They keep striking me in the morning, long before I would normally get up. But then I get up anyway, because I don’t want to risk sleeping again, and so I end up losing sleep.
This story actually starts several weeks ago, though.
I don’t normally listen to the radio, but lately I’ve turned it on when I’m on my commute to the museum or to campus, because both drives take about an hour, and sometimes I get too mired in my own thoughts if I don’t have something to distract me just a little. (And my car doesn’t have a CD player, and it certainly doesn’t have a line-in for an MP3 player.) So I turned on the radio one day, and the DJ was talking about the song that had just ended, and he was saying something along the lines of “That’s the only song I know of that’s about a man blowing his brains out. But don’t hold that against it!” And I thought to myself how very glad I was that I hadn’t turned on the radio a few minutes earlier.
Then about a week ago, I heard a song that was eerie and unsettling, but I was distracted and didn’t catch all the lyrics, especially towards the end. I’m sure you can see where this is going, but at the time if I thought about what that DJ had said earlier, it slid right back out of my brain again.
I heard the song again a day or two ago, and that time it definitely occurred to me that it might be that song, so I decidedly tried not to pay attention to the lyrics towards the end.
But my brain apparently hates me.
Early this morning, my brain decided to play the song to me in my dreams (keep in mind, I’ve only heard it twice, don’t know its name or even who recorded it!) and made sure that I couldn’t mistake its meaning by also presenting it with an animated(!) “music video” that was every bit as unsettling as the song itself.
I’ve been off all day as a result, trying everything to get that song back out of my head. I even watched “Red Dwarf A-to-Zed” in the hopes that the Rimmer song (one of the most insidiously invasive songs ever) would kick it out, but it didn’t help for long.
In part, I blame the thunderstorm for the nightmare. It woke me up about 3:00 a.m.-ish. And the last time I’d had a nightmare, a thunderstorm had played a very large role in it, and I unconsciously started thinking about it, and that probably set my brain against me. (I am not going to write about that other nightmare right now, though. Unlike this one, which was merely creepy, that one was genuinely terrifying, and I’m not recovered enough yet. I plan on using it in a book at some point. Y’know, once I’ve gotten over it.)
