zero hour

young Zeppo's prophetic vision

Last night I had a difficult time falling asleep.

I sat, staring at the ceiling for what felt like several hours.

Nothing new. As a life long insomniac, I am quite familiar with this feeling.

Being so exhausted that my body refuses to fall asleep.

Sitting there, trying to clear my mind of all thoughts... I was reminded of a specific night of sleeplessness and a specific dream that I had that night. A dream that has haunted me for all the intervening years since I first had it.

For context- the following dream is real. I am recounting to you a factual story of my life. It is worth noting that this dream took place long before the invention of certain things- most specifically YouTube, and its treasure trove of images. Before such videos as the following were easily found online:

Powers of Ten
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhofN1xX6u0

Plank Institute Millennium run
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UC5pDPY5Nz4

I make this point because in the years since the advent of YouTube and the posting of such imagery by filmmakers, I have been often accused of plagiarism, either knowing or unconscious. I have been called a liar. I have been frankly and coldly informed that I could only have dreamt the following dream if I had been exposed to those kinds of images before encountering them in my slumber BECAUSE according to these naysayers, dreams can only contain data which the mind has previously consumed from external sources.

Fuck those deniers and doubters. I know my truth. I know what happened. I know what I experienced.

The following is fact, and NOT fiction.

The first time I had this dream I was 14-years-old and in the height of puberty, hormones raging, emotions unstable, and all the general chaos that a person suffers during the worst of the worst of this biological right of passage.* The dream repeated itself every night for 7 nights and then stopped... never to repeat itself again... not at least until I was 33 years of age, at which point it returned to my dream life... but that is an entirely different story.

*A rite of passage is a ceremony and marks the transition from one phase of life to another. Although it is often used to describe the tumultuous transition from adolescence to adulthood, it does refer to any of life's transitions (Births and Beginnings, Initiations, Partnerings, and Endings or Death).

At the age of 14, I was already quite familiar with insomnia. I had been suffering its effects for most of the past 3 years, during which I honestly averaged about three nights a week of poor, shitty sleep, totaling 5 hours or less, with at least one night a week of absolutely ZERO HOURS of sleep. This was so common that I assumed everyone slept this poorly and simply didn't talk about it in public life.

On this particular night, I remember clearly having gone to bed somewhat early, in order to try and offset the usual delay in being able to unwind my mind enough to allow my body to shut down. I lay in bed, as still as possible, denying myself the usual restless activities of tossing and turning in frustration and grief at feeling that feeling that I would not sleep at all that night. Insomniacs always know, moments after crawling into bed, what level of shitty their night is about to be. In an effort to dominate my body with strict self control, I lay on my back, arms and legs akimbo, my eyes half open, my focus as soft as I could manage, regulating my breath to as steady of a rhythm as I could manage. After an hour or two of this, I felt at ease, deeply relaxed, and was beginning to feel sleepy. I tried not to think about it. The less I thought about it, the better.