STREAM.

Some people can go to sleep, slip asunder, whenever they desire, lay stonily at the nocturnal notch of their choosing. That's never been my case. My history of rest has been prismatic at best, a fractured spotlight of dream cycles and stages of semi- and unconsciousness. But living in a world of choices, of new ways to make good on old desires, all it takes is a little blue pill or a little red(dish) or white one, squarish, oblong, or so perfectly round it would make da Vinci weep as he stood before his easel, his arm poised at a right angle to his body, about to make good on the promise of π in a single deft motion. Sleep can be like that too, a quick, decisive choice, medicine taken, an easy pill swallowed. So perhaps it's ironic that my fear in this late era, in this early-yet century, is sleep itself. Deciding when to sleep often feels like pulling a trigger, as though the French were a little wrong about what they called "the little death." I have the child's fear of sleep. As much as I like dreaming, I cannot look forward, think ahead to it; all I feel when I consider sleep, particularly as a decisive act, is an unsettling sense of my own brief nonbeing. It makes me want to lie in the daylight, where the sun can remind me of its unending survey through the blood and tissue of my drawn eyelids.

"Now the world has gone to bed, Darkness won't engulf my head, I can see by infrared, How I hate the night."