Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

Kava dreams and lucid nightmares

I take a lot of Kava to sleep. I’m back into the bad habit of coming home from work, falling asleep for two hours, and then staying up until 3 in the morning. It’s probably because I drink a 12-pack of Coke a day, but there are a lot of other factors. I used to take Nyquil, or Budweiser, or sominex to get to bed. I even got a script for Ativan recently, but all of that stuff makes my brain do weird things. I wake up hung over, and sleep in a blackened state of confusion. But Kava seems to work great, and slowly makes me more tired until I don’t realize it and slip into unconsciousness.

The flipside is that Kava gives me really fucked up dreams, the kind of dreams that you can’t even explain to people without laughing. They aren’t always funny, but they’re extremely nonsensical. Last night, I had a dream I was living in some underground bunker that looked like part of Quake II, with this family of other people. There was a huge pit, like a well, that had some kind of radioactive device in it. It would periodically leak or explode, letting loose this giant glow of energy. When this happened, you had to look away, and bury your face in the ground. Then, you would travel time. Once it happened to me, and I could feel the hair on my head falling out, my muscles atrophying. I sneaked a peek at the ground and saw dirt eroding at a rapid rate, like the movie The Time Machine. When it ended and I emerged, I looked like Tom Petty and I was a latin professor with twin baby boys that talked in Polish. The next thing I knew, I was in Canada, driving an RV with a boat on a trailer. I was visiting my friend Derik from grade school, and even though the RV was unwieldy, I whipped it through the streets of Vancouver or Toronto or whereever we were. You weren’t supposed to drive the trailer faster than 50MPH but I pushed it past 120, until the wheel bearings started smoking.

What does all of that mean?

My nephew looks exactly like me – I mean, when I was two. If I ever have kids (that can be pinned on me) I’m going to tell them that Ho Chi Mihn is a fictional character, like Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and Spiro Agnew. I think the worst part of having a child would be instilling a set of values in them, especially since everyone overlooks this step and turns to Jesus.

Okay, maybe I can try to sleep now.