I've never found sleep easy. I don't have a memory of sleep ever being easy, even as a little guy. I was always the last person awake in my home, which is still the case. I have a funny thing where if I'm especially tired, I'll rush people to bed because I know that I'm not gonna be asleep until they are.

Once everyone is asleep, then I can go to sleep. And it's not connected to anything conscious. You might think that it's someone who might be wired that way for protection or safety or whatever. It's not connected to anything like that. But I’ve had this predicament all my life where if someone else is awake in the house, then I can't drift off.

I have memories of hearing my parents going to bed. I was always awake for that, which would've been late. They're kind of night owls. So, working here, the shift I'm on most often is 3:00 PM to 11:00 PM. I have found on this shift that I am able to sleep into the day. That's kind of when I get my sleep. So, I'm at a deficit when they switch me back to days because I can't compensate. I can't switch it up and just start sleeping through the night. It just doesn't work like that.

I know the first time I realized I hadn't been dreaming, or that I'd compromised my dream life was trying to dry out from drinking. I don't drink anymore, but for a couple decades, I was I pretty heavy drinker. But there was this time in my twenties when I briefly stopped drinking, and it was just like a faucet had opened of dreams. I don't know if I'd taken that part of my brain offline somehow with booze or if it was just something about the quality of the sleep or if it's just that I wasn't remembering them, because they say you dream anyway, right? You're dreaming whether you know you are or not.

I do wonder if it had thrown up some sort of barrier between dreams and my conscious life. But yeah, I had vivid, emotionally overwhelming dreams during that period. And then I've felt it a couple other times. Like I've had to detox a couple times in my life, sometimes with this or that chemical aid to take the edges off, and sometimes with nothing, like white-knuckle. Those are also times when I've just been flooded with dreams—dreams that are overwhelming. They're… what is the word? They feel so immediate, or they feel important, or they feel like something that needs my attention.

I remember waking up during this long withdrawal period, waking up and frantically trying to piece together whatever the dream had been because it just felt so weighty. And none of it was ever anything that made any sense to me. Right now, I'm more aware of the physiologically of dreams than I am of narrative. I remember a piece here and there, but I'm eating a lot of cannabis right now to try to help me sleep, and I think that inhibits my recall. But I'm definitely dreaming because I'm constantly waking myself up throwing my hands up to guard against something. Or there's flinchy stuff that happens or like a sudden fall that wakes me up. But those are often the only sense that I have that there's been some sort of dream. But I love when I can remember them.

I have a kind of classic dream which is some version of the house either filling up with water or it's on fire, or you know, the car is rolling backwards down a hill or whatever. My job in the dream is that I have to account for animals, pets, or sometimes it's a farm setting, with livestock. Mostly it's pets, sometimes pets I've known, sometimes not. Sometimes it's just sort of the idea of a pet, an animal that is my responsibility. My most recurring dream is some version of that: I've gotta account for the animals and bring them to safety, bring them to high ground, or get them out of the back of the car or whatever it is. That's always been with me, that, that kind of dream. There are rarely other people in these dreams. What's a constant is that I'm aware of how many pets are in the home. It's funny. There is often like an accounting that I need to do. It's absolutely my job, when it's happening. It's up to me.

There isn't any strong anticipation of what might happen. It's just, like, an immediate understanding that I need to act. Why they're pets, why they're animals—I don't know. About ten years ago, I became a parent to my wife's daughter. She was five when we got together. And we've been becoming a family over the last 10 years or so. It made me wonder if saving the pets from the flooding house dream was somehow like parental wiring. I'm not sure what else it would be. If my subconscious were trying to tell me a story about my role as a parent or whatever, it might've used pets. I've always had pets. They've always meant a lot to me.

In some ways I have easier, more easily fulfilling relationships with animals than with a lot of people [laughs]. I'm a little bit, like undiagnosed, but I think I'm probably a little bit autistic and I have strong sensory sensitivities. I'm constantly masking. I'm often very uncomfortable from light and noise. And I've always found relationships with animals to be a kind of quick and easy way out of my body. When I can be there with my dog or with cat, then I'm immediately more calm. So, there's always been pets, and they've always meant a tonne to me. But then I did wonder, once I became a parent, if maybe it's similar cognitive pathways, right? There's something to the fact that the animals don't know, they don’t have autonomy. It's a thing that they can't do for themselves.

There's another dream that's connected to those recurring ones that is my strongest dream memory. It was so profound at the time that I remember panicking upon realizing that it had been a dream, because I realized I wouldn't be able to get back to that reality. And the reality was that I lived in a small kind of bare apartment with exposed pipes along the wall. A very simple, empty one room kind of studio style apartment. I lived there with a troop of not-quite gorillas, but entities that were dark and furry.

I had the sense that I couldn't ever look directly at them. I could only sort of make sense of them in my periphery. Even to look directly at them had the quality of noticing something in your periphery, in that they were never in sharp focus—except for their eyes, which were in stark focus, like the sharpest high definition, shockingly detailed. Their eyes were just the softest [and] evoking this strong love response from me. Kind, soft eyes. I, and this bunch of whatever they were, lived in this space. No one knew that they lived there except me. They couldn't leave the space. So it was up to me to kind of bring them what they needed. They would huddle in a pile around some of the exposed piping, as if for heat. They were sleeping in a pile for heat.

