A Life To Waste by Andrew Lennon Page A

of sleep was starting to make him
feel ill.
     
    He decided that enough was
enough. Regardless of what had happened next door, he was a grown
man and he couldn’t be making himself sick through fear of sleep.
He decided he would go to the doctors and see if there was
something they could give him. Something which could help him sleep
throughout the night without waking every ten minutes. He had heard
that sometimes if you took sleeping pills that you could sleep
without dreaming at all, he had also heard that sometimes they
could amplify the dreams. It didn’t matter, his dreams couldn’t get
any worse than they already were. He had to do something, he called
the doctors to book an appointment.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     

Chapter 9
     
    “Take a seat” Doctor Spring said
“so what seems to be the problem?”
    Dave shuffled in his seat. He
was looking everywhere in the room, at his feet, at the pictures on
the walls, at the doctors computer. He looked everywhere except at
Doctor Spring. He would make quick glances towards the docs face
but he would quickly look away when accidental eye contact was
made. He was biting his nails, then messing with his hair, then he
would go back to biting his nails while frantically looking
everywhere in the room again. He was a complete mess, sleep
deprivation had really started to take its toll on him.
     
    “Well, you see, the thing is, I
erm”
    Dave’s voice was quick and
jittery, it almost sounded like he was on some kind of drug like
speed or ecstasy.
     
    “the thing is, erm, I’m
struggling to sleep, I, erm, I need some, you know, some sleeping
pills, you know so I can sleep.”
     
    Doctor Spring sat back and
looked at Dave, his initial thoughts were that Dave had been
taking some form of drugs, all Dave’s mannerisms seemed to suggest
that. But his pupils were not dilated, and although he was jittery,
he didn’t show any other signs of drug addiction, besides the
nervousness. The doctor suspected that maybe Dave likes to drink a
lot and added to this sleep deprivation were symptoms of alcohol
withdrawal.
     
    “Can I ask, have you been taking
any recreational drugs?”
     
    “No” Dave answered without
hesitation.
    The only drug he had now a days
was weed and he hadn’t smoked anything in over a week. He hadn’t
touched any drink either, he had thought about it. He thought that
booze and weed might have helped him sleep but he felt too ill to
touch either. He had been feeling too ill from the lack of
sleep.
     
    “Ok and how much do you
drink?”
    “Not much, just a few cans every
other night” This time Dave lied.
     
    He knew were this was leading
and he didn’t want to be signed up to some alcoholic twelve step
programme, he just wanted something to help him sleep. If he wanted
to deal with any alcohol or drug problems he would do that in his
own time when he wasn’t so tired.
     
    “Listen Doc the thing is, I erm,
the problem is, erm, I have been having these dreams”
    Dave proceeded in his jittery
nervous voice to explain his dreams to the doctor. He told him
about the police coming to the house, he told him that there was a
murder investigation ongoing in relation to his next door
neighbour. He told him how he was too scared to sleep and the
longer it went on the worse it got, the very brief spells of sleep
he did have were filled with even worse nightmares because he had
built them up himself by trying not to sleep. It was a vicious
cycle and he couldn’t see any way of stopping it.
     
    “So you see doc, that’s, that’s
why I need those, erm, those sleeping pills, so I can have a kip
and erm, I can start getting over all these crazy thoughts and
nightmares, I just need erm, just one full nights sleep. You know,
even with nightmares, at least if its, you know more than ten
minutes, that’ll fix me right up you know.”
    Doctor Spring could see that
Dave was genuinely desperate to sleep. He had read in the paper
about the investigation