I've been having Kafka dreams

In the first few years of Calvin & Hobbes, Sunday strips would often have a throwaway gag at the beginning loosely connected to the rest of the strip. This is because newspapers had a few rigid formats and layouts comics for forced to adhere to, and the top of Sunday comics needed to be considered optional to allow papers to make cuts and squeeze in as many comics as possible. Eventually Bill Watterson had enough clout that papers either had to accept the sprawling golden age-style layouts he eventually became known for, or not run the comic; and every newspaper ran Calvin & Hobbes if it knew what was good for it.

In the early days, Bill Watterson would often use the throwaway space to include some more esoteric jokes and references, and this was one I didn't understand as a kid. I knew from context that "Kafka dreams" were bad, but I didn't know what Hobbes was referring to.

Calvin, tucked into bed, offers his stuffed tiger to his mom, imploring her to kiss Hobbes "good night", too. Hobbes, settling in for sleep, remarks that if you don't get a good night kiss, you get Kafka dreams.

Later, like many young people, I'd learn about Franz Kafka from reading Metamorphosis in school, and of course, watching the biographical rock opera, but I still didn't really "get" it. Is it a dream where you turn into a giant bug? Is it just a literary way of saying "nightmare"?

It wasn't until much later in life that I read The Trial and finally understood what Hobbes meant.¹ Not only did I know exactly what a "Kafka dream" is, I realized that I'd been having them since I was about 10, I just didn't have a term for it.

A Kafka dream isn't a nightmare, or a night terror, or sleep paralysis, or even an anxiety dream in the traditional sense: it's a dream about being trapped in an inescapable labyrinth of the mundane. It's like the opposite of a lucid dream: instead of realizing you have control over your dream and can take it in whatever direction you please, you realize you have no control over your dream, and are stuck there until your subconscious decides it's done with you.

The first Kafka dream I remember happened when I was about 10. It was about two wizards locked in a wizard's duel. Okay, that's not "mundane", but Kafka dreams usually draw from some familiar situation from my everyday life, and I believe this one bloomed from a recent rewatch of The Sword in the Stone, which was one of my favorite movies at the time.

The blue wizard and the green wizard are locked in a wizard's duel on top of a castle. The green wizard throws a fireball from across the distance at the blue wizard. The blue wizard ducks behind a stone parapet just in the nick of time. The blue wizard launches a fireball at the green wizard. The green wizard ducks behind a stone parapet just in the nick of time. The green wizard flings a fireball at the blue wizard. The blue wizard dodges behind a stone parapet just in the nick of time. The blue wizard hurls a fireball at the green wizard. The green wizard takes cover behind a stone parapet just in the nick of time. The green wizard casts a fireball at the blue wizard...

Repeat until about 4 AM, when I wake up in a cold sweat and desperate need of a lavatory. I don't know if this is true for other people, but for me Kafka dreams always come part-and-parcel with gastric distress; not like I ate way too much Welsh rarebit before bed and I'm off having adventures in slumberland. I never eat anything unusually rich or indulgent the evening before. I think the causality is reversed: the dream is tying my stomach in knots.

I'd welcome the Little Nemo-style dreams, at least then I'd know my imagination is working. I'd even take a traditional nightmare over this, because then I get the catharsis of waking up and realizing it was all a dream. There's no relief in waking up from a Kafka dream. I don't feel rested; it barely feels like I had been asleep at all. The dream's repetition makes it stick in my brain even upon waking. If I wake up in the middle of the night and need to go back to bed, as I usually do, there's the fear that I'm going to slip right back into the dream. Even the conscious realm is no escape.

That's the primary theme of a Kafka dream, no escape.³ Any apparent escape route just leads you further into the labyrinth (literal or figurative); any familiar-seeming landmark just leads you further astray. I don't know if it occurred to the wizards to try to escape from the duel; I expect they knew that attempting to get down off the castle would leave them too vulnerable to attack.

High school is a very common setting for Kafka dreams, even well into adulthood. Their sprawling corridors, strict rules, masses of people and illogical layouts make them an ideal place to get hopelessly, overwhelmingly lost. We probably all have occasional dreams about forgetting our locker combination, not studying for a big test, ending up in the wrong class by mistake. I've had plenty of dreams like these. In the Kafka variants, I end up questioning if I'm even in the right school, if I'm even in a school at all. I end up in the bowels of an old building with windowless hallways and strange-smelling science labs full of eerie specimens and creepy antique iron and steel equipment. It adds an element of fear that I'm somewhere I'm not supposed to be, somewhere I could be arrested for trespassing if I don't find a way out. School often blends seamlessly into hospital, that other great modern labyrinth of anxiety and protocol. (The architects of the US healthcare system might as well have used Kafka as their blueprint.)

