Ren Powell, Poet | Playwright | Teaching Artist

On my second cup of coffee and my first sentence. Another night of poor sleep. 4 hours. I figure at some point something has to give. I have no choice but to accept the long nights right now. At least my mind isn’t racing, nor am I ruminating.

E. says that when I do sleep, I snore. Which can’t be true. I tell him that he is the one snoring, really, and that he is incorporating that sound into his own dream. Because we do that

– in the same way that our brains take in visual information in the half-dark and make sense of it. A pile of laundry on the chair becomes an old woman sitting very still… but breathing.

I would love to understand the connection between creativity and depression. Why my dreams become more vivid, why in my waking hours I can see faces in the asphalt and – out of the corner of my eye – catch tree trunks dancing in the orange glow of the greenhouse spill.

But when I have the energy to try to harness it all on paper, with paper or paint, it all stops.

This is my version of the Black Dog. When I turn to look at it directly, it is gone. And then you wonder if it was ever really there to begin with.

I had an idea. A brilliant idea. Now it’s gone. Like that nearly-finished novel you outlined while falling asleep, only to find two half sentences on a scrap of paper on the nightstand in the morning. It kills you. If you look it in the eye – the Black Dog – it kills you.

I’ve stopped jotting notes on scraps of paper on the nightstand in the dark hours.