Sleeping Sickness.

 I've always thought sleeping was a weird thing by itself. Probably because ever since I can remember I've had extremely detailed and vivid dreams that I could remember perfectly when I woke up. I started keeping a dream journal of sorts at a fairly young age and pretty soon I realized there was a few common qualities they all shared - people I cared about the most tended to be in them with me, usually in places I had never seen before in real life, and there was always this underlying feeling of anxiety, fear, just something unsettling. A lot of the time they were full on "night terrors"- I don't really remember those though...I just know what my mom told me and that's that I used to wake up screaming and crying, standing up in my crib almost every night. But as I got older, I tried to make sense of a lot of the not so scary ones and sometimes I could connect them to my waking life, but a lot of the time it just seemed to make no sense at all.

As a teenager, I started having trouble with sleep paralysis (horrifying), sleepwalking, and my dreams started centering around somebody hurting me, occasionally a stab, but almost always with a gunshot. My general anxiety was at an all time high during those years so that probably didn't help much but that's when I started actively trying to not sleep. Surprisingly, I found it pretty easy for me to do. I could function on 2, 3 hours of sleep maximum with seemingly no problems.

Fast forward a few years and after getting out of an abusive relationship where certain things happened to me when I was "asleep"- in reality, I was either passed out drunk, or had been slipped something. So sleeping was definitely out of the question after that. I had my daughter a month after I turned 22 and finally felt like I had found a purpose. If she was in a bed with me, that's the only time I could sleep a dreamless, peaceful sleep. I would KNOCK out for hours.

But after she got taken from me, over and over again, plus the fact that I was addicted to painkillers now made the insomnia come back. I believe right around then is when I got "formally" diagnosed with insomnia and PTSD. I refused to take any medications doctors offered, though. Perc 30s were numbing me enough that I didn't want anything else.

Obviously, as an addict, my substance use progressed and I ended up being an IV heroin user. I guess some people would say I slept a lotttt during that time, but that wasn't sleeping, that was passing out again. You don't ever get any rest that way so its like you didn't sleep at all. More like you were just unconscious for a few hours and your brain didn't know what the fuck to do.

At that point I had already started losing friends to overdoses left and right, and then on September 29th, 2015 I found one of my best friends dead in his bed. After that, my insomnia was really bad, and to avoid the dreams that would come with all their faces, or the one replaying the night of the 29th over and over, I would do enough heroin to make me pass out literally on my feet for hours at a time. The only times I wanted to be awake was to go to work to make money and to go drive my dude to Lowell/Lawrence to pick up and bring it back. During those times though, I was struggling mentally way worse than I was physically even with my addiction.

When I finally got clean, I didn't sleep for almost the whole 30 days I was in a program. They had already bumped me up the sleeping medication list from Trazadone to Remron to Seroquel to Doxepin- which was the strongest pill they could give me. I saw the psychiatrist there and he diagnosed me with PTSD again, insomnia, and dissasociative identity disorder. He recommended I stay on the Doxepin and probably get on an antipsychotic. And the standard- for the love of god, Go To Therapy!!

I did all those things, plus some, and got myself clean. Its been 7 years as of right now and it does feel good.

But I still don't want to sleep. Kind of.

I do because every night I pray that one of my dead friends will visit me in a dream, tell me something that will give me some faith in this life. Or sometimes I just want to hear their voice one more time so badly, see their smile, hear their laugh...anything.

I don't know...it's a really weird feeling when you do more to try to connect with people that aren't physically here anymore than you do with the few that are still breathing. It's honestly just blind fucking faith that there is a place we go to after we leave the Earth, and hopefully a better place at that...I know personally, I just hope that my loved ones are in a place where they finally found the love, happiness and peace they could never find here.

I'm not suicidal by any means, but a lot of the time I really wish I could be with them all again. I overdosed and "died" in 2016, and there are days/nights where I think about that calmness I felt that day, that slow-motion moment of total bliss and I can't lie, a part of me still finds that so appealing.

But for now, I'm just going to have to accept sleeping as the closest I can come to both my friends and that feeling I still crave. My psychiatrist calls it depression but I just call it accepting the harsh reality of life and doing whatever I can to keep my sanity through all this madness.