I can be obtuse sometimes. Because the allergy medicine I've been taking has helped my symptoms, it took me several days to connect the dots that maybe my sleeplessness has also been a result of the drug. In fact, it was a comment yesterday on this blog from our fellow Blogstreamer Lady Blumoon that alerted me that it could be the medicine which is affecting me this way. I'd never taken an allergy pill before and wasn't aware of it. Thank you again, Maria.

Yes, there it is in black and white on the box: stop use and ask a doctor if nervousness or sleeplessness occur. I guess I wanted to feel better so much I didn't want to read that label again until this morning.

So I slept for only about 90 minutes last night, waking up at 2:30 a.m. from a nightmare in which I was exploring a vast and creepy cave bathed in a reddish light, where I was set upon by dark and grisly ape-like creatures. When I snapped awake (or semi-awake) and looked around my apartment, I thought I saw a spider hanging in front of the digital clock of my VCR. I haven't had a semi-hallucination like that since I was a kid, when I thought that the clown-face light switch in my bedroom was alive and screaming at me.

After I had tonight's nightmare, I was actually afraid to go back to sleep. That never happens to me, but I dreaded seeing more weird shit. I think a documentary I saw Thursday night at a friend's house about undersea creatures contributed to this bad dream, too. There was a scene with a monstrous squid attacking a man's face. It was like a scene from a horror movie, but it was for real.

I guess I'll have to stop taking this medicine until I can talk to the doctor after the holiday. Or better yet, I'm just going to go back to sniffling a bit and sleeping through the night instead.

There's a good reason why I don't like having insomnia. I really need to take a break from my own company. I can only stand myself for about 16-18 hours max, then I have to sleep.

So I got out of bed after tossing and turning for two hours, dressed, and fetched coffee and a roll at a nearby 24-hour diner. The roll was stale, though, because the joint hadn't gotten the delivery of fresh rolls yet.

I'm still finishing my coffee as I type this. Got a large cup.

I'll probably be able to lay down and sleep for awhile, now that it's light out. But when it was dark, and when I'd just awakened from that dream, the street outside my window seemed so incredibly noisy and jumpy. I'd left the window open because it's warm, and besides the car horns and whoosh of the tires and grinding of the garbage trucks and the late night revelers whooping and laughing, I could actually hear birds chirping. I didn't realize before that birds chirp in the dead of night. And that was kind of unsettling.

When I looked around my dark apartment after the nightmare, I realized that it has a resemblance to a cave, with my stacks of books and magazines resembling stalagmites jutting up from the floor. And the street lamp light slipping in through the blinds and painting the edges of my books reminded me of a similar light illuminating the huge cave in my dream.

Oh, I couldn't get to sleep for anything. I tried to analyze backward the plot of a mystery novel I finished last night at dinner, hoping that would weary my brain; but it didn't work. Then I recalled the images of women's cleavage I saw on the street last evening--the many jiggly bosoms of the twenty- and thirtysomething gals in their revealing blouses as they walked teasingly displayed yet simultaneously distant and untouchable. That didn't make me sleepy either. Maybe I should have counted sheep...

In an odd way, though, sleeplessness acts like a tranquillizer on me, like an anti-depressant, and I almost feel a little more serene than usual...

Still, I could deal with my usual depression in exchange for a little more shut-eye.

I better get some strippers back into this blog or I might have to change the title soon. But I didn't enjoy my most recent trip to the club last Friday, and with my recent financial worries as a freelancer I am reluctant to spend money on anything less than a sure thing...a DVD of a movie I love, for example, is a sure thing. I guess DVDs are winning the battle for my soul this week over the strippers...in a war that truly never ends...

However, the streets of Manhattan are a sure thing for casual voyeurism when it gets warm like it was today. I saw so much plunging cleavage when I was walking down the street, because it seems that women of all stripes like to show off their tits now. In a way it's depressing, because it's taken the thrill away. Plunging cleavage used to have a meaning; a woman employed it usually for a special purpose; now it's just mundane...

It seems to me that for all the drama around us, everything has become more mundane in this world of ours...I wonder if that's true, or just my jaded perception.

Another half-sleepless night. I wonder why. I went to bed around 11:30, read an interesting novel for a short while, then fell asleep only to wake up at 3:00 a.m. I was dreaming that someone had offered me a very lucrative freelance job, but at a sadistically impossible deadline--and I snapped awake, feeling very anxious, the much-needed lucrative fee only a mirage out of my grasp. I could not get back to sleep, and finally got out of bed around five. Now, even after two cups of coffee, I feel exhausted.

I'm taking an allergy medication, and I wonder if that has anything to do with this sleeplessness. Maybe after I blog I'll sit down on my couch and try to doze for a little while.

