The Cliff

Sometimes my mind gets lost. I step to the edge of the cliff and look down. I have no intention of stepping off, I just want to see what is there. Swirling mist and hanging rain? Endless fields of moss roses? Oceans, endless oceans of churning waves and writhing kelp? Nothing, everything, the universe, despair joy? My thoughts wander and I need to remind myself to breathe. I do not lack inspiration, but every effort is rewarded by my body screaming "No!" I retreat and try to force myself to wake.

I spin upon my aching heels and watch the twisted trees sway in a salt breeze. There are words on the wind, clear as glass, sharp and grating. I can dance with them and hold them in my hands, but they refuse to become tangible. The fatigue carries them into a silver box that I am forced to carry with me but not open. The only key is remission, but relief is rare and fleeting, and bracketed by an inability to accomplish anything beyond caring for basic needs. My body refuses to let me heed the call of the twisted trees and the screaming words. I can walk toward the trees but they never get closer, and the words spit scathing insults which burrow under my skin and leave me dazed and breathless.

I turn back toward the cliff to escape the words and nearly fall off the ledge. I can see what is beyond now. Water churns against barnacled rocks. My foot slips. I catch myself but an avalanche of pebbles drop into the water. They plink upon the rocks and are immediately thrashed into oblivion by the waves. If I fell, the violent water would do the same to me. I know I am caught in dreamtime, but this dream is too vivid to be harmless. It is my mind on the precipice of giving up and drifting into a nonchalant cycle varying between asleep and not-quite-awake.

I step back and look down the other side of the cliff. My inspiration sits on a lower ledge -- ragged, filthy, hooded, and surrounded by hungry birds. He is forgotten by society, invisible, a shadow of the brilliant light he once was. I know his story, but he is afraid of me because I know. He is afraid I will reveal his brokenness to the world and drive him from outcast to reviled. I have told the first two-thirds of his story, but he knows it is the last third which will break him. He doesn't realize it will also redeem him. All he sees is the churning water below the cliff, while I see a bigger picture. I see his frailty, his kindness, his longing to be something other than a waif trying to decide if he is ready to lean a little forward and plunge off the bluff. "Wait here," I tell him as he tosses his last piece of bread to the birds. "I will return for you as soon as I wake. I will reveal your life as worthwhile."

I walk away from the cliff. The trees stay distant and the words still wail. I turn around to see where I came from. I no longer see the churning water and the ragged cliff. Instead, I see the light glistening off the tranquil water. I see a piece of my own whole. There is as much beauty in the distant water as there was in the moss roses, in the violent waves, in my fragile muse contemplating his past and future. The fatigue remains, but its sting is lessened. The pain in my hands flares, but it is tolerable for now. I'm afraid to push it toward intolerable, but I must. I promised my inspiration I would return for him, and he will haunt me forever if I don't. He is too beautiful to be forgotten, even as he refuses to reveal his face to anyone but me.

The sun sets, but now I know it will rise again on the other side of the darkness. The fatigue is temporary, part of an endless cycle of day and night. My days and nights are different from most and not restricted by a clock. As the sun falls below the waves, I notice my inspiration upon the shore. He is no longer on the cliff, but instead standing in the sand, his feet licked by the rising tide. I stand with him and reach for his hand. The water is icy. He squeezes my aching fingers and says, "I am no longer afraid of you."

"Neither am I," I reply.


Note: I took these photographs while on a family vacation last week. While looking through them, I realized they had a story to tell just as much as I do.

Time-Lost

My cat enjoys being time-lost far more than I do. She also enjoys sleeping on my partially-finished quilt top.

The dream-time of narcolepsy... a month passes in an instant and I am left wondering where I've been. My creativity goes into overdrive but I can't find the energy to utilize it. I spend my nights semi-sleep, and my days semi-awake. There is not always a clear division between dreams and reality and I differentiate what I have really done and what I have dreamed. Spiders drip from rippling walls, disembodied heads float above my bed -- these are the paralytic hypnogogic hallucinations that spring forth in the darkness when I am caught in the asleep-awake threshold. I occasionally have hypnopompic hallucinations as well, but those are rarer.

I lose time. I live it, I function within it, and I remember most of it, but time undulates in an irregular pattern that sometimes leaves me frustrated. During these periods, which usually last several months, I become hypercreative in visual endeavors instead of literary. All the while, I remain frustrated that I can't focus my fatigued mind enough to write. I don't often recognize I am time-lost until dissatisfaction over my writing failures peaks. Eventually, time flips over and the visual is eclipsed by the cerebral as my focus returns and I slip into a less aggravating phase of my disorder.

