I noticed a difference the very first morning after using the CPAP machine.  I noticed it the moment I opened my eyes with my head on the pillow.  My head was clearer.  Visually, everything in my bedroom seemed suddenly sharper and clearer to my eyes.  The morning light coming in my windows streamed over walls and bookcases and bedroom furniture and dozens of little objects scattered throughout the room that looked richer in detail then before.  The wood grain in my beach dresser stood out in the morning light in a way I hadn’t noticed in years.  There was a world out there.

It’s hard to explain the sensation.  It isn’t like my eyes became suddenly sharper.  It’s that the visual detail in my environment was suddenly more there then before.  I was still tired.  My body was still not nearly as energetic as it used to be.  But my head was noticeably clearer, and it was taking everything around me in. 

I’d known at some rational level that my sleep problem had been dragging me down, not only physically but mentally as well.  I had to work to keep things in focus.  For years now I’ve been having to force myself to concentrate in a way I’d never had to before (unless I was seriously high).  I’d known at some rational level the state I was in was bad.  But I hadn’t realized how down, how out of it I’d been for years, until that instant of waking up, and looking around my bedroom. 

You know how it is with cars…they get worn and cranky and you have to work to get the engine up to speed, and before long you have a dozen little work-arounds you just do automatically to compensate while you’re driving. Imagine one day you get into that car and turn the key and the engine just starts purring and when you get it out onto the road the car just leaps forward.  Yeah…it was like that.  But only mentally.

My body is still tired.  I have years of living a sedentary life I have to work now to overcome.  And I expect that at 52 that’s not going to be a piece of cake.  But if I don’t want my body to spiral down into complete helplessness when I’m aged then I need to get it back into some kind of shape now.  If I inherited the trend of males on mom’s side of the family to die of stroke in their 60s or before I’m fucked anyway.  But if my circulatory system has more of dad’s side in it I might live a reasonably healthy old age.  I need to start getting myself back in shape now though…

But…the difference in how I feel mentally now is just…amazing…

For example…

Dream…

I’m walking through the halls of my old High School.  Usually in these dreams I’m a teenager again, but this time I’m the grown adult I am now, and I’m walking alone in empty halls, while paradoxically all the kids I grew up with are outside, still teenagers, talking noisily to each other as they begin their walk home from school. 

Instead of following them I walk into the big central gym and in my dream it morphs into the arcade of some big shopping mall, the same one I’ve visited hundreds of times in my dreams.  I think this dream Mall is some mental aggregate of all the Malls I’ve ever lived near.  I don’t know how other people’s dreams are, but in mine things can just change instantly from one setting to something else entirely and it never seems to faze me.  One minute I’m walking into the school gym, but I go through the doors and then I’m strolling around in a Mall, and I never seem to notice the oddness of that while I’m dreaming it.

In my dream I recall that there is a subway station down one level, down at the end of this particular arcade, and wanting now to go home, I walk toward it.  For some reason though, instead of going down the escalators to the subway I stop and sit on a stone bench nearby, and just relax for a while watching the people in the Mall walking by. 

Then I notice a beautiful guy sitting on a similar bench on the other side of the arcade.  He’s just breathtakingly beautiful.  He notices me looking at him…and he smiles back at me.

I work up some sort of nerve I don’t normally have and smile, quickly, back at him and then look away.  I’m such a damn wuss.  You want to know why I’m still single?  That’s why.  I can never, never work up the nerve to make the first move.  Been like that my entire life.  And I’m not nearly good looking enough to be waiting around for a beautiful someone to make a move on me. 

So I sit there, like I always do, stealing glances at this beautiful guy sitting across the arcade from me.  From time to time he smiles at me.  Then he reaches over to his backpack, pulls out a notebook and starts writing.  He strolls over to my bench, sits down, and passes me a note…

Hi…what’s your name?

Like a couple of damn teenage school kids we pass this note back and forth for a while.  Swear to god it was even ruled loose leaf notebook paper we were writing on…

I’m Bruce.  What’s your name?  Do you live around here?

Eventually we dispense with the note passing and start chatting.  I forget now what we chat about, but I’m enjoying the conversation immensely.  

The foot traffic in the arcade suddenly starts to get heavy.  We’re suddenly surrounded by crowds.  I check the time.  Of course, it’s rush hour, and people are starting to head to the subway.  The beautiful guy I’m sitting next to looks annoyed at the crowd around us, and for an instant I think he’s just going to get up and leave.  That’s almost always how these sorts of dreams end for me.  But no…instead he gives me a serious look and asks me if I know of someplace where we can have a little more privacy.

And…amazingly…I do.  I’ve walked this particular dream Mall many times.  There’s a spot just down the arcade full of tiny little boutique shops that seldom get any foot traffic.  And there are little nooks here and there along it, where you can sit and not be seen. 

We start walking that way, still chatting easily.  We leave the crowds behind, and enter this very odd little corner of the Mall I’ve never figured out.  It’s full of these tiny little stores that never seem to get any customers, but they’re always open all the same.  There are no boarded up shops here, no look of economic despair, but just the opposite.  Brightly lit stores everywhere, that just never seem to do any business.

I point out a nice quiet spot along the arcade where we can be alone for a while… 

…and I wake up.  Crap.  The damn CPAP mask is crowding my face again.  About four or five times a night now it does that and I wake up having to get it all adjusted again.  I need a better mask.

But…damn!  In my dreams the beautiful stranger never approaches me.  Never.