Control: Sleep…
I, Dalton Lewis, hate sleep. I hate the concept of it. Why sit around for no reason for twelve hours a day? Why do that when I could be reading, writing, and playing video games? And watching essential CBS programming?
I went to sleep at five am this morning. Then I woke up an hour and a half later. I ordered two sausage egg and cheese sandwiches from Starbucks. I ate them as I played Mass Effect. Then I went back to bed and slept until five pm or so. I took out my contacts and took my nighttime pills then. I slept until ten pm and finally woke up at ten pm.
Why? That’s way too much sleep, and yes, I had worked out the night before. That’s true — 300 pound people work out. Some of us work out regularly. We just eat poorly.
Why don’t I sleep eight hours from midnight to eight am like a normal person? I don’t know.
I sleep twelve hours a day most days because I suffer from a mental illness: paranoid schizophrenia. I take strong antipsychotic medications which slow down my body. They make me sleep more than a normal person.
Am I missing life, doing what I do? Am I missing life, watching television and playing video games with my life?
The problem — I’m an artist. I want this. I need this, to sleep all day and work all night. I want to eat breakfast food from Starbucks. I love all of those things. Writing all night long — that’s my life. Eating too much — that’s my life. I enjoy those things.
I hate sleep because it means giving up on a day in which I did not succeed as an artist and become a celebrity. Becoming a minor celebrity for my writing sounds great. Becoming a B-list celebrity sounds like the dream to me…it sounds like a wonderful life, doing minor interviews and showing up to readings with thirty to fifty people watching and listening to me drone on about art and irony.
Solved: Sleep is terrible and the enemy. I hate it. I need to stop it, but why? Why? I shouldn’t hate it. At the end of the day I should go to sleep. I shouldn’t mind sleep. I should just be okay with a day ending, with the next day commencing, with me missing out on succeeding for another day.
I think that this matters. Writing about reality matters. The reality is that I am three hundred pounds, over forty years old, and I am a minor success as a writer. I have sold or had downloaded five hundred or so books. That’s pretty good. I have written 300+ blog entries which have mostly been read by at least a few people. I’m succeeding.
Sleep matters. I need to sleep but shouldn’t sleep until I’ve written for three hours a day, exercised for half an hour and read for half an hour. That should be the new rule.
New rules are neat. I’ve been writing three hours a day for three months or so and it has changed my life on a fundamental level. New goals matter. I want to be able to say that, at forty-two, I am changing and evolving and becoming a better, more ambitious person. I want this. I need this. I love this.
Thanks, and take care, friends.