I had this dream when I was young. I don't know how old I was, but I had just lost my dog. We had two dogs, but the dog that I just said goodbye to was a pretty special case. She was separated from her mom way too early. The people who sold her to me lied about her age. And she very nearly didn't make it. I intentionally didn't get too close in the first couple weeks with her because I thought that I was doing palliative care. She was that sick. But she survived and lived to be 12 and she was the best friend I ever had. Best friend is insufficient. We imprinted on each other. She was an extension of my nervous system and vice versa. I do remember it occurring to me that if dreams can transcend the time dimension or whatever, and I don't know if they can, but if they can, I was dreaming about her. The eyes and the disarming sort of kindness and acceptance in the eyes and the sleeping in a pile thing. She was mostly boxer, so she had very little fur. She was always cold, always on me. I don't know what that dream was, but it absolutely broke my heart when I woke up from it. I tried to go back to sleep, but I knew I wouldn't ever be back to that place. There was even a part of it that I carried into my awake life. Like I would never see those guys again. It was that, like, they needed me to get back to them. I've had other vivid dreams, but that's the one that, I mean, it just rocked me.

I hadn't lived on my own yet. The hypothetical apartment that I lived in, oddly, very closely resembled certain apartments that I would have later—one room, like dingy, exposed pipe apartments. I don't know how I conjured that space. It looked just like a place that I'd ended up having in Parkdale, actually.

My family doesn't have a strong spiritual identity, but we're definitely daydreamers, and my dad’s a creative guy. We talked about dreams for sure. [But] I didn't [share this dream]. I would've felt too vulnerable, not because of the situation of the dream, but because of my emotional response to it. I would have felt very awkward trying to articulate the emotional crisis of it. I think I would've been worried that it would've felt outsized or overblown, or that it would be incongruous with the details of the dream. The emotional language of the dream was of that sense of home and of belonging, of fitting somewhere. So, no, I didn't tell anyone about it. I don't think I would've known how, you know? But I crashed after that dream. I don't know for how long I was down and anxious, but I was very, very down and very, very anxious after that dream, because it felt so real. It felt like such an emergency, not being able to get back.

On the surface, I've been lucky in the sense that my parents stayed together. I lost one of my brothers recently, which I'm still reeling from, but we were all close. So, I don't know what it comes from. It's very strange. It felt [like] all the real stuff—that would come way later in my life, real people in situations I had to leave or whatever. I mean, I was never a happy kid. School was very hard, and friendships were hard. But aside from that, there was no instability. It was all fairly contained. I don't know.

I was trying to be a cartoonist for so long that there's been times that my brain has finished a comic I was working on or delivered a punchline even sometimes. They often don't make any sense though. But, every once in a while, one will and I'll think, “that's kind of funny,” and I'll share that. As I've gotten older, I've become aware that there's a real disconnect between describing your dream, between your experience and having it land with an audience.

The dreams have such internal logic that it can really quickly just become surreal nonsense when you try to say it out loud, because you can describe in perfect detail the exact contours of the dream that you've had and everything will still be missing from it, everything that it meant, its implications. I remember being young and telling my older brothers about my dreams in great detail and wondering why they were like, “I don't care.” It wasn't until I was older—actually probably hearing my stepchild relate her dreams to me—that I was like, “oh, I see.”

Moss Park has meant so much to me that I don't think I'll have a handle on what it has meant until it's in the rear view. It's been the place where the mysterious gaps in your resume are like your asset rather than a question. I've loved that the kinds of things that would [normally] preclude me from certain fields of work are the things that help me to relate to folks and their experiences [here]. That's meant the world. It's not anything I ever expected. I actually never expected to have work that is not only this meaningful, but that protects and sustains me to such a degree.

I've mentioned a couple times how hard school was when I was a kid. Where I lived anyway, there wasn't such thing as alternative learning style. It was all just like “you're lazy,” or “you have oppositional defiance disorder.” Never that you're overwhelmed or that you can't focus, right? So, I was just punished and punished and punished for being bad at school. For that reason, I don't have a ton of school. And so, it's been a real treat to just have, you know...it sounds silly, but to be able to pay into a pension and have benefits and stuff. These aren't things I expected to have. I guess I assumed that I'd be doing humiliating-type work. That's been mostly my experience of work. This work, it's a lot of things, but it feels so meaningful and dignified. It can be brutally hard. It's been very taxing on my nervous system. I have some trauma for sure from it. But I simultaneously have, like, a huge amount of love for the community and gratitude that they allowed us to come in and sort of emulate the work that they'd already been doing. It's meant the world.

And it's in such a precarious spot. We don't know what the next year is gonna look like. I think a lot of people feel that there's a hatchet dangling over their heads. Will this place be here? We know inevitably that it won't, but whether we're able to transition it into something else or not is a real burning question. But mostly I feel extremely grateful that that its path crossed mine.