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)." This is a "drone metal" group from New Zealand – I [broken link! FIXME] posted "Side A" some years ago. My musical tastes remain weird.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]