I woke up this morning, as one does most mornings. I got up, feeling vaguely alert and happy to have woken up at the right point in a sleep cycle. I always figure that waking up in the midst of a dream is good proof of sleep for some reason or another, so I pushed myself upright to whap snooze for the last time, and started parsing what I could remember of my dream.

Now, I’ve always considered my dreams to be weird. I’m guessing most people feel the same about their nocturnal subconscious-based emissions. But it’s been a long time since I’ve had a dream so disturbing that it’s lodged itself into my conscious thoughts in an intrusive and repetitive manner. My brain seems to have felt the need to spit up a dream about an ex-boyfriend from over a decade ago, complete with the semi-stalking that followed our break-up, and the smirking planes of that face recreated most faithfully by my bastard brain. And it was truly being a bastard — all I was trying to do was find a bit of privacy so I could get dressed, but he kept popping up every place I moved to, smirking, and completely disabling my attempts to put clothing on in frustration and ire.

To my benefit, at least, I do have one current working tool against my brain’s attempts to spit up bullshit like this — writing it out, or telling someone about it in general. This is the kind of crap (like my resurgent micro-crush on one of my friends when depression is rising) that my brain tries to spit up because it knows me well, and knows that I am so horrified and upset by these things that I don’t want to tell anyone else. If I don’t get it out, it festers, and very quickly drags me down into dangerous bad places. But if I manage to release it, it doesn’t cause me too much harm. I don’t know how long before my brain finds a way to fuck me over so that I can’t make use of this current tool, but I’ll hope that it takes its sweet time about it.

And, I guess, I’m not surprised it picked last night to dream stupidly. I’d gotten completely rage-fuelled worked up over something incredibly stupid, and stormed off to bed before I started breaking things. My husband, brave lad he is, remembered what almost happened last time I went that far, and came in to check on me. We had a good talk and I apologised for my brain being stupid, and managed to explain the particular backstory on that brain issue — I’d been suggesting we watch one of my shows for a week, and he put on something sports-related instead. He’d told me he was going to and why, but my brain decided to completely flip out over being ‘forced’ to watch stupid sports when I’d been going to bed earlier lately, so why didn’t he watch it after an episode of my thing, etc. I’m so used to people hating everything I like right out of the box that it’s nigh on impossible for me to ask for things, and TV is his relaxing thing (not mine), and and and. Well. As said, the bad bits of my brain dug their claws in. But we talked it out and it was good in the end, and I am pleased for both of us. But it did certainly lay the groundwork for more brain bullshit.

It suffices to say that even though I woke up feeling a bit alert, I’m pretty worn down all in all. It takes a lot out of a gal when her brain starts acting extra-stupid. I don’t know whether it’s just my body trying to process the Zoloft or happenstance, but hopefully it won’t happen again. That whole sitting down and having a normal conversation last night was a pretty impressive near-miracle, I should say — usually I spiral upwards or downwards until I explode into super-sharp shrapnel of maximum wounding. So whatever the case of the bad, it certainly was better than usual in those circumstances.

Hope everyone has a good day. I’m off to get more blood out of my caffeine stream.

<3