Sleep's sticky tendrils?

I welcome them, crave them, reach out to them whenever I can.

If I wake up five minutes before the alarm goes off I berate myself for losing that 12th of an hour's sleep.

Sleep re-invigorates the body and mind. You wake up fresher, cleaner-feeling, rested by your eight /ten hour nap. You are able to face things which were impossible to beat the night before: you can focus, and the problem you've been wrestling with for the last day becomes as simple as tying a shoe.

And if you didn't sleep, how would it be possible to drift up out of your shadowy pool of dreams and realise the love of your life is slumbering quietly next to you? To reach out to their warm body as they shift in their sleep to embrace you? To fall back asleep, content to meet them in your dreams where you can fight monsters, see strange things and invent a new history for yourselves together?

Edgar Allan Poe's idea of sleep is "little slices of Death"; if that is a true depiction I don't fear death, but welcome it, as long as I can take my dreams with me.

I know this write-up is under a misleading node title but I felt I had to speak in the defence of sleep... it can't help it if people think it has sticky tendrils.

I hate sleep. I hate the feeling of falling asleep, like I'm drowning, like hands pulling me down, down into a deep, dark oblivion, pushing and pulling me into chaotic dreams.

I hate the nature of dreaming, I can't stand going about my dream-state acting as if everything is perfectly normal, so what if that man has snakes for hair, so what if I can suddenly fly.

I hate the process of waking up, feeling like I'm tearing myself away from sleep's sticky tendrils, gasping for air, struggling to come afloat. I hate waking up and finding that I am more exhausted than I was upon entering the sleep state.

I hate sleep.