The most courageous decision you make each day is the decision to be in a good mood.

I simply could not sleep last night. I tried, as we so often find ourselves doing, endeavouring to master and victoriously conquer the alluring and devilish seductress of sweet and life replenishing sleep.

I lay, waiting, waiting, waiting for delicious sleep to slowly, silently and expertly wrap my mind in its delicate warmth, to feel the edges of my rambling thoughts begin to lose their precise and well formed contours, to begin to blur and dissipate like an overworked artist’s palette. Merging, growing, forming and then softly, with a strange and comforting finesse dissolving, falling graciously and beautifully away, lost amongst the hills of the landscape, free, free, free like a peregrine falcon, gliding through the haze while returning from his seasonal migration.

Through it was not to be, I was not to fall in to grateful slumber, lost in the boundless dimensions of a dream state, symbolism and imagery portraying the wishes and unconscious deliberations of a mind no longer governed by the internal controls of the superego or acquiescing to societies norms.

Instead I left the comforting confines of my warm cradle. My ever loyal faithful companion, ever ready and always there to envelope me in his strong and reassuring arms, to calm the troubled waters of my chaotic and fragile mind, to nurture and protect, to nourish and adroitly remove the deep feelings of anxiety, the dread, the overwhelm and the left over mental clutter and remains of the day.

I wandered around; the moons pale silhouette the only light in the darkness of what would be a long and torturous night. The darkness mirroring my thoughts, malevolent nebulous shapes appearing, then falling away as new, more terrifying forms emerged. Mocking voices and crude laughs with terrifying gnarled and deformed fingers reaching out to pull me into the deep vacuous black hole of the underworld.

And so I kept wandering and I waited, I waited, I waited with hot tears streaming down my face, with an exhausted and aching body, with a wretched and perpetually tormented mind.

I am still waiting!