Step 1: Flee home
Have an annoying family member or friend room with you. Said family member needs to not let you sleep at all at night, to the point that for two weeks running you fall asleep at sunrise on a daily basis. Want to hit things. Decide to remove yourself from the situation instead.
Step 2: Get on a train. Get on another train. Get on a plane. Get on a car. Get on a bus. Be picked up by a darling blog acquaintance who offered to host you for a bit.
Bed #1: Woolwich. Double mattress on the floor. Soft-firm. Skylights. Uncomfortable for doing things but excellent for sleep. First night’s sleep in a month. Brain barely remembers how to have nightmares, it’s so tired.
Step 3: Continue to use kindness of friends to stay the fuck away from home.
Bed #2: Taplow. Double in a guest room in a cottage. Wiry but comfy as fuck. Comfy armchair downstairs to do things. Middle of fucking nowhere. Weird dreams just the once. Must leave because unexpected construction on listed building’s façade. So long, estate cat.
Bed #3: Brixton. Double bed with a duvet that does not even remotely cover the mattress, somehow. Homemade decals of London things on the walls. Pretty cute from afar.
Step 4: Get on another bus and another bus and another train and another plane and another plane and another bus to meet your best friend and crash with her.
Bed #4: Tallinn. Cot in best friend’s room that her parents got for the occasion. Thank you, her parents. Soft mattress that moves around a lot on the structure, but comfortable nonetheless. However, as it’s a longer stay and I get to relax, so does my brain and I start remembering my weird dreams and nightmares again. I even have one of my recurring dreams about this girl I knew in high school and me fumbling towards a relationship, which is one of the only 100% good dreams I ever have, and one of the few that make some modicum of sense outside my sleeping head, which is why I submitted it to Adjustamatic for their Dreams Explained campaign. I don’t know if they’ll get around to it, but it’s always nice to be asked about your dreams, seeing as how no one ever wants to hear about other people’s (including me).
Bed #5: Friend’s sofabed when she visits her parents because it’s bigger. Bigger. A little hard. I get to stretch my legs, though, so a+. The weird dreams remain.
Step 5: Take a job somewhere else and spend the weekend there, in two different places, one of which you stayed in before but it just so happens you’re staying in a different guest room this time.
Bed #6: Taplow. Single. Tall as fuck but also very comfortable. Estate cat greets me in the morning with mud. Good times.
Bed #7: LHA London’s Bowden Court. A single. Makes a weird noise when I move in a certain way, but otherwise perfectly adequate. Not into the shared bathroom at all though.
Step 6: Go back to best friend for four days. Have a nightmare on the second day that you wake up at midnight, which is only a terrible thing because you know that feeling as it has happened before, when your sleep schedule was significantly more screwed up. Find a flight towards your next crash pad that arrives so late you can’t continue your journey. Book hotel in city.
Bed #8: Bremen. Novum Bremer Haus. Sweet basic hotel, reminds me where I stayed with my parents in Valencia in 2006. Clean and tidy and comfortable. Hot, though, and I got bit by mosquitos. Slept excellently though.
Step 7: Take bus to original destination. Be picked up by a longtime friend and driven to their flat in Leeuwarden.
Step 8: Hit week 8 in their guest room, with one of their cats on bed #9.
Post in collaboration with Adjustamatic.