The weather has been beautiful all week but I haven't been able to really enjoy it, because I've been feeling so tired and stressed...and, well, old. Uncharacteristic for me, I also forgot the birthdays of two people I know. Me, who can still remember the birthday of a girl I had a crush on in junior high school!

I'm supposed to get together with some film buff friends tonight to watch a vintage movie or tv show, but at the rate I'm going, I don't know if I'll be able to stay awake past nine p.m.

I badly need to recharge my batteries this weekend. Maybe I should start my weekend today...? After all, what's the point of being a freelance worker if I can't cut myself a break every now and then when it's feasible?

I did get a good night's sleep last night. I sure needed it. I had my breakfast and set down to work here in the city today--and had a productive enough day, met my self-established quota of freelancer's accomplishment, nothing earth-shattering but just responsibly efficient. Talked to a couple of my friends briefly on the phone, then went out for a walk before the sun set. Had pasta and a glass of white wine for dinner. I have to be grateful for a calm day, I think.

I wish I could find more to write about tonight, but I am feeling inhibited, like I'm clamming up. Perhaps it will pass. I don't even feel like writing about the DVDs I've been watching, or the noir novels I've been reading. Well, most of the flicks and fiction are pretty grim, so perhaps I don't want to relive them. Anyway, I seem to be pressed up against a brick wall. Little things take a lot of effort. I feel inertia; sometimes I have to will myself to stand up from the couch or chair. In fact, when I'm doing my work is the only time when I feel pleasantly outside of myself, when I can forget myself.

Too bad that I can't drink from a spring of forgetfulness like Steve Reeves did in Hercules Unchained, and be spirited off to the island of the seductive Omphale, Queen of Lydia. But even that would have a downside. Omphale would have her amnesiac lovers mummified when she was done with them.

Over the years I've occasionally had a dream where I am confronted with a red brick wall, behind which there is a blue sky. Maybe I'm in the process of trying to either break through, or climb over, that metaphorical wall.

Talk about synchronicity. Last night I couldn't write anything that I felt was worth reading, and I got up from the computer without posting and I thought, "I'm tired of writing about myself." But that really wasn't the problem, as an article in the New York Times this morning helped clarify.

The article is called "This is Your Life (and How You Tell It)", by Benedict Carey, in the Science section. I would put a link but you'd probably have trouble accessing it unless you can log into the Times website. You can probably find it more quickly through a roundabout search via Google.

The point of the article was that the way we perceive and tell our life stories, whether anecdotally in conversation or, say, to a therapist, shows what our current mental state is, how far (or not far) we've come from the past, and the way we're likely to think and act in the future. I think this thesis applies to blog writing as well. What I've been having a problem with myself here is feeling tired of my cranky approach to things, tired of hearing myself bemoaning and criticizing this and that; so what I was really tired of was my tone, rather than this endlessly fascinating character Sir Cranky. Because how could I ever get tired of him, class?? (No need for a show of hands.)

I've been trying to be more stoical, more Richard Conte or Charles Bronson or Toshiro Mifune than Sir Cranky, but I haven't been sleeping well, and the various stresses of money worries and exhaustion were getting me down. And lately I've been very critical of things in my work, a sure sign I need to clear my head. Will I clear my head? The suspense is Hitchcockian, given my bad track record at this. But I'm looking forward to this holiday weekend. I'm going to try to do some housecleaning, because the clutter is getting on my nerves, and I always feel better when I throw out some junk or bring stuff to my storage space. It's therapeutic. Underneath the dust mask, I smile and glow, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

I woke up today at 3:50 a.m. and couldn't get back to sleep, so it's been a long day. I hope tonight I will sleep through until morning...

On another front, I read an item in Cindy Adams' gossip column in the New York Post today that Leonardo Di Caprio and Kate Winslet will star in a movie based on the 1961 Richard Yates novel Revolutionary Road. Although I found director Sam Mendes' earlier film American Beauty too facile, maybe he'll do better with this movie. I think Leo could do a great job with the complex role of a self-pitying married man in the 1950s who can't believe he's just an ordinary guy and not the creative artist of his dreams. Likewise, his wife suffers from similar disappointments. Revolutionary Road is one of the greatest books I ever read, definitely in the top ten. It is unsparingly honest, incredibly sad, but so beautifully done you are lifted up by it. The marriage of the two characters disintegrates in an awful manner, but the way the story is told is amazing. Poor Richard Yates suffered to write this well; a terrific biography from a few years ago, A Tragic Honesty by Blake Bailey, told his life story in detail. I've often wondered why a movie was never made of Revolutionary Road, and I think it has a fair shot at excellence, especially with Di Caprio. So that is fine bit of news. The movie is being filmed now, for release in 2008; but I would recommend reading the book above all. Or if you just want a taste of Yates to whet your appetite for his novel, read his hilarious story "Doctor Jack O'Lantern" in The Collected Stories of Richard Yates. The man could write funny as well as gloomy.