Strands

One

I love my GP's surgery. It's a five-minute walk around the corner, tucked away inside a community centre, and always immensely peaceful. The most people I've seen in the waiting room at any one time is three - a far cry from the over-subscribed circus Leo and Alba attend.

The GP herself is marvellous. Her bedside manner has struck exactly the right balance between matter-of-fact and sympathetic; too much of either tends to intimidate me. I visited her yesterday for a duplicate medical certificate, an update on my counselling referral, and more medication. She gave me an extension on my certificate without my needing to ask, apologised for the long waiting list for counselling services, and corrected my repeat prescription to show my correct dosage. I was in the surgery less than five minutes. My GP seems to be the exception that proves the rule within the NHS.

I collected my medication from the awful pharmacist, who looked far from pleased to have a customer so close to closing time. Earlier today, the Jobcentre faxed my certificates to head office whilst I waited - taking no risks this time - and later sent me a text message to confirm that my back payments would be released within three working days. I won't feel a sense of relief until the money enters my account, but the promise is there.

Two

Truman has been over several times since I cleaned up his room. Unfortunately, my own hatred of conflict barred me from confronting him about the mess he left, but Leo conveyed the message for me. No apology has been forthcoming yet, but this comes as no surprise.

Meanwhile, Truman is already regretting his hasty decision. Both Poison Ivy and the person in whose flat they are staying - an old enemy of Leo's - are frustrating him to no end. I can happily report that Leo has told him to lie in the bed he's made for himself.

Three

Since writing that I neither have bad dreams nor recurring themes from night to night, I have experienced both. I dreamed that I had killed a monstrous person in self-defence, and was running from two things: the police, and the dark fog slowly covering the city. Despite my overwhelming guilt, the people I met all sympathised with me and hid me from the police, but the fog was awful. It moved slowly, mockingly, in that near-sentient way it does in horror movies. It was inescapable and evil.

The next night, I dreamed I was ill and unable to walk, so I had to be driven everywhere by my family. We left the house in the middle of the day only to confronted with the darkness and the fog again. More horrifying still, the fog was somehow refracting the moonlight so that there appeared to be three full moons overlapping each other in the sky. I've been disconcerted by dreams about planets appearing too large in the night sky before, but combined with the creeping fog from the night before, those three moons absolutely terrified me, even upon waking.

I am considering starting to write a dream diary to help with analysis. Perhaps it would be useful.

Sleep

Sleep has never come easy to me. I don't understand how or why it works (who does?) so the act of falling asleep is something I've always been uneasy with. Since my teens, I have had to talk myself to sleep - literally talk nonsense to myself until sleep takes over - unless I can listen to an audiobook, music or a movie in bed. This might suggest an insecurity with sleeping alone, but until I left the family home I shared a bedroom with my sister Alba, who was always asleep long before I even felt settled. It has been the same with every friend I have had stay the night in my room, and every partner with whom I have shared a bed - with the notable exception of Leo, when we shared a sleeping space. Perhaps under my influence, even he cannot sleep without an audiobook these days.

Yet here is what I find most odd about my need for auditory stimuli - I cannot
remain asleep without one. If I have company, which in most cases renders my usual sleep-finding techniques impossible, I will wake up frequently throughout the night. Sometimes my eyes will pop open for a minute or less before I doze again; other times I will stare into the dark until someone else wakes up.

Some nights I do not sleep at all. Roughly one week in six - again, true since I was a teenager - I enter that surreal, distant daze in which I lose depth perception and the world becomes an artwork by Takashi Murakami: "superflat". Tiredness becomes bodily irrelevant yet all-consuming. My actions become automatic, limbs moving on muscle memory alone. I am there, but not there; physically there but mentally far away, in a dense and foggy place.

For the other five weeks in the cycle, my sleep would be as normal, provided the absence of silence in which to sleep. Yet this too changed when I was first prescribed antidepressants. Now the cycle has become bipolar; I have weeks where I sleep too much. I have started to lose entire days to my bed, and once awake I am constantly weary - yet not in the insomniac superflat sense. All three dimensions remain present, but I cannot summon the energy to function. Where movement becomes automatic when not sleeping, it becomes impossible when I can do nothing but. Going to the bathroom becomes Herculean, feeding myself unfathomable. Hunger makes me weaker and wearier still, yet my mind goes into overdrive whilst my body refuses to cooperate - in true opposition to my insomniac phases.

Periods of hypersomnia are only one of two changes my medication has wrought upon my sleep. Previously, my phases of insomnia were preceded by several nights of very vivid dreams, from which I could recall details of people, conversations and surroundings for days afterward. Now, these dreams are constant. They are rarely unpleasant and almost never carry a theme from one night to the next - except for a few nights last month, in which I dreamed of being late for school each night, albeit in different circumstances and company in each one. I feel sorry for people who claim they do not dream, dislike to dream or cannot remember their dreams. I enjoy dreaming and deciphering their symbology upon awakening. On some occasions I have been capable of lucid dreaming, an experience as fascinating as it is amusing. Unlike the effect of hypersomnia, I have no complaints about my enhanced dreaming abilities.

One last observation: whatever I listen to as I sleep has no intrusion whatsoever on my dreams. One of my particular favourite "sleepytime stories" is the inimitable Stephen Fry reading the Harry Potter novels, yet I have never dreamed of so much as a single house elf.

I wonder, though, how common a cyclical sleep pattern like this is. I am trouble enough to my doctor already without raising an issue that truly only affects me two weeks of every six. There are bigger fish to fry first.