Dream A (CRAZY) Little Dream...

I'm not going to lie to you, dear reader.  Life has not been easy in Emma Land, recently.  There are things getting me down and whilst this is most definitely not the place to talk about those things, it's the ideal place to tell you about a bizarre side-effect of dealing with said things.

Wow.  I said "things" a lot, there.

The trouble is, my brain being the irritating beast that it is, I can't just go to bed at night and control my thoughts enough to ensure that I don't end up staring at the ceiling, thinking stuff through until none of it makes sense and my mind is close to imploding.  At the moment, I'm liable to go to bed and lie there for hours, going over and over situations and conversations, until I'm thoroughly confused and usually, incredibly miserable.

YAY, ME!

I hate my habit of overthinking everything.  And, seeing as there are genuine reasons to be fretful and stressed out right now, I hate knowing that bedtime - which is, frankly, one of my most beloved times of day - has become a time to lie awake in the dark and worry, rather than a time to drift off into Snoozeville.

MAKE THE THOUGHTS STOP!!!

In the last couple of weeks, I've come up with a method of countering this hideous period of late-night soul-searching.  You'd think that bypassing the whole "staring at the ceiling and mulling things over until you cry" scenario would be perfect, but actually, all I've discovered is that my method has side-effects.  Some of which are seriously bad for me and one of which is hilarious.

Basically, I've started refusing to go to bed.  Yes, much like a small child, I will do anything and everything to avoid getting ready for sleepy time.  Not because I don't love sleep - listen, there are few things I'm more bothered about than getting a good, solid eight hours of kip a night - but because I know for a fact that sleep is going to take at least an hour or two to arrive, due to the noise in my brain.  So, my incredibly stupid "DO-NOT-TRY-THIS-AT-HOME" method of dealing with the situation has been to force myself to stay awake - usually by watching YouTube videos, binge-watching Buffy The Vampire Slayer or reading blogs - until I look like this:

It works.  I mean, the side-effects are dreadful (a muscle strain in one eye, permanent exhaustion, stomach problems from internalising my stress instead of letting it out... I could go on), but technically, it works.

It works, because when I finally reach the point of almost passing out and I crawl, hopelessly, underneath the duvet, my head hits the pillow and I'm pretty much out like a light.  No nasty lying awake and thinking.  Hooray!

But - possibly due to the fact that I've let myself get so tired that my brain has gone genuinely insane - once I'm asleep, I have the weirdest dreams I have ever had.  Ever.

Recent topics have included:

• Trying to eat at a dozen different restaurants, at none of which am I ever served and at one of which, I discover that the chef is Eamonn Holmes.
• Being told to marry Dil, Dan and Phil's Sim on their gaming channel.

TBF, he IS a cutie...

• Randomly trying - and failing - to seduce Joyce from Buffy The Vampire Slayer, who, in my dream, was the mother of a teenage boy who I had also previously failed to seduce.  DA FUQ, BRAIN??!
• Setting up a shoe-design company with Phil Lester and deciding it would be fabulous to design shoes that looked like food.
• Forming a band with various YouTubers and playing a gig for a nameless charity, which we then recorded a fundraising single for.
• Having a bizarre condition that made it seem as though I was drunk all of the time and having to try to explain to everyone around me that I hadn't been drinking.
• Getting back together with my abusive ex, just so that I could take him to a festival, eat waffles with him, make him fall madly in love with me and then dump him as part of a reality TV show.
• Falling in love at a funeral.  Thankfully, not with the corpse.

I mean, my brain is creative and my dreams have always had a tendency to be a bit weird, but I am knocking it out of the crazy park, lately.

Annoyingly, as well as being creative, my brain is enormously analytical, so I've spent most of my days recently, replaying random scenes and trying to work out WHAT THE HECK THEY MEAN????!!!!

Pictured: Me, every morning.  For like, the last month.

I think it might be time to re-establish a healthy bedtime routine.  It's probably not doing me any good to force myself to stay awake until my eyes feel like they're falling out of my head, regardless of the bizarre dreams.

If anyone wants to share their "falling alseep without having a mental breakdown first" tips, please do.  

Because I miss sleep.  

And sanity.