If the Kafka dream has one comfort, it's that it's rare. I thought the Wizard's Duel was a one-off until I eventually had a similar dream as a teenager, and I could probably count the number I've had on two hands; up until this week, in which I've had one every night. I know what's causing them but I don't know how to stop it.

I want a new drug

I have to write these posts a few words at a time over the course of several days (work is still annihilating my soul) so I have, in fact, figured out how to stop them. Sorry if this takes away from the drama.

Remember how back in spring, I noticed that my back was in agonizing pain, particularly when I first got up in the morning? And how I started walking an extra hour a day and that helped get it within tolerance again? Well, this plan worked fine up until mid-June, when my part of the world was in what the media was calling a "heat dome". Which is like a heat wave, except whereas a heat wave merely sucks ass, a heat dome fucking sucks shit. Just kidding; there is no difference.

The temperatures were up in the high 90s/low 100s. If you don't use a human-relative temperature scale for weather, 100 is around the upper boundary for human heat tolerance. I was anxious to do too much additional walking, particularly in the middle of the day, when the wretched orb is at its fuck-you meridian. I was legitimately concerned that I might succumb to heat exhaustion.

So I stopped the extra walking for a few days, and my back flared right back up to pre-april levels. Desperate, I was looking at everything I put into my body to try to understand why this was happening. I realized that trazodone, a drug to help with sleeplessness, had "back pain" as one of its rarely-reported side effects. I stopped taking the trazodone, and the back pain subsided.

But then came the Kafka dreams. The cause of my restlessness, the reason I started taking trazodone in the first place, was never dream-related; and yet, withdrawing from the meds seemed to be causing a modernist literary renaissance in my brain.

My psychiatrist appointment was July 02, in which I related basically the contents of this blog post (minus the stuff about Calvin and Hobbes and with less swearing.) He prescribed a different medication, hydroxyzine, which I picked up that same day. Getting the prescription was an almost Kafkaesque ordeal in itself. I tried to game the bus system to require as little walking in the heat as possible; due to buses not showing up at their designated times, I ended up not getting home until nearly 20h30 and needing to pay for a ride on one of the taxycab apps, which I hate using, but I really couldn't bear the thought of being out any longer. If I had a car, I probably would've been home by 17h30.

I took the hydroxyzine that night, making sure to go to bed early enough to get a full 8 hours of sleep, and it knocked me the fuck out. I got up to get ready for work at 07h00 like usual, and I couldn't do it. I could barely move. I stayed home from work and slept another 3 hours, and was in a state of useless half-consciousness for the rest of the day.

Luckily the governor had declared July 03 a holiday, because he wanted a 4-day weekend; but since my employment status is still not permanent full-time, I'm the only one here who doesn't get paid for holidays. So, if you've been enjoying the blog enough to consider making a contribution, now would be a good time to do so. Missing one day of pay probably won't ruin me, but it will make everything a little harder.

But, at least I didn't have to deal with the anxiety of calling in sick. I just stayed home instead of coming in. No big deal.

After spending most of July 03 drooling on myself, I took another hydroxyzine and went to bed at around 20h30. I set my alarm for 7, and apparently 10½ hours still wasn't enough sleep, cuz I hit snooze until 07h30. I finally got up, took my morning meds, and I'm feeling like a raccoon again for the first time in like a week. I came into work, and I get to enjoy a relaxing day in the office by myself, and then I have the weekend to look forward to.

My back was a little stiff, but it's probably from sleeping several hours longer than I'm accustomed to, and the pain didn't linger like it did with the trazodone. Also my dreams have been normal! Well, as normal as they ever are, which is pretty weird. Having vivid and bizarre dreams that I remember, at least in part, is usually a sign of good mental health for me.

The quality of sleep was good, but I'm concerned by the duration; taking 10-11 hours to feel rested will definitely not be sustainable for me, and if that's the norm I'm going to need to stop taking this too. I'm hoping the hypersomnia was an effect of the exhaustion of not getting proper sleep combined with the exertion of the trip to the pharmacy.

June was a pretty bad month for doing things in general, but capping it off with some bad rest and terrible dreams and oppressive heat sure didn't help. I'm still happy I was able to post 10 times in June, even if a lot of it was meta fluff and blogging about blogging. I think a rate of 1 post/3 days is a good enough target, and given the state of work, it's about as much as I can hope to have time for. I haven't been reading much, but I've been playing some games and looking forward to adding their badges to my collection.

Something about this post feels incomplete,² but they always do when I have to write them piecemeal like this. It's a very unnatural way for me to write. But it's best not to dwell on it, lest I psyche myself out of ever posting anything. I'll see you next time.