Keeping the Dream

I have horrible insomnia. It’s gotten worse. Used to wake up in the middle of the night and not fall back to sleep for a couple hours. Now, I find myself wide awake as soon as my head hits the pillow no matter how tired I am, and stay awake until 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning. Which makes those days I have to wake up early – which is just about every day – really hard to get through.

I think that’s why I got so sick this past week, why it hit me so hard, why I’m still not back to full speed, why I haven’t been for a number of years now.

Anxiety, I guess is what keeps me awake. Getting older doesn’t help either, but it’s anxiety that’s the main culprit I think. When everything is quiet, my fears speak louder, and I’m feeling more worn and less able to resist what stresses me these days.

But not tonight. Tonight I fight back. What can I give? I thought as I lay awake. I can’t fall back asleep and I refuse to lie in bed and be consumed with worry about survival and finances and stuff like that. Not tonight.

So what can I give? What can I do to defy the feelings that I’m a victim of circumstances? To make the statement that I’m not lacking, that I can give fully from a resource rich and deep?

And then I thought of my music, my CD – those CD’s – the “mistakes”, the ones (1,000 of them) that we had replicated before we realized that two songs listed on the face of the CD were in reverse order from the way they were recorded on the CD. We had the opportunity to send the CD’s back, but when I realized the company would just destroy the CD’s anyway, and didn’t care if we removed them, Stacey and I had an “open 1,000 CD cases” party.

I have approximately 1,000 CD’s sitting in my office on a dowel anchored on a wooden base. I say “approximately”, because we had passed a few out to friends to leave in random areas, and I had left a few here and there. Our intention was to take these misprinted CD’s and share them, leave them in places for people to find. It was my belief, those who needed to hear the message on the CD, the people for whom the songs were intended, or for whatever reason, those who would not likely purchase or even become aware of the corrected CD’s would find the misprinted ones.

Either way, the songs would be heard as they were meant to.

But somehow, life came at me so fast, this project was forgotten…until tonight.

So what do you think? Would you like to join me?

I got out of bed, placed a CD in a case, and wrote a post-it note, “If you have found this, it is a gift for you to keep or pass on”, and stuck it on the CD. Tomorrow, if I go out, I shall leave that CD in whatever public place calls out to me to be discovered, claimed or gifted further to someone else. I have several such CD’s to place in my bag.

Random gifts of music.

There’s a smile on my face now…and I’m sleepy. I think I can go to bed now, and lay my head down on a soft pillow of a dream.

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