Doctor, there's a castle in my head (Part One)

I don't sleep very well. I would guess that this happens to a lot of people, but for me it feels like a very personal affliction. I feel vaguely tired at night, but not the drifting associated with falling unconscious. However, I don't want to get out of bed and ruin the chance that I might fall asleep. So a couple years ago I started a mental exercise to pass the time while I was lying in bed. I remember reading "Hannibal" maybe eight years or so ago. While it wasn't a particularly interesting book,(This concept of the aristocratic serial killer, or the utterly evil and mad genius, are rather boring concepts. I'm more interested in why normal people hurt themselves than the unrealistic representation of the twisted ubermensch. As for 'Silence of the Lambs', semi-omniscient counterpoint characters are actually a shortcut for a writer.) Anyway, the one thing that was interesting was that Hannibal Lector spent a lot of time inside his own head and he created a 'memory palace' to store all his memories and ideas. It was also an escape for him.
I decided to create one of my own. Of course it would be considerably different, seeing as how I'm not a two-dimensional character, nor a psychopath. (Of course I've always thought of myself as occupying a position somewhere on the periphery of sanity. That is, if you think of sanity as a geographical space, with room for movement, instead of a single point.) I decided to build it from the inside out. I started with a single room 40 feet long, 18 feet wide, and 12 feet tall. I didn't move out of this room for more than a month as I refined the details, adding and subtracting. I took the floor from an old factory building I saw downtown. It had an extremely worn oak flooring made up of very long, foot-wide boards. Old growth wood that just isn't seen anymore. Years of grit and varnish in the cracks but the whole surface is worn soft and smooth. At one end of the room the entire wall was a window. The room started out on a hill and then moved up the side of a cliff, until it became the observatory above my castle, which was built at the base of the cliff, and somewhat up it, as well as being dug in the hill. More on that later. At the other end of the room is a sort of sculpture(I just realized I'm switched tenses, but it's a blog, roll with it.) built into the wall. It is a 10 by 10 grid of wrought-iron spikes that are 18 inches long. They stick out of the wall with a foot between each one. They aren't particularly sharp or perfectly straight. They've been pounded out by a blacksmith many many years ago. They're black and rusty with age. I think they were once the top of a fence, but I'm not sure. I don't know where they came from or why, they just showed up in my mind one night. Sometimes I have dreams about being impaled on them. For some reason the dreams aren't nightmares. This should be disturbing, but for some reason it isn't.

I sometimes find a blog to be a terrifying thing. I feel this need to pour out everything in my head honestly. Honestly isn't always the best policy. Anyway, I'll just live with it. I'm not really capable of being particularly embarassed. This is looking like a multi-part posting, so more on this later.

Adam
"Run for the hills."