Time-Lost

I'm adrift between awake and asleep,
Halfway to nowhere, regrettably languid.
Worlds and stars spin around retrograde idioms,
Askew, and dripping microseconds into annihilation.
I careen to avoid another day, another nebulous morning,
Where the time-lost slip into Lethe and drown,
Forgetting the hours, the days, the purpose,
An abeyance of everything, continuance of nothing.
Find me if you can, capricious Time,
For I am caught in the maze of the narcoleptic void.
Awake, asleep, and egregiously haunted
By the fickle visions of an effulgent stupor.
Arise from the shade, little muse, little whim,
And recover my lucidity from meandering seasons,
Unbind my perception from sidereal rambling,
And spin my balance away from dream-time.

D is for Dyssomnia

I waltz in a fog, never fully awake, never fully asleep.  I taste sounds and hope the walls don't cave in.

Narcolepsy is life in dreamtime, never fully awake and never fully asleep, coasting through a fog broken by scattered lanterns of full awareness.  A narcoleptic can dream while pretending to be awake.  She can carry on conversations and complete tasks, but her mind fades in and out of the mist of REM sleep.

Excessive sleepiness can overtake her at regular intervals or at random.  She will be alert and suddenly crash.  This does not mean that she falls asleep in her soup, but instead that she becomes so fatigued that she can no longer function normally.  She may need to lie down, or she may go through periods of automatic behavior and not remember how she got from one minute to the next.

If she has cataplexy as a symptom (and not all narcoleptics do), she is careful to guard her emotions.  Laughing, crying, anger, or fear trigger her muscles to respond with anything from dropping whatever is in her hand or a knee giving out to a total body collapse.  She laughs and drops her glass or stumbles on the sidewalk.  She ends up on the floor, surrounded by people who can't figure out what just happened.

Sometimes the narcoleptic swings wildly between excessive sleepiness and insomnia.  The cycles can last for weeks or months at a time.  During insomnia phases, she is alert and productive, but often gets less than four hours of sleep a night no matter what she does.  After a while, the exhaustion phase takes over and she feels the overwhelming urge to sleep as much as possible.  She is too fatigued to function normally so has to force herself to stay awake and accomplish what she needs to.

For most people with narcolepsy, the scariest symptoms are sleep paralysis and hypnogogic hallucinations.  Walls and furniture come alive, floating heads bob around the room, insects crawl through cracks in the ceiling.  The narcoleptic tries to escape, but her body is frozen.  This can happen either on the onset of sleep or upon waking.  The hallucinations very occasionally strike outside of a sleep attack, when the brain slips into REM while the narcoleptic is otherwise awake.

I was diagnosed with narcolepsy ten years ago following a sleep study.  I was in college, and ended up needing to use the university disability support to make it through some of my classes.  Medications ended up either not working well enough or causing severe side effects, so I no longer take them.  My narcolepsy seems to foster heightened creativity, and I have extremely vivid dreams.  I gave my primary protagonist, Sevilen Achara, narcolepsy so I could describe its symptoms properly after seeing so many inaccurate portrayals in entertainment.  It is a life-altering disorder, but not a life-destroying one.

Star Baby

Star baby, water baby, who are you, little girl?
You look like me and came from me, but you are not me.
You are a dreamer already, but what are your dreams?
Is there music in your soul, or physics, or poetry?
Do you wish to soar through the universe,
Or would you rather stay closer to home?
I'll help you either way, my star baby, my water baby,
I'll help you find your dreams and make them your reality.
Your future belongs to you and I am just your guide.
Sleep now, sweet baby, and dream your favorite dreams.
Weave your dreams, my baby, let me rock you to sleep.

Ouch, My Teeth!

Wow, so I guess it's been over a month since I posted last.  I was thoroughly lost in Malora.  I finished my complete revision of the Echoes of Oblivion trilogy, and now I'm 2/3 of the way through my Mayfly Requiem revision.  I generally have to stay up until 2-3am to work on anything without interruption, so I'm fairly sleep deprived.  In the past two weeks alone, I've dealt with flaring TMJ from an old broken jaw, a double ear infection, a concussion, and a scratched cornea, and that was just on me.  My germ-wielding toddler decided to bash me over the head with a toy, which knocked me out for about 30 seconds, and then he followed it up the next day by trying to gouge out my left eye.  Now all three of us are fighting off yet another cold, so maybe I'll get a little bit of a break and finally be able to think about something other than fantasy apocalypses and fallen immortal time-keepers.

