"As long as my spirit permits / There will be no fucking rest!" --Dimmu Borgir, "The Heretic Hammer"
I love sleep. But I hate the necessity of it.
I love it, for it has given me many gifts. Primarily, the gift of dreams--the voice through which my subconscious may speak freely, without fear of being filibustered by my conscious mind, or drowned out by bothersome sensory input gleaned from an inconvenient world. Many strange, wonderful, and haunting things have come to me in dreams. Most were fleeting amusements--some were terrible nightmares--and a precious few have been grasped by my conscious mind, and woven into works wrought in the waking world.
Sleep also grants recuperation and reprieve, both physical and mental. It allows the body a chance to heal and grow, and affords the mind a rest from the challenges of constant analysis. Without sleep, one's already tenuous sanity cannot remain intact--a fact that allows "eccentrics" such as myself to justify prolonged periods of slumber.
As though dreams and healing were not gifts enough, there is sleep itself--seductive and delicious. At 4AM, I cannot justify taxing my brain with the effort necessary to describe it further--but I do not need to. Like me, anonymous reader, you sleep. Like me, anonymous reader, you are already intimately familiar with the seductive touch of slumber.
I love sleep. But I hate the necessity of it.
"An artist is a creature driven by demons," said William Faulkner. "He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why." I am all too familiar with the truth of this statement. Underneath my calm, slightly deranged exterior seethes a roaring inferno of ambition, spurring me ever forward to achieve--or at least attempt--new things. Because of this inferno, the concept of resting on one's laurels is alien to me. I can take pride in the things I have accomplished, but I can never remain content for long. Always, I must embark on a new project--the fire within will not be appeased until I do.
This ambition, this black fire, I once called both a blessing and a curse. It has aspects of both, but having matured, I now view at is neither--I view it as a simple fact. It is a blessing, because it moves me to accomplish great things. It is the purest, most effective cure for inertia--it is the polar opposite of stagnation. Without it, I would accomplish very little, and that little by mere chance. But ambition is the cruelest of taskmasters, and those who do not learn to work with it are condemned to be broken by it. Before I learned to temper my fire by keeping my feet on the path of progress, I denounced it for a cruel curse, a seed of malice planted in my heart to one day bloom into flames, and burn me out from within.
Now, I embrace that fire. There are times it roars within my chest, a raging inferno, warming every fiber of my being as I move forward with a ferocity matched by few. There are times it wanes, its flickering coals hissing as they are doused by buckets of water labeled Setback and Defeat. But it is a fire that will never be extinguished. I have a restless nature because of it, and while I at times talk wistfully of adopting a calm, peaceful existence, the truth is that I love the restless nature of the black flame, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
"The sky's the limit", it's been said, but even the most driven of individuals has a limitation that simply cannot be shaken--the need to sleep. It's no wonder that death has often been compared to sleep--nor is it any wonder that most of those drawing that comparison have it backwards, since the average moron lacks the black flame within to reveal the truth that it is sleep that is comparable to death.
As I write, the hour groweth late, and my body groweth weary. The fire within, however, is burning bright, and I am wide awake. It is nights like these where I despise the necessity of sleep. I conquered my need for naps during the day after the age of two, aside from a few rare instances where serious illness or extreme exhaustion have forced my protesting body to shut down for a while. But try as I might, I cannot escape my body's demands for its nightly preview of death.
I love sleep. But I hate the necessity of it. And that necessity is upon me now.
Farewell, anonymous reader. Good night... or, if you prefer, have a pleasant preview of your future demise.
Posts
