circadian

My head is clamouring: too many undreamt thoughts, too many late nights extending to sunrise. Ideas take on new meaning at these hours. Brain becoming sharp with exhaustion, focussing on pinpoints, and words begin to seem luminous with clarity and imagined insight; bed noting the imprint of me, the dimpled warm soaked in books and sleep; water and suddenly the purity of it is astonishing, the light sluicing though it incandescent. There's birdsong outside and a half-written essay eating at the back of my mind, but I'm too full of abstracts and nonsense to work, unable to control the incessant stream of consciousness. Is it possible to dream awake, I wonder? to sort and process subliminal imagery with the body still active, churning out half-visions from a corner of the mind?

My hands are shaking and my reflection looks strangely young, pink-mouthed and wideeyed. This is the third night in a fortnight now, insomnia keeping me on the brink between sleep and work and frustratingly unable to do either. I'm full of words; in my head they're full of meaning, but as soon as I try to form them they become ridiculous. (Like that dream where I write the perfect novel, re-reading it with wonder and joy and forcing myself to remember every detail until I wake in a frenzy of excitement, scribble it all down, and finally stare at the page as I realise the plot is random, mundane, meaningless. The mood of it lingers though, something intangibly sweet and pure at the back of memory, waiting to be fleshed out and fulfilled.)

Lying there unsleeping, I keep taunting myself with imagined suffering: violence and - worse - loss. It's been a night-time habit as long as I can remember, the tentative visualisations of death and more importantly the reactions to it, exposing myself to my own potential grief like pressing a bruise to see if it hurts. I don't know if it's to emotionally defend myself against the possibility or something more self-indulgent, but I've reduced myself to tears with the imaginary death of a loved one, how it must feel: the immediate tightness, the hardness, the unbearable internal ache. It's never happened and I don't know why I torment myself with the thought of it. It's only at this hour, this strange breed of madness at four am, the lowest point of the diurnal cycle when you're physically weakened and everything seems to hum. At this time of night I loathe myself.