Due to my narcolepsy, I have more vivid dreams than most people.  They are usually a full-sensory experience complete with smells, tastes, and even pain.  Last night marked the triumphant return of the painful lost teeth category of dreams after a long absence.  I think it has been two years or so since my last one.

I was sitting outside in a park when all of a sudden I felt a series of pops in my mouth.  I tried to open my moth, but it hurt too much and my gums felt swollen.  I swept my finger around the side of my mouth and pulled out five teeth.  I panicked and shoved the teeth back into my mouth and walked to the dentist's office, which turned out to be in the middle of a bustling mall instead of its usual location.  I tried to open my mouth to show her, but my jaw was nearly locked.  I felt more pain and more crackling pops, and spit out a bunch of teeth onto the table.  I tried to use my tongue to feel around for the empty spots, but my tongue and gums were numb.   The dentist got out her books and was trying to figure out why something like this would happen to someone with previously healthy teeth.  In the meantime, I kept losing more and more teeth, and soon there was a small pile of teeth on the table.  People kept stopping by to look at the teeth, but I refused to smile at them because I knew I was missing a bunch.  The dentist kept talking about being able to do something for me once my gums were healed.  The pile of teeth now contained more teeth than I could have possibly started with in my mouth and there were bits of wire that the dentist insisted were from the braces I had in high school.  I was really anxious because I had hardly any teeth left and I didn't know how I was going to be able to eat.  My mouth hurt horribly and was still popping and dropping teeth, and then I woke up because my toddler was whimpering.

Weird dreams are nothing new to me, but the teeth ones are always disturbing.  I wake up and immediately check my mouth to make sure nothing is missing or loose.  Thankfully, I still have all my teeth, even though I have some issues with them because of suffering through nine months of morning sickness.  My husband thinks I'm nuts when I tell him my dreams, but he sleeps so deeply he hardly ever remembers his dreams at all.  Maybe I am nuts, but right now I am too busy watching the praying mantises crawl across the wall to really think about out.  Oh, wait... hypnogogic hallucinations.  Again.  I guess it is nap time.

Winter descends

The leaves have fallen, the flowers are dead.  The air is beginning to chill.  There is a month left until the solstice, but it is already dark by 5pm and the season has switched from transcendental color to monochrome grey.

I miss the pines.  I miss snow draped over cedars.  I miss the sandy crunch of fluffy snow under skis.  I used to ski for hours through the northern forests, but there are no great forests here.  There are no cedars, no pines which were not planted by humans.  This place is grey and domesticated.  Its winters are slush and fluctuating temperatures, naked deciduous trees, gloom, dormant hibernating death.

The grey buries memories of blinding snow.  It destroys hope with an unrelenting, undulating despair.  The winters here are two months under desolate skies.  There are nothing but death and waiting seeds upon the plains.  The leaves drop, the wind blows, and the winter falls heavy with silent gloom and dormancy.

Northern Michigan winters are a far different beast.  They are not cheery, but they are bright, and the whiteness of the earth competes with a blue-grey sky and the snow triumphs.  Even at midnight, the bitter snow is bright.  It reflects the light of the moon, and absent the moon, it mirrors the stars and occasionally the aurora instead.  You can find your way through the forest by the light of the snow and still view the spectacular glory of the Milky Way above.  I used to go stargazing on the most frigid winter nights.  The sky was always clearest then.  The moon would hang resolute above the pines and the aurora would streak kaleidoscopic across the northern sky.  Twigs snapped, owls hooted, and the symphony of life accompanied the brilliant cosmos in an ambient duet.

There is no music in the winter dark in Kansas.  Life hibernates and the few sounds are urban and incidental.  It is dark so early, but the darkness is not illuminated by snow and galaxies.  Instead, city lights muffle the sky, and only the brightest stars and planets are ever visible.  The visible Milky Way is a myth, and any moving lights are planes and helicopters instead of potential UFOs.  Imagination is lost on urbanization.  The beauty of the universe is packaged and boxed and shown only in school texts and television documentaries.

