A Sleeper

Let me preface this by saying the following relates to my writing career. (Of course it does, otherwise I never would have used the word "preface." Instead "So anyway" would have sufficed.)

I had a date with a walnut cheese roll and a box of Triskets -- a celebration for my new-found fitness. (What? What? It’s new, I found it and it's mine to do with what I like.) One shouldn’t eat just before going to sleep, but if not then, when? With all this running and hiking, I take a meeting with my appetite somewhere between 11:30 p.m. and midnight.

And then bring on the weird-ass dreams. The 9 p.m. run in conjunction with the midnight feast stirs up the serotonin something wild.

The only bad thing about a dream is that, while internally compelling, it’s impossible to communicate the full impact afterwards. Try, even with people who really love you, and they’ll find some way to interrupt your story. Or, worse yet, they’ll tell you one of theirs.

The nightmares of my youth visit only once a year or so. Mostly my dreams are kind of like My Dinner with Andre, but I get the good lines. Brilliant stuff. I woke up and jotted this down, because it solved all my artistic problems: “You must write a sentence backwards and forwards.” Inscrutable advice; advice inscrutable.

Scientists of the pragmatic and prosaic variety say dreams are just a way of giving order to our daily life. At night, we churn our waking experience and longing into some sort of narrative. Which makes sense, but not all sense. How does this explain the nocturnal visits from a beauty, fear, and wonder much greater than that you’ve ever seen, Horatio?

Some of my favorite dreams wake me up because I’m laughing so loud. Bolt upright in bed, laughing so hard, tears are streaming down my face. Unbeknownst to the waking world, something hilarious, no, uproarious, is happening in the sleeping noggin.

So anyway, where does this lead? To the conclusion that I'm fun in bed? How dare you. I can assure you, no one ever accused me of that. Nonononono, this means I need to set goals -- as in, I should make it easy for the general public to find me unconscious.




This helps. Or this is Julie's choice.