issues

so one of the results of sleep dep is that if you lose enough, you end up having really vivid dreams when you finally do get to sleep. i'm thinking about this because i was having email correspondence with mike b earlier today, talking about my issues... which led to me contemplating my conversation with nick on saturday nite about how i'm the last person he needs to have commitment worries about... which led me to recall a dream i had a few years ago which may offer some insight into my psyche.

after a weekend of no sleep due to certain pharmaceuticals, i had a particularly vivid dream. i had only been asleep for about an hour when i dreamed that i was being buried alive. i could actually feel the clods of dirt hitting my face.. feel the weight of the earth pressing down on my chest and cutting off my air supply... i could feel myself slowly suffocating. i pulled myself back out of sleep for a moment and was gasping for air, rolled over and sort of shook myself off and went back to sleep. i then slipped back into the exact same dream, except instead of starting from the beginning the dirt was at the same point it was when i had woken myself up. it kept piling up on my chest and on my face.. was getting into my mouth and i could *taste* it - feel it in my nose and in my lungs... i pulled myself up into wakefulness again and again, only to slip back into the dream, each time deeper and deeper under the ground... eventually i had to get up out of bed and sit on the couch. i was afraid to go back to sleep because i was half convinced that it was actually happening..

now how do i interpret this dream? well, i see it as fairly indicative of my fear of being weighed down. but then maybe that is *now* me looking back on *then* me, who was really an entirely different person. either way, it was a pretty creepy dream. i can still feel it - you know when an experience is that haunting that it just stays with you...

on that note - i finally asked nick what he thought of the piece of poem i printed up for him. he said that he loved it - that he hadn't had any more weird experiences since i gave it to him, cause he knew exactly what it meant.