the witching hour
I'm awake at the witching hour, again. My internal clock allows me to sleep until just around 3 and then rouses me to greet the day in the spooky early light. There's something really magical about this semi-dark pre-dawn glowing grey world, just starting to be sprinkled with bird chatter. I'm poised between drowsiness and an early-morning buzz (no caffeine required.)
Lack of sleep sometimes leads to psychosis. In the Staying Well Plan that my CPN encouraged me to devise, I cited sleeplessness as the most likely factor to topple me back into that foreign land. My first psychotic episode erupted out of a miserly sleep routine. Back then my days were spent being a mum and my evenings spent being exhausted from a day spent being a mum. The only time I could carve out for myself was first thing in the morning, and I craved it – so greedily that I set my clock earlier and earlier; earlier and earlier until one fateful day my vision began to vibrate and the PC screen I stared at erupted into sentience. From there I took my first step along the road to mayhem.
Conversely, a good long sleep can quell the storm of a frazzled mind. There's something utterly soothing about blacking out into slumber, leaving one's troubles and frettings to the side. I remember landing up in hospital, and just sleeping, and sleeping, and sleeping – trying desperately to absent myself from the clinical, institutional surroundings. Or was I just drugged into oblivion? It all rolls together in my memory...
Sleep brings dreams, and psychosis sometimes feels like a waking dream. It holds the same bizarre atmosphere, unfolds with the same uncanny logic. Like the witching hour, it contains magic, and potential, spinning around in a dizzy dance, narrating a curious story. It draws one along into all kinds of weirdness; contains an allure that lingers in one's imagination, whispering secrets and beckoning one to join in.
I'm awake once again at the witching hour... awake, asleep, dreaming... until it all blends together into a single continuous thread, leading me through the labyrinth, out into the early-morning light...
Photo by Shyam on Unsplash