It is not much improved outside of the city.  There are no lights and the stars return, but the plains are desolate and dead.  Trees are scarce, and they are skeletons instead of majestic evergreens.  They die every fall and are reborn in the spring.  Everything does here.  It snows, but not enough, and the snow is gone quickly.  Ice is far more common, and every snowfall is guaranteed to blanket a substantial layer of ice.  The naked trees are weighed down with it and often break.  Broken, tired skeletons, longing for a spring not soon to arrive.  Everything is wet and dirty, tired and depressed.  Snow becomes slush once grounded, slush becomes ice, ice melts to become mud.

I miss the water.  I miss spontaneous hockey games and skiing through the forest at night to find the perfect stargazing spot.  I miss the thick blankets of fluffy snow that last for months at a time.  I cannot go back to those memories.  There is nothing for me in Michigan anymore.  Some family to visit, but there is no future there, only past.  My present is here in Kansas, but my future is to be determined.  For now, I'm trapped between desolate winters and scorching summers.  The unending flatness is my home now and for the foreseeable future.  I gave up beauty for stability.  I do not regret it, but sometimes I miss it terribly.  Sometimes I dream of snow-painted evergreen bows but wake up to bare branches perched on a lonely stretch of ashen earth.  The northern forests call to me, but I can only listen and not respond.  The calls will remain unheeded for now as I prepare myself for another Kansas winter.

Stream of Consciousness

Can't sleep.

Too much brain working, too many thoughts.  About what?  Nothing, as far as I can glean.  I'm foggy and wander from one thing to the next.  There is a pile of freshly washed diapers on the floor.  The baby happily pulled them off the couch and I haven't gotten around to taking them upstairs yet.  The cat is sitting on one of them.  Strange little cat, waiting for me to go to bed.  She never sleeps anywhere at night besides on my head.  Has for years.  Furry, purring, obnoxious, kneading away at my pillow.

My family is sleeping.  I left them upstairs playing Angry Birds on the smartphone.  They are dreaming while I am downstairs absently staring and channeling words through my tired fingers.  Is it late?  Not so bad, just before midnight, but such a long day it feels later.  Fasting and blood drawn before I could finally eat, and I've been hungry ever since.  I've been awake too long, and hungry for longer.  I've never been as hungry has I have the last ten months, but still slowly the weight falls off and now my pants are falling off with it.  I need to find my belts again, or at least my smaller pants.

There are toys everywhere down here in the basement.  Drums and gear bugs and plushies and things that make noise.  I am surrounded by drummers and my son is already showing aptitude for the musical arts.  He beats drums, and taps at the xylophone with purpose.  Perhaps it is just me.  We took video of him last night, and he played something beautiful.  Sleepy Time for Solo Vibraphone, composed by a ten-and-a-half month old boy, perceived a genius by his tired mother.  Beautiful and haunting, you cannot be out of tune when you play the vibes and that is part of the reason I love mallet percussion.

I used to be a decent mallet player, but my myoclonus mostly stripped me of that talent.  I twitch too much to be consistent.  I still play, but as a perpetual amateur.  I left the semi-professional group this season.  Too much work and stress and all I had to practice on at home was a vibraphone.  The spacing is different on the others.  I can't play piano anymore either.  My fingers are slow and I can't straighten all of them out.  Damned nerves, damaged by years of self-abuse and a long-misdiagnosed mitochondrial defect.

I haven't slept much lately.  I'm not as tired as I should be, but I am weary.  I can't think straight.  I try to nap, but just lay blankly and enjoy the warmth of my little boy cuddled next to me.  I don't think he is the reason I can't sleep.  He's big now, and I'm not afraid of crushing him anymore.  My husband still is afraid.  I hear noises and they keep me awake.  I solve puzzles and math problems in my head.  I've always done that.  I've always swung between narcolepsy and insomnia.  I exist on my own clock.  I can dream without sleeping and sleep without dreaming because my REM stage is abnormal.  I can dream while wide awake and aware that I am dreaming.  I can sleep while conversing and remember everything I said.

My cat is looking at me with tired eyes.  She taps me with a paw, begging me to stop typing and go to sleep.  I want to, I really do, but my brain has not shut down yet.  I sit, accomplishing nothing, nothing at all.  I breathe, I blink, I type but my motions are meaningless and automatic.  I want to sleep, I want to dream, but mostly I want to wake up feeling refreshed after a good night.  That last dream has never happened to me before, and likely never will.

