Day 4: Maybe I’m not superhuman?

I’d always prided myself on being able to be “just fine” on 6 hours sleep. Oh dear…I think I may have made a mistake there.

Strategies for last night worked, and I was able to fall asleep in short order around 10:30pm. I woke up this morning shortly before 6:30am after having the longest stream of dreams about a mob family in New York, that lasted multiple generations. I woke from this dream feeling like I’d lived several lives, and a profound sense of awe, gratitude and privilege that I’d been able to witness that story. It made Breaking Bad and the Sopranos look like badly written sit-coms.

Had I been able to hold on to the story and write it down, I’d make millions in publishing. But alas, the details are eroding as dreams do. But the feelings I felt when I woke up have remained.

Actually the emotions I felt have remained. I felt something other than nothing for once. What a delight!!

If this is what I can feel with a good nights sleep then I think I need to be taking it more seriously as a treatment method.

For context, the end of the dream saw me as the last surviving member of the family as I am about to embark on a life away from the crime and misfortune. I go to park my car to attend the funeral of my father, and through being moved on by a police car to park elsewhere a stream of knock-on events occur. I attend the funeral late just as someone else is walking through the church door, they offer me a job working across the country and after the funeral I choose to leave my home and New York for good, just wearing the clothes on my back and nothing else. The last scene leads to someone breaking into my apartment to squat, they fall asleep naked on my luxurious bed. In the night the apartment is overrun by men in black who grab the guy out of the bed and slam him onto a table thinking he is me. You witness this from an aerial vantage, panning away from the screaming man, as the masked intruders slam several screwdrivers into his limbs pinning him to the table. The scene ends with one through the eye socket, as they write lines and symbols all over his body, but the main word you see is UNUNITY over and over. You realise the mob family was a cover for something much older and darker.

Don’t get me started on the second dream about the house floating on a river, and the man that owned it who spoke to me of techniques for making wooden chairs that involved carving a mould out of stone, and then letting the tree grow around it for 50 years, then chiselling the stone out. His lesson was one of something worthwhile taking time and patience, and that we as a species had lost touch with the joy felt from something beautiful taking time develop. Everything is so immediate. I can’t help but think this was my subconscious encouraging me to stay away from the short lived dopamine hits of social media.

When I roused myself from the dreams fully, I checked the weather and it was around freezing and rainy. I wasn’t going to subject my dog to that, so I nodded back off to sleep for 45 minutes, which was lovely.

Woke up and fed everyone, showered, had my pint of vitamin soup and ready to start the day. I even had half an hour spare to do some inventory management on Fallout 4. Nice.

Work has still been a struggle and something I am focusing on. Though the main battle has been my own emotional foundation, sleep, and having a house that’s tidy and a joy to be in.

To that end I’ve created a schedule over the last few days for daily chores that are easy to do one day at a time, but daunting to consider as a whole. In fact I’m not going to label them as chores; I’m labelling them as “gifts of peace” I can give myself each day. A tidy room just makes my brain feel tidy, which can’t be a bad thing.

Maybe this is the approach I need to factor into work. Work = big and daunting; small tasks towards larger goals = gifts of work peace.

I’m enjoying the act of writing each morning. I may also start doing this at night as a way to unload the day before bed and setting intentions for the next day, so I don’t need to “plan” as I’m falling asleep.

If I existed as “tomorrow me”, then my life would be perfect. At night “present me” tells “tomorrow me” all the things they need to do to succeed in all aspects of life and be this paragon of perfection. Unfortunately, when I wake up the next day it’s not “tomorrow me” that wakes up, it’s “present me”, and he’s the one that’s great at planning and poor at execution.

As a final aside, I have taken the minimalist app off my phone as I didn’t want to pay £4.99 a month for it (living in Yorkshire truly has seeped into my bones), but I have managed to use “Modes” on my android phone to achieve a similar thing, It’s enabled me to lock away my social media apps so I can’t use them at certain times. Yes it’s easier to circumvent, but if I was determined to go on an app, I’d circumvent the minimalist app too. I’ve also used the Digital Wellbeing section to add a timer of an hour across all my social apps each day. That’s not an hour each, that’s an hour across all of them. Yesterday I used 30 minutes, so it’s working well.

Tomorrow sees the end of dry January. I do still crave a beer when I see them in the fridge though; which means I’ll be holding off drinking anything for a while longer. My strategy for dealing with alcohol in general is to only drink if I’m away from the house for an occassion, or if we are having a date night at home. But drinking during the week, drinking alone, drinking cos it’s in the fridge and I fancy a beer or a rum, are all out of the window.