I have trouble falling asleep at night, so I've learned the art of extremely detailed fantasizing. I don't mean smutty stuff. I just mean escapism. I try to picture things in excruciating detail(temperature, wallpaper pattern, etc...)that seem relaxing. This week, it's been a ski chalet vacation a la the afforementioned original Pink Panther. The one with David Niven. I just love the whole ambiance of that movie.
They aren't very exciting fantasies, since they are meant to be relaxing I guess. Once, I imagined having a chat with Woody Harrelson and Owen Wilson. We had dinner and I ordered a piece of cake for dessert. We talked about Texas and movies. They asked me if I wanted to continue the evening at an outdoor party with them, but I opted to go back to my hotel room early and have a bath and watch a movie and call it an early night. Yes, I am a boring introvert, even in my imagination.
Sometimes, I just picture weather. A cloudy sky or snow falling. Welcome, ladies and gentlemens, to the inner world of my mind. It's that uninteresting. Well what do you picture? Unicorns on lakes of gold, holding hoofs with striped elephants and chocolate covered leprechauns engaging in ultimate fighting championships? You do? That's pretty awesome actually. Good for you!
That sure as shit, would not get me to sleep at night though.
I remember the the 3 or 4th night, in the hospital, after Leon was born. We had been moved to a shared room with another couple. I was delirious from lack of sleep. Every time I would close my eyes, my brain would think of ridiculous scenarios and fevered plays on words that would crack me up. I would shut my eyes and start laughing and snorting and guffawing. Must have been annoying for the other woman.
My first tendency now, when I close my eyes, is to imagine all the possible horrors that await me as a mother. All the things I have to worry about possibly happening to the little Sasquatch. That's why I need to drown out those thoughts with very very detailed daydreams. It's called being crazy.
L is napping again at the moment. I shall go close my eyes, picture a particularly tasty bowl of ice cream and maybe a rainstorm and see if I can't get a new song in my head. Oh, that was another one that haunted me for a couple of weeks actually: New Song by Howard Jones. Probably started that exact way, by me saying: Gawd! I need a new song in my head! Not such a bad song to have combating catastrophic thinking...
Throw off your mental chains! Oooh, ooh ooh.
Will that ever come back in style I wonder? Dudes wearing big fuzzy sweaters with a belt and puffy pants rolled at the ankle? Actually, it's sort of still going strong with a certain genre of pan flute playing, "gypsy" type Quebec dudes. Swarthy ones with long curly hair who only wear sandals and have Guatemalan girl friends. These are dudes you just don't find in the rest of Canada...unless they are orginally from Quebec in the first place...
Ah crap! I missed the nap opportunity. L is up! Gotta go.
1 comment:
Oh yeah, I'd forgotten about the pickle factory.
Do you remember the Toronto years when Johnny and I came by your workplace and said we were trying to imagine a great thing to do tonight? We'd imagined a big party with lots of interesting people.
And you said, that's the greatest thing you can think of? Why not flying to Neptune on a banana?
I have laughed about that periodically for a decade now.
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