Of all the many side-effects of citalopram, the one that strikes me most keenly, that weighs heaviest on my soul, is the dreams. I am a disorganised man. That is something I am unlikely to escape in this life. My world lies in chaos and I must struggle to make sense of it. You may have gleaned this from my writing – the detours, the digressions, the repetition and unnecessarily complex sentences. Or the content? Maybe the content more than anything. I have difficulties keeping to a schedule.
When my alarm sounds, I take the drug. That is the plan. I do not keep to the plan, I am a rebel, I am a liability. I cannot keep to the plan because I am both an idiot and an active saboteur in my pursuit of equilibrium.
Many nights I will not realise I have forgotten to take my drugs. I will merely continue to drink, paint, write, or whatever I do in the dead of night until sleep takes me. It is only upon waking, sweating, exhausted from my nights endeavours that I understand my mistake.
I have always enjoyed vivid dreams. I have always suffered vivid dreams. The drug withdrawal heightens this reality. Asleep I live another life, one that sings with meaning, with significance, where every room and every wall is a multi-layered reference to someone I’ve been. I return to these places, always different, reconstructed to suit the mood of this evening’s digression. Those ghostly faces, warped and contorted, crumbling and splintering into shards of memory. Conversations meander and drain away into other times. I stick my fingers into the world, reaching deep for purpose. This is life, constantly running out, fading away, bleeding into unconsciousness. I feel my body give way, paralysed, unable to act, like I’m falling asleep.
And then I wake up.
It doesn’t take long to realise that whatever story you think you’ve been living doesn’t make any sense. Your motivations were all wrong, you were chasing after the wrong prize. That thing you cared about was imagined.
My dreams were for nothing.