I Have A Dream

I have a dream.

I have a dream that one day, I'll be able to lie down in my bed and drift into a peaceful slumber within a only few minutes. I have a dream that I'll sleep for a full eight hours without waking once. That in the course of those eight hours, my mind will cycle through all the appropriate sleep cycles and that I will awaken in the morning rested and ready for the day. I HAVE a dream.

I have a dream that I will walk through a day awake and truly alert. That I will have the energy to do my daily tasks without having to forcibly will my body to move when it is sitting still. I have a dream that I will be able to relate to my family without peering through the heavy fog of fatigue that makes me fight irritability on an hourly basis -- a fog that has been a constant in my life for so long, only recently has it occurred to me that maybe nobody else's brain feels like this.

I have a dre-e-eam, bruthahs and sistahs.

I have a dream that I will drive errands on a sunny late afternoon and not worry that the warm air and the late hour will lull my eyes closed and the cars wheels out of the lane I'm driving in. I have a dream of arriving home and sitting on the sofa without thinking about lying down . . just for a minute . . just for . . a minute . .

For years, I could never understand how I could be so tired all the time when I slept so much. So when I had my sleep test done last fall and the doctor told me the results (that I was unknowingly waking up an average of 28 times an hour and rarely if ever getting to stage 3 or 4 level deep sleep), I was fascinated and relieved. THAT explains my tiredness, my forgetfulness, my needing stuff repeated to me, my occasional lack of motivation, my irritability, my constant tiredness, my frequent depressive episodes, my over-sleeping, my little stupid mistakes, my never-ending inexplicable tiredness . . . I'm not a lousy excuse for a human being after all. I'm just seriously sleep-deprived!

Now, if my doctor and I could just figure out how to fix this problem. Because I just am dying to see how different life will be when I'm genuinely awake. Maybe I'm kidding myself -- maybe it won't be that different after all. But I can dream. Maybe the fog will be lifted and people's words will actually register when they're spoken to me, so my live conversations can be as coherent as my email ones. Maybe I'll have the mental wherewithal to hear my teenager's rantings, analyze them, check my own emotions, formulate an appropriate response and execute it all in real time. Maybe I'll have the energy to get my daily work done AND enjoy my family at the same time.

Maybe there's a magic pill somewhere, or a secret technique, something that will free me from this sluggish prison I feel trapped in. That would be so cool. I've had rare moments when I've really felt awake -- it would be great to feel awake for several hours at a time. Awake. Awake and free. Free at last. Free at last . . .