Cmmnwlth's Atty. Atticus Psychopannychism: "Mr. Ecks, how does a man sleep for eight or nine years and live to tell ..."; "A Night at a Time, ...?"

State's Atty. Ilene Nathan: Mr. Little, how does a man rob drug dealers for eight or nine years and live to tell about it?
Omar: Day at a time I suppose?

I've learned somewhere along the way that REM, dreams are an indication of the health of one's psyche. Specifically, that if you aren't dreaming, something that needs to happen isn't happening. That's my medical view on the matter. I have spent the better part of a week asleep without dreaming. I was not right.

Last night I wore a patch when I went to sleep. Let me light a cigarette to tell this tale...

An important person, a very gentle and quiet and loving person died last week. I was told she died peacefully, almost on her own terms and without the tariff of a long and arduous medical exit. Personally, I'm not even sure if I am actually alive, but that's an entertainment. A notion to muse over when realities aren't convincingly or tolerably real. The general opinion, if there is one, is that she was indeed alive. Now she is not. I woke up at about 5am with an unusual vision in my head. She died at 4:48 I believe. The person closest to her said to me something like, "She's fine. We're all fucked."

I was tired. Very tired. So, I slept. Oh I went to work, I went to a show, I did all sorts of things, but I was very much asleep. I'm not even speaking allegorically.

Now I will have to make my bed. I've already done the "lay in it" part.

So last night I wore the patch when I went to bed. You know, so I can cut back on my smoking while I'm sleeping. Let me tell you, and let yourself take this to be as veritable as anything else you hold true: the nicotine patch makes you have technicolor psychonautical ether piercing dreams. Like nonstop. You have to wake up periodically to get a breath, like a diver collecting divine pearls at the bottom of the dreamworld sea. I had a freaking psychonautical odyssey last night. One of the most prominent features went as follows:

I was in the U.K., without a home. I had a new old friend that doesn't really exist as far as I know in the waking world, and he took me to this large manse without windows. Think of an old and dirty church with a roof but no other structural protection from the weather. Up some stairs the friend, who I will name Fred after a Portuguese fiend I had in London when I stayed there, had some mates who basically kept a very secure and sinister bacchanalian vigil. Like when people party for so long that it no longer becomes a celebration but a curse. There was something about the environment in the church. Like it was some sort of divine entropy, some sort of holy decay. What happens when g-d leaves the building. They had this area of this abandoned church physically secured with bolts and gates.

The were high like some Pete Doherty characters, all perverse and obscene and fear & loathing. I was mostly just trying to be comfortable with the assault some of their vague antics imposed. I set up an old bed outside a window, on a ledge and in the dream I spent some time, some hours, some days, some weeks on the bed. The hellish party continued. It became normalcy.

I felt a comfortable air in the church. It wasn't homeless, stale air, it was some sort of barometric and humid familiarity, like a blanket that doesn't get twisted around you, that you can walk around in, that keeps you dry and soothes you. I have seen this church, or parts of it in different forms in different dreams. Like it's some sort of 'home' for me, in my psyche.

From somewhere, a friend, some widely co-orbiting angelic celestial body came up the stairs and they let her in the gates. She completely disregarded the other occupants, giving no courtesy or deference to the owned space. Her only intention was to talk to me. And so she did.

She took me aside, we went out on my window ledge and told me that I needed to get out of there. I didn't have to ask why, she just went on to explain that the other characters, the Pete Dohertys were more like Omar Littles in that they perpetually robbed drug dealers and as such were becoming black holes. This was the source for their perpetual narcotic victuals. Many people representing the organizations they had robbed wanted these Libers, these Dionysian children to pay a price for their impositions. She told me that I should get and stay very far away from them. She explained that I could already be a target because of any observed association I may have with them (which in reality would be unlikely, since no one really would have seen me sleeping for however long on the window ledge, but this is not reality, this is a dream). She took my hand, kissed me on the cheek and then left just as quickly and with as little formality as she had come.

Then I was distraught and I woke up. And then fell back to sleep.

In the second episode of this dream, I had found a new building to claim. It was another church. My psyche sure can put the 'b' in subtle. This was basically the same building, but it was only me in it, and I had set up camp on the ground floor and there were still windows. So I settled in and was very happy and safe and felt that I could undertake the construction of my greatest laboratory. Then my dreams moved on to other psychically spasmodic symbols.

Thank You. Try a 7mg patch one night, even if you don't smoke.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul_sleep