I really haven’t been sleeping well, lately. Partly it’s the sultry late summer temperatures, I’m sure – I don’t like to sleep running my a/c which is, in any event, not very useful, but it’s hard to sleep with my apartment at over 30 C.
So my sleep feels fragmented. I wake up at 4 am. I read or something – I refuse to just lie in bed awake – though it might be smart to try to meditate, but my mind has been really resisting that lately, too. So then I doze off and wake up again at 5:30. Same pattern, several times. The night gets sliced up.
When I was young, and could sleep continuously for 12 or more hours with little difficulty, I used to sleep with the radio on. I can’t do that anymore, but I think it left some permanent effects.
One thing that used to happen that was more than a little bit entertaining was that my dreams would have commercials. Fully separate, hallucinatory vignettes inserted willy nilly into some other hallucination. Mostly I don’t have commercials, anymore. But the other thing my dreaming developed at that time which remains a recurrent constant is the “announcer voice.” Sometimes, my dreams have an announcer, or a voice-over. It’s not my voice, nor that of anyone I know. Just a disembodied, often authoritative voice making commentary.
Since it’s dreaming, however, the announcers rarely make much sense. Things don’t seem relevant, or the utterances are non sequiturs.
Yesterday morning, I woke up before dawn with the following voice-over stunningly, clearly and precisely reverberant in my mind. In that moment of awakening, it felt incredibly profound, and I wrote it down – otherwise, like most of my undocumented dreaming, it probably would have faded from memory quickly and disappeared.
“You’re not wearing shoes, and you blame me for such totalitarian conditions?” – the disembodied voice in my brain.
Instead, later I found that scrap of paper where I had written it, and I decided that although it was rather gnomic and weird, it still seemed oddly profound.
I wonder what it means, or shows, about my subconscious and my state of mind. Perhaps, it only demonstrates that I read too much philosophy, history and political science while barefoot in my apartment?
What I’m listening to right now.
Black Boned Angel, “The Witch Must Be Killed (Side B).” [UPDATE – the old youtube link rotted, this replacement isn’t just “side B” but is the whole track.] This is a “drone metal” group from New Zealand – I posted “Side A” some years ago. My musical tastes remain weird.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]
