Somniphobia.

Reasons for being ‘afraid to sleep’ can vary greatly: backstabbing or murder potential on the part of a malicious awake party, loose bowels and overactive bladders, recurring nightmares regarding tanning beds, paranoia in general, ‘the idea of wasting time,’ or whatever. My experience leans closer to the ‘dreamworld closely approximates undesirably realistic fiction’ end of the spectrum, particularly because I’ve been obsessing so much over so little in working on my WriMo ‘novel’ (the scare-quotes are absolutely necessary) that its imaginary energies are seeping from my conscious reality into my subconscious mind more profusely than saliva from the mouth of one of Pavlov’s dogs. For the past two nights now I’ve been bothered by my dream-self’s embodying of a character who works for a, let’s say ‘lifestyle,’ magazine. I’ve job-shadowed Anna Wintour at least five times, on all counts becoming strangely good friends only to later ‘screw it all up’ by either spending too much time on a cell phone or mistakenly identifying a Forever 21 knock-off as Rodarte. On some cases I’ve been left out in the rain, once in the snow, and in another I was tossed into a volcanic abyss by a very angered Vera Wang. But as with any dream, there must be a deeper message I’m missing here. The overall moral I’ve gathered, at least, is that I’m either an idiot or otherwise manic about vanity, and that to overcome these qualities I must attend hearings presided by Diane von Fürstenberg and André Leon Talley in which I am reprimanded for my crimes against humanity. Perhaps it is because I’ve spent sleepless nights researching things I’ll never even remember. Perhaps the larger issue is Condé Nast itself. (I should write them a letter.) Whatever the end result, however, I must at least warn all of you not to ever, ever even think of serving Ms Wang an iced latte.