Dreamtime

I lose time. Hours, days, weeks, months. I can remember them, but I don't feel like I was actively participating in them. Memories are dreamlike and I can't remember either beginning or end. I lost a week this time. I drifted mentally while doing everything I was supposed to, but I lived in a perpetual fog and acted automatically.

I have narcolepsy. I was diagnosed when I was twenty, at the end of my sophomore year of college. I was napping more than I was awake, hallucinating, and had been losing muscle control as a result of emotions since I was a child. I had a sleep study ordered by my neurologist and was diagnosed, and the diagnosis was reconfirmed when I was 26.


Damn it, it is two days later. I lost track not long into writing this. At least I've been working on my book a lot. It is another time-eater, but not a time-waster by any means.

I gave one of my major characters narcolepsy because it has only rarely been accurately described in fictional literature and on screen. He has my hallucinations, cataplexy, and time-loss. I even gave him my summer time experiment, where I spent a summer between classes sleeping when I was tired to see what my body clock would do. That was the summer right after I was diagnosed, and before I found a medication that worked at all. It was also the summer I wrote The Crystal Lattice.

I am currently unmedicated and have been for several years. I spent a lot of time on a medication called Provigil, but the side effects compromised my health. I was always jittery and never hungry so my weight dropped to 85 lbs. I switched to Ritalin after that, but the effect didn't last long enough and I developed a quick resistance to it. I tried Provigil again a couple years later on orders of a new doctor, but this time it irritated my stomach so much I couldn't keep anything down and my weight started to drop again. I am now just treating my primary coenzyme Q-10 deficiency (autosomal recessive mitochondrial disorder, diagnosed via muscle biopsy when I was 25), and the supplement treatment for that disorder has actually helped my narcolepsy enough that I am functional.

I still have cataplexy, and I still hallucinate. My husband told me I was frantically thrashing and yelling about bugs on the walls a week or so ago. I hallucinated giant butterflies one day in the park while playing frisbee. It doesn't happen very often, but it still happens. I also can lucid dream, hold conversations while dreaming, and am aware of my surroundings while my brain is registering REM on an EEG.

I don't think any of it is so bad. I am intensely creative and am able to be inspired by mundane things. I have an excuse to fall asleep in class, which was upheld by my alma mater's disability services when I was working on my bachelor's. It is not all bad, but my life is dreamtime and I never really know when the next attack will strike. I have a decent amount of control over it since my sleep attacks are overwhelming fatigue and not a sudden drop into sleep, but I don't drive more than 10 miles if I can help it. Narcolepsy is my normal, and though it would sometimes be nice not to have it, it is part of who I am.

Evergreen and Indigo

The name of this blog has quite a bit of significance to me. Evergreen and Indigo is the title of the 1st chapter in my fourth book Mayfly Requiem, which I am still transcribing. The story itself is completed, but I made the decision right away to hand write the entire thing, so I am now going through the tedious process of writing it out. The colors signify forests and the night sky, the two symbols of my own childhood. Mayfly Requiem is the story of a fallen immortal, written as both a confession and a series of letters to the narrator's sister, who is also an immortal. It deals with misplaced, misinterpreted, and mis-recorded history (history is written by the winners of wars and the politically strong), gods who are fallible and not much more than stronger beings than the humans they oversee, guilt over innocent actions having horrible consequences, and forgiveness, both of the self and of others.

Here is an excerpt from the chapter Evergreen and Indigo, the first of many second-person letters the narrator Lani writes to his sister Dia.

My first memory is of evergreen. Not the tree, but the color. It embraces me, caresses me, envelopes me in a furious glow. It is comfort. It is home, my home, our first home in Lusifal in the days before we knew who we really were. I still dream of it, but you are no longer part of those viriscent dreams, my dear. Our vines have been severed and now I can only dwell in the evergreen alone. There are so many things I choose not to remember, but so many more I am unable to forget.

Dia, I remember you telling me your own dreams were not green, but indigo, an overwhelming blue twilight lit by stars from within. It is your own, and I can't even imagine it. It is only one more thing that makes us different. I can not experience your twilight, and you can not feel my evergreen. These are always the realms we experience alone, though we often dream each other within them. We reinvent our childhoods in deep colors, but are forced to face reality the moment we open our eyes. You always handled it better than I did. You were always stronger than me. I envied you, envy you, for that. Maybe that is why my dreams are still evergreen.