Long time no see.

What prompted this visit? Was it the iced tea I had with dinner? The cup of coffee in mid-afternoon? Just general anxiety?

Let's see how bad an idea Melatonin is at 2 AM. I hope it kicks in soon.

Maybe I should make a point of having a beer when I get home from work.

---

I am ... off, this morning. I don't know if I'm still fighting off the vestiges (or a relapse) of last week's cold, or simply reeling from the aftermath of a night full of stress-anxiety dreams. I've got that fuzzy, light-headed feeling, so it's entirely possible that the former induced the latter, and the answer is "all of the above".

St. Paddy's or not, I probably shouldn't have had that beer last night.

The dreams ran through the night, I think, or at least through the last bit of it, but the real roller coaster hit after I woke up, looked at the clock, thought, "Oh, hey, time to get up" -- and promptly rolled over and went back to sleep. That hypnopompic state seems to be kind of a sweet spot for memorable dreams for me -- to my dismay, this morning.

This one combined major adrenaline-stressors ("Those cars are going the wrong way -- in my lane!!") with minor irritations in such a way that every time I came close to waking, I backed off and retreated back into sleep, because I was somehow associating all that anxiety with the waking world.

This is not to say that I don't have some cause for anxiety in my waking life these days, but when I finally did surface, I wasn't reacting to any of that. I was disoriented and shaken, but that was due to the rapid-fired combination of narrowly-averted accidents, police encounters, car trouble, bicycle problems, and gods-know-what-else that were bouncing around my brain.

Sublimation? Maybe.

More probably, given my current mental state, it's the aftermath of that cold.

I think I may start setting my alarm in the mornings -- something I haven't bothered doing much since moving to the evening shift at the game store almost a year ago. Most people find "sleeping in" to be a luxury, but I've always been the sort who likes to get up and dive right into the day -- ideally, because I have something structured to do and get out of the way. When I do that (as I did on Sunday), I'm in great shape. Rolling over and catching more ZZZs does nothing good for me -- it just makes it harder to get moving, and -- frankly, it underscores the lack of focus, direction and purpose in my current existence.

Which just makes it harder to overcome that lack.

Besides, I don't want to have to fight with the Hypnopomp anymore.

---

After sleeping in far too late yesterday, I went to bed earlyish last night, determined to roll out of bed at a decent hour, hop in the shower, and fire up the computer for the usual rounds of email and job boards.

I did indeed wake up around 7-ish, looked at the clock -- and, rather than blurry LED numerals, saw nothing. The power was out.

No Net. No TV. No lights in the bathroom.

I wound up going back to bed until 8:45, then taking a shower by candlelight.

(I do so love bathrooms in candlelight.)

Needless to say, the power came back five minutes after I got out of the shower.

It was only a few minutes ago that I realized that it was the Second of February, and that I had gotten up, seen my shadow, and gone back into my hole.

Looks like six more weeks of winter, from here.

---

More water-themed dreams last night; how much of them were due to the sound of rain outside, I can't tell. Not the usual crystal-clear water, this time; in this one, the nearby creek actually ran through the backyard. The usual gang of Generic Dream Friends and I were looking it over. The water was higher than usual; I noticed that conditions were exactly right for a flash flood, and suggested that we should get back over the creek and into the house. Of course, everyone blew me off, right up until the big muddy rush of water hit.

For some reason, I was wearing robes of some sort, as was at least one of the others.

---

Last night, Your Obedient Serpent and his family had yummy, yummy BLTs for dinner.

During the night, this combined alchemically in my stomach with my acid reflux.

I am now having Bacon Reflux. This was my alarm clock, awakening me after five hours of sleep.

Bacon does not make everything better.

Oorlp.

---

I woke up this morning with "Losing My Religion" running through my head, continually. As quelonzia can attest, I was singing bits of it all morning.

The alarm must have jarred me out of REM sleep.

---

the_gneech just posted something about the internal struggle his brain has every morning, with particular emphasis on the way his subconscious tries to fool his waking mind into thinking it's already awake.

These are not issues I usually have. I'm normally one of those annoying people who snaps out of bed at the first alarm. In fact, when I'm getting up regularly, I start waking up a minute or so BEFORE the alarm rings.

Being "up" isn't the same thing as being "awake". When I was first in college, fresh out of high school, I would wake up every morning in the shower, hot water cascading over me as I stretched out in the tub. I had gotten out of bed, gotten out of my pajamas, adjusted the water to the perfect temperature, and stretched out to let Brain catch up to Body... while still asleep.

I slept in the top bunk, with no ladder.

A few years later, I was in the Coast Guard, aboard a High Endurance Cutter patrolling Alaskan waters. At one point in the watch rotation, I was due to stand the 0400-0800 watch on the bridge.

As usual, around 0300, the messenger for the midnight watch came down to wake me up. I woke up, put on my uniform, and stood a full rotation -- an hour on the flying bridge, an hour as messenger, an hour at the helm, and another hour on the flying bridge. It was a perfectly normal shift, nothing unusual happened...

...until the messenger showed up again, and said, "Hey! What are you doing? It's time to head up!"

I had dreamed the whole watch.

And even though the "first" watch was a dream... it still felt as though I'd stood on the bridge for eight straight hours.

Ever since then, the conscious mind hasn't fallen for the subconscious's little tricks. I think the subconscious knows that if it pulled that kind of stunt again, the conscious mind would take it out behind the amygdala and beat the living crap out of it.