About 10 years ago, I suddenly realized that I was shaped like a couch cushion. I drank too much beer and had the diet of a fourteen-year-old who’d been allowed to choose his own daily menu. I ate frozen things from boxes. My blood must have been 40% hotdog and 20% fish stick.  

I decided to make a change. I started working out, cut out bread and elevators, drank beer only once a week, and embraced ideals like disciple, hunger, and misery. I set Saturday as Cheat Day. The idea was that I could eat what I wanted on Cheat Day if I was good all week. Anyway, it worked and I lost a lot of weight. And for a long while I could see my toes from my face with no mirror middleman. Sitting down in tight pants didn’t take the planning and organization of D-Day. Life was good.

After a few years, like democracy in America, I backslid. Stressful day? Pizza. Thursday before a long weekend? Celebrate with mashed potatoes tonight. Buttery mashed potatoes. Don’t feel like cooking? Have a sandwich. One? No, how about two? Awesome. I had long grown out of my drink-when-stressed days and had settled comfortably into a carbohydrate coping system. Slowly Cheat Day became just Day. Anyway, it worked and I gained back a bunch of weight.

This became apparent a few weeks ago when I passed out while trying to button some pants I hadn’t worn in a while. This was coupled with other signs. In an attempt to help my dog get a little exercise, I make her jump up on the couch and chair for piskoty to add a wee physical challenge. I’d hole a piskoty above the couch and she’d jump up, then the same on one chair and then the other. After a day, she got the pattern and I felt as chuffed and arrogant as a suited fellow in Westminster running through an obstacle course.

The next day, I spotted the slice of pizza Burke had hidden for me atop the kitchen cabinets. I climbed up there and got it, feeling proud in my ability to beat the scavenger hunt. An hour later, locating and grabbing the Snicker’s bar taped to the ceiling light fixture, I called to her across the flat that she was making it too easy. Later that night, doing a jab-uppercut duo on a punching bag in order to win some French fries that Burke had set up for me, it all became clear.

As I munched those fries (I had won), it occurred to me that it was time to get back to my healthy lifestyle. We decided on a reversal of policy. The return to the days of yore, when Cheat Day was Saturday and every other day was void of bread, carbs, sugar, and happiness. I had done it before; I could do it again.

As a kid, I spent a great deal of time outlining in detail the contents of my dreams to those around me. If you’re assuming those numbers plummeted throughout my early life, your assumption would be correct. And, though I’m not exactly certain of the numbers on household murders immediately following the detailed recounting of a dream, I’m sure they’re in the high nineties.

And, yet, somehow I made it to adulthood, where I still hadn’t grasped the idea that one’s dreams are only interesting to them. Oh sure, we all want to hear a dream if it’s graphic in a sexual or violent nature. Our curiosity is piqued if someone we have a crush on might let on that we made an appearance in their deep sleep theater, more so if we weren’t wearing pants. Otherwise, the social rules are: keep your dreams to yourself and we won’t hit you in the face with a shoe.

With that being said, what follows now is a mild foray into my current dream life. So if you stumbled onto this blog and are now regretting it, I hold no hard feelings if you run away to the warm, comforting arms of Instagram, Facebook, or one of those websites that gives you a real time ticker on all the lies that Donal Trump tells. Otherwise, enter at your own risk.

In the last few years, my workload was increased immeasurably. This is good in some ways – i.e. I have money to buy and eat food. It’s also less good in some ways – i.e. anxiety has become like a drunken roommate who steals my waffles in the middle of the night. And this anxiety has also invaded other areas of my life.

Over Christmas, a time of peace, relaxation, reflection, quiet, and serenity, I took to waking up around 3 am in a sweaty panic and walking around the house trying to remember what it was I was supposed to do. Though I can’t – and never can – recall the task in detail, I do know it was a weird and complicated task. Nothing so straightforward as calling someone or sending an email. No. My dream task involved esoteric steps, just-out-of-reach visuals, and clandestine reasons.

Others get a dream lover, some smooth-bodied sex god(dess) to soothe their real-life troubles and pleasure their dream bodies and spirits. If those people wake up early, it’s usually with a smile on their faces. I get a dream job and dream tasks delegated from some nameless, faceless, voiceless entity like the little box that signifies ‘the board’ in Severance. A while after waking, I do become vaguely aware that I don’t have dream tasks, but there is still that niggling something in the back of my head – some lever I have to pull, a checklist whose points I had to tick off. This anxiety doesn’t dissipate upon waking. 

So, when Burke asked me at 3:10 am on December 23^rd what exactly I was doing holding my tablet up against the Christmas tree, my answer “well, I have to find the . . . do the thing by morning . . . that had to be done before the day . . . yesterday when the thing was sent” didn’t exactly clear things up.

Our university’s testing period lasts about five weeks. Five weeks of very little teaching, very little student interaction, very little day-to-day face-to-face worry. It took about three and a half of those weeks for me to unwind enough to stop getting dream tasks in my dream job. But we started back to school last Monday.

Around 3 am, I awoke in a sweaty mess (pillow saturated, just like in the movies). I then embarked in a small journey around my flat, checking windows and bookshelves. The cat raised her head from her bed on the couch and asked me with her eyes: what you doing, old man? I had no real answer, I think I said something like “Good morning, B Monster, see I’m just practicing for my old age, a period of life towards which I am careening with the hopes that I might get some sleep then.”

The cat found my explanation lacking.