Chris: Welcome to Conversations with My Night Brain, with Chris Enns.
I'm Chris Enns.
Funny enough how that works.
This is another little test of the podcast format as I mash and mold and try and
figure out what this thing is gonna be.
You can't see my hands, but I'm actually doing the like, play-doh
e mashing and molding thing, even though there's nothing in them.
For this episode
I'm gonna try, uh, podcasting, mouth blogging as the Shop talk show guys
call it, uh, mouth blogging a blog that I already wrote and published.
As some of you have probably picked up from my writing, and even in this podcast
if you're listening along somewhere, there's just some church drama and
stuff in our life, and I won't go into deeper detail about that right now.
But, uh, suffice to say, often, less so lately, but often, the night
brain attacks are around and related to the church drama in our life.
And so what follows is what I wrote at 4:00 AM.
And then refined later that day when I was awake with coffee and posted on
my little blog over at chrisenns.com.
But I had the thought of doing a audio version of it sometimes not for
every blog post, but just sometimes.
And so then a natural way would be to embed a, player obviously is for the audio
and I really like Transistors, uh, audio embed player for the podcast episodes.
And so then I thought, why not throw it into something on Transistor,
which would lead to this podcast, which maybe then would also be down
the road, uh, sort of crossovers between like a blog post that I write.
Then I would also do an audio version of it.
Or maybe there'd be an audio thing that I would write a blog post of.
So just as a way of having a thing to test.
That's what this episode is.
So thanks for listening along.
Here we go.
The post was entitled Night Brain Dreams, posted May 18th, 2023.
According to my blog CMS thing, it says it's a three minute read.
I guess this'll be a good test of that.
I had a dream last night about being at a church meeting of some sort.
Groups of people sitting at the same round tables that have been in use for decades.
Built to last.
It was the lounge, but it wasn't the lounge.
There's some familiar faces, but in that dream way where you
don't see anyone specific, but somehow you know they're there.
Someone I trusted was sitting at a table and I went to sit near him.
Various people in leadership wandering around.
They avoided making eye contact with me.
It was like we were all waiting for a bigger group meeting to start.
At some point, the person I trusted left without me realizing, and there wasn't
anyone left that I felt safe with.
Internally, I panicked.
I made a plan to leave the room, got up and walked out into another
space and sat down there to wait.
For someone safe?
For something to happen?
I'm not sure.
I just remember hoping that nobody unsafe would come by.
Then I woke up.
I was left with that mix of post dream emotions.
Sad, hungry, hungry, not hungry, angry, maybe hangry?
Hurt, empty.
And then the words my youngest said to me during our bedtime routine earlier that
night started playing back in my head.
When Grandpa died, everything changed.
Thanks to name withheld.
I don't get to see my friends anymore.
Thanks for that night.
brain.
4:00 AM thoughts like this are really helpful.
The next stop my night brain took me to was this image of our kids
letting themselves into the main office area to go to what was Sue,
my wife's, office, to hang out with friends after church on a Sunday.
It was a safe place.
A place they thought they could relax in, be comfortable in, and feel
a part of things by proxy because their mom worked at this church.
What I've taken to calling conversations with my night brain aren't as frequent
as they were a few months ago.
But it doesn't take much to trigger them.
A side comment about something fairly unrelated.
An Instagram post with a face I used to see on a regular basis.
Someone asking me to play guitar.
One of our kids missing some part of our former life.
Whatever it is, something kicks a pebble in my brain, and a whole
bunch of rocks come tumbling down.
It's often during these times that the lyrics to the U2 song, The Little
Things That Give You Away, the bridge in particular, try to help me make
some emotional sense of it all.
Sometimes the air is so anxious.
All my thoughts are so reckless, and all my innocence has died.
Sometimes I wake at four in the morning, where all the darkness is
swarming, and it covers me in fear.
Sometimes I'm full of anger and grieving so far away from believing
that any song will reappear.
Sometimes the end is not coming.
It's not coming.
The end is here.
Sometimes.
All right, that's the end of the, uh, reading of the blog post.
If you're hearing this somewhere, somehow, some way and are able to give me feedback
on whether you think this is a good idea or a bad idea, stick to blog posts, stick
to podcasts, or stick to none of it.
I welcome your feedback.
As always, this has been an episode of Conversations with
My Night Brain with Chris Enns.
Thanks for listening.
Have a great day.
Bye.