There was a moment where I lost my sense of self when sifting through pictures from earlier this year. I was lost in the rhythm of scrolling and suddenly outside of myself.

It made me dizzy.

I've been dreaming about you all my life.

I feel like my body is turning against me.

Starting with my mind. Ending in my esophagus, scarred and burned with bile.

I woke up last night because I couldn't breathe. I was choking and my throat was burning and I thought that was it for me.

It wasn't.

Now I'm making the most boring note of it here. Leaving out the fear and the flashes and the worried bouts of panic that kept waking me up.

If you're not dead, you're alive.
I guess I'm alive.

One of the hardest things about being single is not letting the loneliness get to you and jumping the gun just so you're not alone. 

The trouble is waiting for the moment to know when jumping in is right. 

Dream time:

There was a stream of weird scenario-jumping so I'll start with what I remember and leave out the segue, because there isn't one.

This dream started with a western feel do it. In a city with dirt roads and overgrown grass, not that it was technologically impaired, it's just how the time was. And there were beasts that were using this town as a feeding supply. I'm not really sure of any back story here, just that I was caught in the middle and tried to save who I could. Ultimately, I realized it was a dream because I wasn't afraid, and I tried fighting back. I was weak, though, I couldn't really hurt the things, they were nearly immortal. Though, I did get to split one's jaw at the hinges, that was the most of my damage. And these things did destroy a house/building that I was primarily residing at. Throughout this whole segment, though, I never felt like I belonged in the town. I was more in the feeling that I was passing through.

Then I'm at a lesser known award ceremony, something to do with music predominantly, and it's in another country or rather some small city and not a lot of people care much about it. I figured you wouldn't be there, Braille-Reader. But somehow you sneaked into my unconscious mind. At first, things were passive and nonchalant. I didn't want to hound you with anything I had to say, but somehow you still knew. Maybe you didn't, actually, maybe you were just acting on your own accord. (Except for the fact that this was my dream. So I'm sure I had some influence there.) So despite my few attempts to leave you to enjoy the awards show and possibly reap your own if you were nominated, you stuck around with me. The most vivid part of the dream: we were leaning over the edge of a balcony, standing, and you were close to me. Elbow to elbow. And I remembered wondering why you were there. You had literally a million other places you could be, where other people more deserving of your company were, but you kept looking me in the eyes and laughing at the extremely terrible jokes that I nervously made. And in a moment of silence, I saw you looking out over the crowd, toward the stage - your hand was close to mine and my heartbeat began to drown out the din of the theater. So I stretched out my fingers and started to weave them into yours, scared and curious and excited. Before I knew it, we were holding hands. I was too focused on them that I didn't notice you staring at me. Smiling. But there you were. We locked eyes. Didn't say anything. Just looked back out to the stage, hands still together. It felt nice. Not overwhelming. Not devastating to wake up from. Just nice that it happened, regardless of it being real or not, just that I had the moment to feel that, even for a second.

Then I did wake up.
I tried to will myself back in it, but we know that never works.

Here's still next time.

People are weird.

They grieve and mourn in weird ways.

I've just spent the last hour visiting Facebook pages of people I know that have passed away, died, however you want to say it - and see people that've been gone for 3+ years that are still getting posts on their walls - on the daily. People videoing themselves singing the deceased favorite song, or some song that reminds them of the dead, then posting it to their wall. What did people do before this upswing in social media to cope? Write letters and mail them to an address that some living person had taken over? Leave messages on a stranger's answering machine?

It's odd. I don't understand it. I've never really been effected by death as much as others. But I've always thought of death differently than a lot of people around me. I feel like I think of a lot of things differently.

I don't mean to be insensitive. It's just weird is all.

My guts feel warm like maple syrup on a fresh pancake. It's nice. It's like I'm full of blankets just out of the dryer.

...and no, I'm not drunk. I'm just full of Chinese food.

I've been trying to write poetry for half an hour.

They're all shit.

Memories are a funny thing. Each time you revisit something in your head, you're reconstructing that memory from pieces and fragments that you placed elsewhere - sometimes those pieces are probably exactly what happened, but other times your brain can't find the authentic piece you made and basically creates a new image to run along the celluloid of your memory. This means that the more you remember something, the less you can actually trust that it's the real moment that you experienced.

Don't worry - I have a point.

My mind is packed with such vivid imagery that I can sometimes feel my night and day dreams shuffling in with my memories like a stack of cards. Lately, more than a couple of times, I've riffled through my grey matter and retraced a memory that was actually just a dream. A moment I shared with someone that didn't exist. It's unnerving at times, mildly heartbreaking at others. I actually have this one dream that I can recall better than any memory I've made so far. It's been five or six years now, but there was a silhouette of a woman. No distinct details of her face, just the shape of her dress and the cut of her hair and the feeling I had wanting to burst from my chest just knowing that she existed. I can remember the floral pattern along the bodice and the stark white Peter Pan collar. But what's most gripping, the most intense footprint in my head from that dream, was the feeling of loss once I woke up. I knew I'd never be with her again. It's odd to say, sad even to know, that I'll never feel that happy or depressed again as I did within that 48 hours. I've been in love. I've been shit all over. This was still nothing compared to the dream.

So sometimes, when I'm getting nostalgic, I revisit the relationships I've had. And then I get to one where I just remember the feeling and vague, yet crystal clear, details of this moment I shared inside my own mind and try to play it off as something real, when it was just a fantasy. That is, of course, if I'm not actually sending myself a dream theater from the future in hopes to hone my skills and start to build a blueprint of accepting future information in a past brain, therefore successfully lubing up my unconscious mind to make myself a super genius and profitable so that my future life is super rad.

Then again, I do indulge in way too much science-fiction.

Also: I think I'm going to title my short story collection "Thick Fiction" - at least I feel better about it than "Chronicles of a Heavy Sleeper" - we'll see, though. I haven't even begun the first round of edits.

I started having those dreams again, the ones where I'm displaced in a different type, but I'm still in my body. They happen enough so that I know I have an obvious obsession with science-fiction scenarios gone wrong, but also they come in such a frequency that I'm worn down to wandering if there is such a device that makes dream implantation an actuality, regardless of time. Say that (and step far back from Inception) there is a way to affect someone's brain waves while they're in the R.E.M. stages of sleep, like a radio broadcast and you can only nudge a few things here and there... unless you're actively fucking with your own dream patterns in a time that allows you to send such waves back through your own timeline.

I know, it's weird and very very unlikely... but what if.

The truth is definitely much more grounded. I'm sure that my subconscious mind is pulling fragments and miniscule pieces from all these random parts of my brain that I've long forgotten and put them together like a digestible jigsaw that I scarf down. There's enough from my actual waking life sprinkled in there to drive the curiosity away for authenticity, while piling on loads of distractions in which keep my brain and self occupied, especially after some randomly awkward future time shit is brought up.

For example: another person in the dream I had last night asked how things were since I got married. (Which for those of you that know, I am not married - nor am I in an sort of romantic entanglement.) Since the mind in the dream body was that of the person I currently am in the waking world, I didn't know what they were talking about, but still being me (as I'm sure this other version of myself was), the person thought I was just being facetious and laid a trail of bread crumbs saying that this woman I married was my best friend and we'd be together a while, which still didn't give the real me any inkling as to what they were leading to. Then the name dropped and it took me by surprise. But instead of getting to ask any questions, some shit started going down in the underwater alien/illuminati pyramid that we were in that was used to house the history of existence, including human and alien currency since the beginning of time. (Like I said, this is obviously sugar-coated in fanboy fantasy, like Stargate meeting the first AvP movie with elements of The Abyss and some other horror franchises thrown in. But like I said, that's wasn't the focus for me, obviously.)

And that's the deal with these dreams, I'll have this moment wherein I am teased with a string of information (probably not real, but enough to snag my curiosity) wrapped in this thick fiction. I actually had one the other night where I had to survive a battle arena and ended up acting in an improv play as the husband in a cat family (as anthropomorphic cats which were really just people in costume for this play), and something in it triggered this inspiration that bridged the gaps in this story I've been working on. It was so intense that I immediately woke from my dream and madly began to write in the notebook I keep next to my bed for such occasions. However, once I grabbed the pen - I couldn't articulate what was rolling around in my brain, so it dulled and most likely ended up getting lost in outline notes with the sloppiest handwriting I could muster at 5am. But I still have those images rolling around in my head through the faint fog of memory.

Dreams are weird. And I feel like mine are slightly making me a bit more disheveled. Anyway, crazy or not - I'll likely never know until I'm lying on my death bed.

Lost, I guess, is the way that I would put it. The way I feel. My state of being. Perpetually lost. As if I don't typically or wholly identify. Sure, I have my element and my comfort zones, and when I really like people and truly feel like I appreciate them (or feel like I want to know them more on a personal level, regardless of romantic/platonic entanglement), I try to express or invite them into these said zones, whether they be physical (bar, apartment, etc.) or ideological (personal beliefs, political standings, being a closet anime kid). But it's not always that, I force people through these fiery loops to "earn" the right to get to know me better as a person, when in actuality I don't feel comfortable letting people get that far. It's a weird process, and allow me to illustrate it for you - the reader that may or may not be on the other end of this rant.

I am happy in my misery. That's the whole of what you should know about me as a person.

I feel fine leading the boring, lackluster life that I lead because I am a miracle in myself. Now, don't let that confuse you in my belief that I am a modern American god - I know some friends would argue that of my cockiness and self-absorbed, nonchalantly conceited existence - the fact that I exist out of all the sperm cells that came out of the father before me and paired with the mother that housed my for 9+ months. That all in itself, that I came to be into this world and became self-aware without any other factors making it more difficult for me than my own self, is a fucking miracle. Now, moving forward.

I am happy existing, I truly am, even though there are nights that I lay awake and wonder the what if's and feel like I'm not living up to a certain potential. But wait for that bit later. I am happy that I get to experience honest friendships. I've been in love. I know what a lot of other people may not or may have taken for granted (I, as well, have taken a lot for granted), but these things are not (despite the beginning of this rant) lost on me. No, I appreciate my begrudging obsession with pop culture and pop celebrity icons regardless of their power to stay in the spotlight. I am happy claiming to be a writer with a shitty string of poetry and short fiction in my wake to claim as mine. I am happy that I have to option to go to sleep every night hoping that I don't wake up, but despite my pessimistic tendencies, I  do anyway. Not to discount or exclude all the millions and millions of unfathomable cool things I get to experience and take for granted on the day to day.

However...

The only time I ever feel like I'm falling short is when I have to measure up to people around me, maybe not immediate circumstances or those far fetched ones (because I'm usually acquainted with college dropouts who understand my plight - and I'm not ever going to be the male equivalent to Taylor Swift or Beyonce) but when 20/30-somethings are portrayed - erroneously, I might add - as the pseudo-successful types with a disposable incomes and their only problem is finding someone who they can marry forever and ever, I feel inadequate. I know that's not uncommon. I know that I am a minnow in a stream of this particular thought. But that's the only time I ever feel like I hate being myself... when other [fictional/well-adjusted] people come into the picture. These fictional fucks that are the collective dream of what life should be like, when no one even knows how to really live until they're ready to die.

I often find myself wondering what life would be like if I secluded myself from the massive amounts of bullshit that's posted online/that I watch in horrible RomCom situations and honed in on the people around me. The real life people who struggle every day with self-identity issues and finding their own happiness. I wonder what life would be if I and everyone else in this whole goddamn world stopped dreaming these unattainable dreams that aren't even our own and just focused on the life in front of us. I never wanted a big house. Maybe a shack on a beach so I could die understanding the infinite nothing that exists. I never wanted a top-line sports car. I'm happy with the size of my penis, and I just want something that's reliable and can maybe take a hit or two and keep going through rain or snows or a fucking motorcycle to roam around the country nomadically without materialistic bindings. I never wanted a trophy wife with honor roll kids. I just want someone that I like to look at, who laughs at my dumb jokes and knows that even though I stumble and fall a lot, that I'll still do everything in my power to be the best that I can be for them... and maybe have a child that fucks up as much as I do that I can impart my terrible sage-like wisdom of "nothing's perfect, but things will be okay if you know that you never have to be perfect as long as you're happy with who you are". I never asked to be alive and live a life that I was happy or unhappy with, but I'm here and I'm grateful - I really am, despite all these self-analytical and doldrums shit that come out of me. It's all a venting process that I've found helps me understand the human condition, and despite my weird complex, I am - after all - human. I am alive and I'm human. I'm lost and I'm happy. I'm not every single person, but I am wholly myself. I just don't feel like that should be something to be ashamed of.

I'm too drunk for this shit right now.

Strange things, we are - creatures too smart for our own good most of the time. Duality. Procreation. Has there ever been a more self-destructive and self-obsessed species?

I think a lot about this bullshit and, honestly, I'd rather be asleep than have my brain turning over tiles just to see what's underneath.

Being human feels like a curse sometimes. I'd rather be a cat and be okay with being a shithead.

Sometimes, it feels good just being able to type something out. The movement of my fingers stretching and seeing something on the other end of my mind, something not quite tangible, but still more physical than it was before. It's nice every now and again.

The "can't sleeps" have begun. And I've already reached the end of the Internet, as well as looked at everything on Facebook AND read the comments... can I die now? The world has no secrets!