Here's the introduction to Hallucinabulia: the Dream Diary of an Unintended Solitarian.

Most of my dreams were nightmares. Some of them were so bad that I began writing them down. I wasn’t sure why I bothered; preserving them to read over again wasn’t the goal. Instead, I think I simply wanted to get them out of my system. And by capturing them, I caged them. My nightmares often made me wake up screaming. Putting them on paper helped me cope with the thoughts and emotional hangovers they produced. Sometimes my nightmares ruined the entire day.

Beginning in 1998, the new editor of Bass Player began waging an existential war on my career. My waking hours became an unending nightmare, my greatest fears realized one after another. I walked among aliens with whom I could never communicate; I lost the ability to build scale models due to failing eyesight; I discovered that no other woman would ever compare to “Carmen”; I lost the ability to play the bass guitar due to osteoarthritis; and I failed utterly as a music journalist. It no longer served any purpose whatsoever to record the horror, weirdness, and humiliation my brain manufactured as I slept. The days and nights were indistinguishable.

From 2003 I wrote terrible novels and did research for books on military history. I wrote all day, every day, morning to night. There was no opportunity to resume the dream diary. I also had different tools--psychotherapy and medication--to cage my nightmares. Though my dreams are still as vivid and lingering as movies, I rarely experience a horror show on the level of the ones I present here. I used to hate going to bed, because my nights were usually a journey into hell. But I’ve lost my fear of sleep.

Hallucinabulia is the third volume of the Ghosts trilogy. It joins Ghosts and Ballyhoo: Memoirs of a Failed L.A. Music Journalist and my novel Chasing the Last Whale. All explore the same theme of conquering a traumatic past by converting your anger over loss into gratitude for what you once had. The feedback I’ve gotten from Ghosts and Ballyhoo prompted me to publish this extremely private document, since it provides context to the memoir and serves the same function: It banishes and entertains. Not everything in this book is negative. Some of it will make you laugh. Hallucinabulia also documents the psychological and emotional state in which I existed until October of 2011, when I was diagnosed with Meniere’s disease and was able to finally junk the last of the rage that’d eaten me alive for my entire life.

By reading my dreams, you’ll be able to see for yourself how far I’ve come. I’m proud of that achievement. Showing you what was inside me for so long is also my way of bearing witness. It’s a chronicle of disaster, no different from a diary kept during the Black Death, for example. I’ve edited some of these dreams, removing details and changing specific nouns and verbs. What you read is nowhere near as hideous as the nightmares actually were. It’s my prerogative to withhold, and besides, my intent in publishing Hallucinabulia isn’t to exploit my history or seek your pity. It’s simply to create another art project. I wrote 90 percent of this diary in longhand, filling several notebooks, and then I transcribed it onto my computer. It deserves to be published if for no other reason than the sheer time and work that went into it. Also, I think some of the imagery is outstandingly odd and hilarious.

There’s great freedom in being housebound and solitary. I’m now indifferent to so much that worries others. At the top of the list of things I no longer care about is how most people perceive me. Make of my dream diary what you will. If there is a message in the Ghosts trilogy, it’s this: You are not alone. Plenty of us know what you’re going through, since we’ve gone through it ourselves. I kept thinking that things could not possibly get worse, but I was wrong. There’s no bottom to reach, no “bad as bad can be.” Bad is not finite. As bad as you can imagine your life can become, reality has a way of topping you.

And yet...

The person who had these dreams is now happy. He’s achieved clarity, and gratitude has allowed him to weather far worse storms in the past six months than he did in the fifty years that came before. Clarity and gratitude saved his life.

As long as you’re alive, there’s hope.