Sleep Confidence

Do you ever have an overwhelming sensation of creative desire? It's where you feel like your pores are just oozing creative juice and you need to find some sort of outlet before it all goes away, so you think of all of the different creative channels you could potentially use.

I could do a dance! No, that's weird. I will paint a portrait! Nope, my artistic abilities have not improved since 2nd grade. Okay...then I will burst forth into the sky as a radiant beam of light, and I will explode like a supernova as I cover the earth with a blanket of glitter and magic!!!!!! Good God...no...that's not even possible.

Is that just me?

I tried to find a picture to describe this sensation, and after 20 minutes, this is the best I could do.

Well, anyway, I feel like that a lot, and it's super frustrating. Despite my great capacity for heightened creative energy, I have severely limited artistic ability (as is evidenced in the following picture I drew of a shark in Draw Something).

And believe it or not, this is one of my better depictions.

When I start to feel creative, I usually decide to write. The problem is that my creative sugar-high usually precedes ideas of what I should actually write about. I know that this energy is only momentary, so I need to take advantage of it while I can. From here on, I start to panic. It's a feeling similar to holding a city's water supply in your hands while frantically searching for a bucket. It's a high-pressure situation, which (like most stressful situations) usually results in an undeserved nap. 

No one in this picture deserves a nap, and neither do I.

I have remedied this anxiety by keeping notes on potential writing topics. Even when my creative juice levels are not spiked, I often think of ideas of what I want to eventually write about. For most of my life an idea would come to me and I would think about how I will write about that later, and then I would think about how later I want to make baked potatoes for dinner, and then I would think about how potatoes are good in so many forms, and then I would think about how good is relative, and then I would think about how I needed to call my relatives, and then I would think about kneading bread, and then I would think about how Jesus said that man should not live by bread alone, and then I would think about how that's written in the Bible, and then I would think about how I had an idea of something to write...and then, by that time, I would have forgotten the thought that spawned these subsequent useless thoughts.

Now that I have an iPhone, though, I have been keeping these ideas in my Notes app. It's quite handy. I've been able to hold onto solid ideas that I would otherwise discard into the recesses of my mind by just typing out what I call "trigger phrases"

Trigger phrases remind me in a shorthand manner of larger concepts that I want to later write about. Usually they work well...when I'm conscious, that is.

The problem comes when I write these trigger phrases in my sleep. Naturally, I keep my phone by my bed in case anything awesome comes to mind, and most nights I end up writing total nonsense. Here are some gems straight from my Notes app:

Grizzly man foxes

Adults talking to babies...remember that time that lady talked to you on the train?

You were an idiot 10 years ago 

And my personal favorite...Ponies - God preparing women for a horse war

Obviously, these phrases are absolutely meaningless. I know this now that I am awake, but at night I suffer from a serious, fatal, and highly-made up condition called Sleep Confidence.

Sleep Confidence allows me to believe that I am the best person ever and that I'm awake enough to be using an iPhone. I somehow find meaning in the words "grizzly man foxes" and I am convinced that I will wake to find coherent statements of genius. 

This video is exactly how I feel with Sleep Confidence.

I wish I could have a discussion with Sleep Confident Christy. Maybe she does have all of the answers. Maybe she is a genius. Maybe "grizzly man foxes" is the answer to world hunger. 

And maybe this kind of confidence is something I should learn to incorporate into my conscious life. To be honest, I spend so much time worrying if my ideas are good enough that I often don't execute them. Sleep Confident Christy can go from a dream where she is giving a tattoo to Amelia Earhart to writing without giving it a second thought. Conscious Christy has this bummer called "reality" constantly holding her back.  

Maybe Sleep Confident Christy will make some kind of Freaky Friday switch with me (as long as I don't have to be Jamie Lee Curtis...or Lindsay Lohan...can I be Shelley Long?).