Purgatory

I like to sleep.
When I'm asleep, I don't have to think.
There's dreaming, I know; but the less said about that, the better - life's complicated enough without having to analyse actions and thoughts in a scenario invented by a confused, unconcious mind. When I sit down to write, like I have done now, I find, not that I've run out of things to say, but rather, the things that I had to say have run away from me. My trains of thought, which were seemingly going somewhere, have lost all sense of direction. When I lie in bed at night, the thoughts that dart haphazardly through my mind are of such numbers that I could use them to pen an entire nonsensical novel in just those few hours.
My best thinking is done when I lie there, in that state which finds itself somewhere between conciousness and sleep. I like that state sometimes. I like that I can be thinking rational thoughts, reliving situations, fantasising about others - all of my own volition, and then suddenly I find myself in a Finnish supermarket with a dog I never had, buying umpteen butternut squash, which I hate. Then all of a sudden, the realisation swoops in through the black emptiness that, haha, I was about to drift off then. That was the moment when dream thinking mushed with real thinking. That was the start of a wild sleep adventure that I refused to embark on.
The thing about this state, and the bad thing, I mean, is that you can sometimes find yourself trapped in it, with that undesirable feeling that you have in fact been awake all night and the uncertainty about whether this is true. When I first slip into bed, I allow myself some time to think about things - not necessarily worry, although that is often the case. The problem of arriving at purgatory between conciousness and unconciousness arises when I let myself think for too long. Then I can't stop.
That is a lie. I can stop, but my brain carries on in my absence. Somehow, it is possible that, while I am lamenting the fact I am still awake and there are all these thoughts shooting through my semi-conciousness, some thing, some separate part of my brain is audaciously thinking them all up. And I can lie there for hours, pleading with this thing to shut the hell up, give me some peace and let me fall asleep. There is nothing so unfair and miserable as lying in the dark, thinking about not thinking; thinking that if only I could stop thinking about not thinking, then I wouldn't be thinking and therefore I could sleep. Round and round the thoughts go, in their tedious yet erratic fashion. But, every so often, you find yourself in that Finnish supermarket, buying butternut squash, drifting off...and then that bastard gleeful thought comes along: hooray! I'm falling asleep! And, needless to say, you're straight back out those supermarket doors, lying in the dark, thinking about not thinking.

Sleep well.