I’m whacked out of my skull, said I should talk to a psychiatrist/psychologist about what this could possibly mean. I know what doing that will mean: the men in white coats and me hopped up on mind numbers for the rest of my life. No thanks! (Yawn.) Ugh! Out of coffee again. No matter. Think I’ll rest my eyes for a few minutes…
… oh, wait. One more thing before I rest the peepers: don’t open the third eye, even if you think it’s bull-honky.