My dreams are so vivid, so passionate. How many times in the past year or so have I woken myself up because I was laughing or crying or screaming in my dreams? It’s a lot. I’ve chronicled many of them here. I have such passionate dreams; such life in my tiny deaths.

I’ve wondered frequently why. Why do I have such deep, emotion-laden dreams? Why can I read syntax, feel contours, and understand inside jokes in short films my mind plays for me when I should be resting? Why do I unravel great mysteries and tackle life’s biggest hurdles while I fitfully wrestle around on the couch in the dark?

And, furthermore, why is it referred to as fitfully? Because I’ve been sleeping fitfully for the better part of a year and I am no more full of fit. If anything, I’m gaining weight.

Sorry, but I can’t pass up a terrible pun.

Anyway, I think I’ve finally figured out why my dreams are so intense: it’s because my waking life isn’t.

I lead a predominantly passionless existence. I care for few, I get excited by little, and I anticipate close to nothing. I wake up everyday in a world where Donald J Trump is our President, so already I feel like I’m living in an existentialist cartoon, and coupled with the fact that I fear that all of human existence will come tumbling down with ne’er more than a Tweet, I can’t bring myself to feel anything in this world.

I used to look at the state of our current trajectory and think “Well, it can’t get any worse.” Now, every day, it does. Every day I hear something worse. Every day he says something more ridiculous, the rift between neighbors grows deeper, truth and integrity mean less and less, and the Doomsday clock needles closer and closer to oblivion.

So now I face each day telling myself “Well, it can’t get any better,” and I just live like that.

Every.

Fucking.

Day.

It takes a conflagration to make me angry. It takes an ethereal miracle to make me smile. These statements seem hyperbolic, and they purposely are, because the level of dramatic tension I am living in demands nothing short of cataclysmic interpersonal conflicts relegated to Mark Burnett-level programming. The world I am living in is the direct descendent of desensitization, isolationism, and screen-worship. I am living in the Millennial Nightmare and there is no escape. To invest in it, feel it, or even acknowledge it would mean certain abandonment of the human condition.

So, no, I don’t give a fuck. About anything. Not because I’m uncaring, but because eating of the fruit currently offered me is assured suicide, and I refuse.

My lifespan is a horror film and this is the part where the squeamish should shut their eyes, and I count myself among them. I’m forty years old, so by my Syd Field-timeline, we should be toward the beginning of the third act. At this point, the conflict is at its apex, setting the stage for the protagonist to clench its fists and prepare for the climax. It’ll be hairy, so as the viewer, go ahead and keep your eyes shut for a while. Peer through your fingers occasionally to ensure you don’t miss the best shit, but rest assured that soon the film will return to the character-driven affirmation that you tuned in for.

Soon, I believe, I will return to a life that leaves my dreams pale in comparison. For now, for the time being, I will close my eyes and wait for this Nightmare to end, and live in my dreams, if need be.

I like this song.