Last night I managed to fall asleep at one in the morning, which is way earlier than usual . . . I usually sleep at six or seven in the morning. Out of nowhere I felt a mysterious and utter heaviness come down upon me like a curtain of lead. This pretty much never happens . . . I almost always have to “decide” to go to sleep. I would never, for instance, fall asleep during a movie. Every night (or early morning, rather), I’ll think: “OK. Now we have to go to sleep.” But this time it was not so. Perhaps out of self-preservation, in order to save me when I would not save myself, my body had made the decision for me!

I closed both rows of curtains on all my windows . . . a solemn gesture which felt like preparing a submarine for submersion, or reinforcing a fortress before a siege. Now cocooned in total darkness, I lay down on my couch and immediately fell asleep. I had a strange and vivid dream that I was with this girl I used to know, but we were here in Berlin walking in the middle of the street which was devoid of cars. It was a winter evening and we were the only people out. I saw a sort of rundown park nearby, one that does not actually exist in Berlin, and told this girl I wanted to check it out. On the other side of the fence I heard a small orange Persian kitten crying out from a pile of shredded newspaper. Carefully I hopped the mangled rusty fence near an encampment of tarp tents and touched down near the kitten. I knelt to pick it up and, as soon as I had clutched it in my hand, I saw four or five more orange-and-white kittens rolling around in the newspaper, a whole litter of them. Some of them had runny eyes and noses. It was cold outside and they were all alone here.

In the dream, I thought of the logistics of bringing them home: I would need kitten food and food bowls, a litter box, blankets . . . I would bathe them in the sink when we got back, and have them seen by a vet the next day . . . and then I would foster them while I found them homes, and so on. I called out to the girl and told her I had found some kittens. I began to take off my jacket so I could collect them in there and keep them warm during the walk home. Just before I could put the first kitten in my jacket, it was as if I were struck by a bolt of lightning . . . I awoke in the darkness of my apartment drenched in a cold sweat. I groaned . . . I had been so excited to take the kittens back to my apartment and make them a little nest on my bed. Why couldn’t I have just got to that part!

As I mentioned in some other sad thing I wrote here the other day, I cannot seem to sleep for more than an hour or two at a time. I think this is actually killing me. In addition to all the other little sorrows in my life that I cannot get rid of, being completely sapped of vitality and also unable to sleep no matter what feels like being alive while also being dead. It is life-in-death. I’d almost rather just be outright dead. At least then there is some finality to it. I can say for sure that I would not wish this rotten feeling upon anyone. So I lay there in the dark for an hour or two while rain poured down from the grey sky and soaked my balcony beyond the forcefield of my blackout curtains.

Having no alternative, I eventually decided to just get the hell on with it and begin another worthless day of my life. I made a little coffee and a little smoothie, read a little, wrote a little, played a little FINAL FANTASY XVI, took a little bath . . . and on and on. And then around one in the afternoon, exactly twelve hours after I’d first felt that megaton brick of despair and exhaustion come crashing down upon me like a tidal wave on the river Acheron, I felt it once more. I was so tired just then that I had tears streaming down my face. I placed my phone in the antechamber of my apartment and then returned to my bedroom and shut the door. I wanted that thing as far away as possible from me, fearing it would influence my dreams, or worse. I turned out the light and curled up in the center of my bed. Closing my eyes, I felt myself falling into the center of the earth . . . I had a childish wish that someone were there to hold me and stroke my hair and tell me I was safe. I supernova’d into about a billion completely insane kaleidoscopic dreams in which I visited or was visited by essentially everyone I have ever known. Time compressed in on itself and I stood there in the center of it till I was compressed along with it. I felt no pain other than the tremendously odd cratering sensation of ego death, which I had experienced only once before while on mushrooms.

Upon waking, it was as if I had been hurled out of that psychedelic rainbow vortex from the end of 2001 . . .

Stars wheeled overhead, and every day was as long as the life age of the earth. I took in a huge lungful of air and felt completely emptied of all the good chemicals your brain relies upon to keep you from jumping in front of fast-moving objects. With an unfeeling hand I parted the curtains next to my bed and saw that the sky outside was black, and all the apartment buildings around me had unlighted windows. This filled me with dread. If you had told me a thousand years had passed, I would have believed you . . . I felt deeply alien inside myself just then and only vaguely trusted any external stimuli. I did not want to look at my phone but I needed to know the time. It was past midnight. I was so dehydrated I went into my kitchen and glugged down two liters of water straight from the tap. I sat down on the floor and wondered what I ought to do with myself now that I had completely destroyed whatever tattered sleep schedule I had held on to before. I felt nauseous and my entire skeleton ached . . . and yet the damage was done: I was wide awake now and not even an elephant tranquilizer would have felled me then. And heaven help me, I thought about the dream kittens again, and felt that phantom emptiness from having been deprived of their company. Perhaps, I thought, it would have given me some purpose, however illusory . . . these days I’ll take any purpose I can get . . .

It is nearly nine-thirty in the morning. I could tell you how I filled the last nine hours of my life in the darkness of night, but I think it would just make us both sad. So instead I will conclude this post cartoonishly. As anyone would tell you, I love doing that: