Control: Sleep

I, Dalton Lewis, woke up from sleeping twelve hours today: at ten pm. How does a mentally ill person end up on this sleep schedule? I just don’t live properly. I don’t eat what I should, sleep when I should, or act in a responsible and mature manner. I don’t do what I am supposed to do as a reasonable adult. It takes a lot of effort — let me tell you.

It started when I finished college. I began to stay up all night and all day. I remember living in Tucson, Arizona and there were no adults and no one telling me what to do. I hated sleep. I hated the concept of sleep. I hated everything related to going to bed — I wanted to avoid it no matter what. I remember watching bad television all night long. I taped old videos of soap operas and rewatched them. I rewatched Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel on old tapes that I created — this was before streaming shows whenever one wanted to watch them. If you missed your show you didn’t watch it.

My workouts became irregular and not as efficacious as they used to. I began to gain weight. My body became sluggish and old.

Sometimes I stayed up until noon the following day. Then in Las Vegas, Nevada a year later everything changed. I became sick with paranoid schizophrenia, a mental illness that never goes away. I started to take strong medications which made me sleep for twelve hours when I took them. I should have taken them around ten pm every night responsibly and well.

That didn’t happen.

I took the meds later each night. I took them at two am one day and four am the following day. I took my meds at any time that I damn well pleased. I slept through the night or the day.

Then came my drinking period, and I slept at night. I slept when I passed out from the liquor. I woke up around noon or one or two pm and started to drink again at four pm.

I quit drinking a couple of years later. I then went back to sleeping erratically. I spent the next ten years sleeping at any time of night or day. I worked for a year or so and made some money, but I still sometimes slept for four hours before a shift instead of responsibly going to bed twelve hours before a shift.

Why? Why do I hate sleep so much? Why don’t I responsibly go to bed at a reasonable hour? I don’t know. I don’t function how a human being is supposed to function. I just don’t. I don’t have any life lessons or anything to teach. It’s just a fact: I sleep at weird hours. I sometimes dream, and I sometimes don’t.

Today I was supposed to go to bed responsibly to wake up at 3 pm to talk to my therapist. I went to bed around ten am and couldn’t wake up to talk to him. This was a failure.

Thanks, and take care, friends.