Michael Jackson's Dreams

This is allergy season, and I keep waking at one in the morning. If my boss didn’t insist on my being in the office at eight, I would simply get up and do something productive until I was sleepy enough to return to bed.

As it is, I stay in bed and try not to wake thoroughly, and so remain in the netherland between dreams and consciousness when random thoughts about Michael Jackson pass through my brain. I probably should get up anyway, since I still wake with a sense of sleep deprivation.

A registered nurse, Cherilyn Lee, was the first to state Jackson wanted powerful drugs to fight his insomnia.

Since, sleep specialists have discussed the dangers of chronic insomnia and sleep deprivation as if what they were discussing was the same thing Jackson meant. However, his insistence of anesthetics suggests what he wanted wasn’t simple sleep with REM cycles filled with dreams, but immediate and complete unconsciousness.

Everyone who has had bad dreams or suffered sleepless hours and has followed Jackson’s life could suggest a different source for a fear of dreams and half-awake associations: something in his childhood, that burning hair, the upcoming tour, the trial for child molestation. Some might even speculate on why the problems got worse recently.

What’s truly frightening is that the most useful solutions were unavailable to him, and would be shunned by most of us. Freud may have had people willing to describe their dreams, but most of us are leery about seeing a specialist who might then be forced to report to some legal or insurance authority. As it is, almost anyone who could claim special knowledge about Jackson was talking after his death, either to assuage their own shock or to gather some reflected light.

And of the people Jackson allowed to get closer to him, Gerald Posner believes Liz Taylor is the one who first overcame his childhood, Jehovah’s Witness grounded aversion to drugs by her own example. She’s the one who introduced him to the Svengali dermatologist, Arnold Klein, who was providing her with illegal drugs in the 1980's.

Jackson’s former wife, Lisa Marie Presley, said he was self-destructive 14 years earlier, in the middle 1990's, and that it was impossible to help him without being consumed by him. His personality was so strong, it was impossible for her to walk away without feeling guilty and angry for years. Those feelings resurfaced when he died. Most of his friends, sooner or later, faced the same choice.

To die from a fear of dreams. It’s too bad he didn’t listen to Ernest Tubb when he was young. Then he would just have gotten out of bed and sung "Walking the Floor over You."

Notes:
Associated Press. "Nutritionist Says Jackson Pleaded for Insomnia Sedative," 1 July 2009.

Posner, Gerald . "The Jackson-Liz Drug Link," The Daily Beast website, 6 July 2009.

Presley, Lisa Marie. Her 26 June 2009 MySpace comments after Jackson’s death have been widely repeated.