Fighting The Serpent

Last night I sat down at my “desk” (typewriter balanced on two Pampers boxes filled with my wife’s comics and some hardcovers) and tried to get to writing. The night before I skipped ahead in my draft and started rocking on a scene involving the narrator, his German exchange student friend who came back from Europe and is now a very proud American, Bob Dylan, and the Quechee Gorge. It was going great, and I had stopped writing that night after the equivalent of about ten manuscript pages. But last night? Stopped after a paragraph. Just had no energy at all, and while the tiny amount I wrote was good and fit in, my eyes were closing and before I gave up I started a sentence that didn’t make any sense.

I’ve had insomnia for a few years now. It’s a combination of not being able to get myself to sleep, followed by bizarre dreams and other factors waking me up throughout the night. I don’t want to take Ambien, as I have a kid and the last thing I want to do is pick her up and try to walk down the stairs while in a drugged kind-of-sleep.

The dream I remember from last night: I was sitting at my “desk”, writing on my typewriter. Nothing was being printed on the page, but I kept writing. My writing area is in the mud room where we have a red washer and dryer set, and I sit with them to my left. To my right are three stairs and the door to the garage. I was in the process of not-writing when the skeleton of a long, thick snake came out of an unseen hole in the garage door and wound its way up the stairs and into the large pile of crap my wife and I have yet to sort out and put away since moving here in December.

I’m afraid of snakes. Very.

My dream reaction is to run into the kitchen and grab a curtain rod, split it in half, and go back to the mud room to do battle with the snake. While I was gone, however, the snake has started going through changes, and when I returned it resembled a skeleton version of the serpent from R. Crumb’s Book Of Genesis in the latest issue of The New Yorker.

Apparently The New Yorker influences my nightmares. Not too many people can say that.

I woke up my wife with my thrashings, then got back to sleep, then woke again, and now am at my day job. Tonight I’m going back to the keyboard, I’m determined to finish the scene, and I’ll try to think of a better dream weapon if I get attacked again. Perhaps a car loaded with nitroglycerin…