The art of sleeping

 Sleep.

A messenger in disguise. A messiah in the madness.

The one thing that I'm perfectly good at.

I've spent numerous years mastering the art of sleep that I could do it with my eyes closed. It is my hobby and my passion. It is an art.

 I am a person who experiences constant mood swings. My irritation with everything around me, the feeling that comes as an added bonus to adolescence, often takes over me and directs me as a whole. I want everything to be perfectly as I want it, though what I want is often not perfect. This very thought drives me mad, like a pinch of pandemonium in the dark that drives people to the verge of insomnia. I, however, have designed sleep to become a mechanism to deal with stress. I don't usually understand when I am stressed out or burned out because I like being pressured up to some extent. As a successful master procrastinator, being pressurized is the only way to be productive with myself. Unfortunately, my body shoots out its defense mechanism with full force and I automatically turn to sleep as if drugged. Otherwise my whole body processes (except those vital ones required to keep me alive) shut down and go on a strike, leaving me burnt out.

This is why it is very important to schedule your sleep, or else it may kick in at the most inappropriate timing- like in an interview, during class, while eating a banana and so on. I remember once, when I was in eighth grade, I had come home after school, completely exhausted and distraught. I let myself and my sister into the house with my spare key and made sure I had locked the door twice or thrice (because OCD can be a HUGE bother) and ungraciously plopped myself onto my bed and dozed into sound slumber, while my sister (who was still extremely teeny and small) proceeded to raid the completely loaded kitchen, all the while singing two different songs, with extremely different tunes and totally unrelated lyrics. My sister's hoarse attempt at singing did not affect my sleep. Instead, it functioned as a lullaby, letting my dream instincts take over. I find it necessary to mention that I sleep like a bored panda in a summer afternoon after a fulfilling lunch. My dreams also tend to be pretty weird. That fine day, I dreamt that I was in space and had only one nostril. I looked around in my dream to see my best friend with me, also lacking a nostril. We looked at each other and then we looked ahead to see a light from far, far away. Out of the light emerged Leonardo DiCaprio (you guessed it- only one nostril). He swam through space towards us, all the while chanting "a dream within a dream within a dream", while the background simultaneously changed around me to reveal a tiled floor which opened underneath my feet into a pit containing smelly avocados and chocolate fungus. As soon as the bile rose to my throat, the scene changed again to my physical education teacher who was shouting at me to run faster. I ran profusely until my sweat started forming pools of water on the sandy ground. I slipped on a rock which was covered in my sweat and fell face first into a swamp that had arrived out of nowhere. As I looked up, my eyes witnessed all the my little pony characters standing in a line, gawking at me as if I were an alien being. Then they all started singing in soap opera style, asking me to open some kind of door. I looked at them in confusion as the world whirled around me and the backside of my head terribly hurt. I opened my eyes to hear a lot of noise and noticed that I was lying on the ground, cocooned in my blanket, as my sister pulled at my hair, crying desperately to open the door. I rushed towards the commotion on the other side of the main door, suddenly realizing what had actually happened. I had left the key on the lock of the door and my parents had come early from work. Both of them tried their respective keys in an effort to open the door but to no avail. They rang the bell until it refused to function, which obviously worried them so much that they started panicking and banging at the door, imagining the worst. My sister was of no help, of course, as she had two Parle G biscuits in her mouth and was chewing and crying at the same time. This terrified my parents as they didn't know that the reason some of her cries were muffled was because she was eating the biscuits. The neighbors came over and all of them attempted to take out the door in order to get in. They had partly succeeded in doing so when I rushed to it from the other side and turned the key to unlock the door, to find about twenty to thirty people, one dog and two cats staring at me furiously, the fire in their eyes equivalent only to destruction as they advanced upon me. I quivered in fear and shame. One look from my parents made me lose all the courage that I had mustered up and burst into tears, crying and smiling (at the neighbors, as a part of formality, of course) at the same time. I still look back to that day with horror, completely taken aback by my carelessness that almost made a whole community break into my house.