Peaceful sleep awaits me in Dreamland
This is a newsletter about night terrors and collage and time management
This past month and a half, I’ve been desperately trying to find the cure to something that is not curable: night terrors triggered by living in a state that is clearly, obviously, no longer hiding it, fascist.
A therapist I saw years ago suggested that I should repeat affirmations before I went to bed: I am safe, I am not in danger, etc. Those were never very helpful, but even now I tell myself at night: demons reside in real people, but they cannot hurt me.
The collage I have shared above was inspired by an odd inscription that Danny Lavery recently found in a second-hand copy of Care of the Soul by Thomas Moore. In the front cover is a list of affirmations, ending in “peaceful sleep awaits me in dreamland”; this, paired with the back cover inscriptions, “hell / a nightmare / show me hell and give me a nightmare”, presented an obvious visual juxtaposition. I stole the images from old copies of the New Yorker to create the varied textures of darkness during a night terror.1 You will also see in the collage a photo of a wildfire from an article about the climate crisis, and some birds, in homage to Goya’s The sleep of reason produces monsters.
The theme of time management often crops up in my art practice. I have started reading Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, an anti-time-management manifesto for actually enjoying your life while you are living it. It has prompted me to reflect on how often to-do lists and deadlines are themes in my terrors: I almost always wake up, fearful that I haven’t done something by a certain time. Sometimes it is midnight, sometimes it is 3am. The same therapist once asked me why 3am, and all I could think was that this was the time that almost all queer dance parties ended.
Ritual and routine (which feel very different to the dreaded time management) have, along with prazosin, been crucial in reducing the likelihood of a night terror. Another important routine that I have introduced into my life recently is that of this newsletter: I found I couldn’t keep up with a once-a-month missive, and so against logic I have increased it to a weekly email, written and sent on Fridays.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this newsletter! Feel free to reach me by replying to this email.
In a digital age, I am always looking for printed material to make collages with. If any of you have anything good, maybe you could mail it to me, and I will cover the cost of postage. I am a big fan in particular of trade catalogs - the owl in the collage came from a travel agent’s promotional magazine. ↩