Nightmare Awakening

A voice in the darkness monopolizes your attention until you realize you can move. You spring out of bed and the darkness swallows you, but with some just-discovered fortitude, you stand where you are until you can see - there is the light switch! You run over and stretch out an amorphous hand... Have you done it? Have you flicked the light switch? You definitely moved it - but enough? You try again, your hand heavy from something like pins and needles, but a kind you can actually see, not feel - except for the heaviness. The light will not turn on. Acid panic starts to gnaw at you from the inside. You frantically flip the switch back and forth multiple times, but the room remains enveloped in living darkness scratching against your inner sanctity. Suddenly, without a sound except a voice in your head telling you it is happening, lightening floods the room a stormy orange. You instinctively turn for your security object from childhood, but there are three stuffed dogs on your bed. You grab them all and you run to your parents' room. Your father gives you a surprisingly welcome look - you were expecting annoyance at being woken up in the middle of the night. 'You see!' you cry in desperation. 'There is only one of me - not three!' Then everything melts away and your eyes fly open. Your racing heart begins to calm as, twisted in your blanket, you fall out of your nightmare and embrace being awake.

On A Dark And Stormy Night

It's raining and thundering so hard, I can't sleep. Lightening keeps flashing through the blinds on my windows. Often when I sleep during a storm, the sounds and flashes from outside incorporate themselves in my dreams in some way, and that makes me reluctant to fall asleep.

When I was younger, I used to imagine that thunder was the sound of a heavenly bowling alley God was making use of that night. It does sound like some sort of cosmic bowling night, doesn't it?

I also have a distinct memory of opening up an umbrella outside during a particularly windy rainstorm and being nearly carried off Mary-Poppins-style by the wind.

If I wasn't so tired, I would describe these memories more poetically and in greater detail, but I'm really only awake because of the din and commotion outside.

Did any of you ever have any strange notions about thunder and lightening?

I happen to love storms, but not while I'm trying to fall asleep. This old video I dug up on youtube was strangely comforting - if only because it's a clip from one of the best children's movies ever. It makes me sad to think kids don't watch Wee Sing movies anymore (I hope I'm wrong about that!) because they were such quality kid entertainment.

Also, I used to always want a dress like Sally's. :)

...Things seem to be quieting outside. For now, at least. Except I think the wind just knocked against our garbage cans outside because something scraped against the house just now. It had better be the wind, anyway. A little unnerving...

...And now the rain's started again. Wow, I think I'm liveblogging a storm. I am way too tired for this. The rain, if I'm going to start using metaphors for everything, or similes - as the case may be, sounds like the earth is taking a strong shower. Or like a humongous watering can from one of Jack and the Beanstalk's giants being poured down onto the world. Or like the clouds are dumping buckets of water on us. Which is somewhat accurate, anyway. Isn't is funny when your simile is actually what's really going on? The clouds are dumping water on us.

Well...so much for being poetic.

Alright - I'm going to try and let the rain lull me to sleep...

...Though I'm hungry. Have you ever read A Wrinkle in Time? It starts off like this. A storm. Meg, the protagonist, goes downstairs to get something to eat. Charles Wallace, her brother, has already made her a sandwich, intuiting that his sister would be upset by the storm and want something to eat. Their mother comes down and has something to eat, as well. And then they get a surprised visitor and the adventures begin...

Good book. Highly recommended.

I feel like Meg tonight. In fact, I feel like Meg often. Smart, not especially cool, average in looks, high hopes and dreams. And like Meg, I've learned many things this year about myself and my own strengths. I spent time learning about the Happy Medium (aka Balance). And I am still learning how I, an ordinary girl whose succes - until now - has remained only in dreams, can stand firm and grounded on my own two feet and face the world with my chin held high.

I was just thinking recently how, ever since school ended, I haven't written much on my blog. It seems a stormy night is fertile ground for thinking.

Someone said to me today that I ought to consider myself an adult, not a little girl. Well, that person is right. It's high time for me to take the mantle of adulthood, and I guess that begins with not letting a storm keep me up at night.

So I think I shall try going to sleep now. I'm certainly tired enough for it...

Good night!

But perhaps with a lamp on... ;)

Good Morning

I would just like to say good morning to everyone! I got up at seven this morning and it feels as though I have entered back into the fold of those who get up at normal hours in the morning. We shall see how long it lasts - but the truth is, it is quite nice to really have a long day ahead of you without having to stay up past midnight. Hmmm...

Can't Sleep

It is difficult indeed
When you find you are in need
Of a single night's good rest--
For, you cry, you try your best!--
But instead of drifting off,
All you're wont to do is cough.

If cough syrup has to taste that awful, the least it could do is work. :(

Edit: Here I am an hour later still unable to fall asleep, still coughing, and a half hour too early to take more medicine. Not that the medicine is proving to be all that helpful.

Ugh. It is so distressing to be awake all because of a stupid cough. It's that feeling where you lie there and want to just be one of those jugglers who swallows fire so you can burn the scratch away from your throat because things like hot chocolate are just not helping. Or you sit there in class and all you can think about is how you need to cough and then you choke on yourself and it's so annoying because, ugh, I just want to SLEEP.

(Sorry, the Apple!)

Orange Sky

Orange Sky

orange sky
why do you laugh?
as I compose
this epigraph?

is it because
the stormy tide
has cocked your head
and sparked your pride?

yet fleeting sky
you tease and jeer
but come the morning -
won't be here.

Nighttime Blues

As a little kid, I never liked going to bed. My parents say that as baby I was nocturnal. I would cry all night until my dad took me out of my crib at three in the morning and we'd watch I Love Lucy. Then I'd be quiet.

When I got a little bit older, I was the typical little girl who wanted to stay up late with all the grown-ups. I used to get angry at being put to bed and would rebel by reading in my room with a flashlight or sitting up eavesdropping on the conversation downstairs (usually both).

In high school, I went through a weird phase where I liked going to bed, except I wouldn't go to sleep. I just needed that alone time when I knew no one would bother me. Then I would lay awake in my bed for hours thinking.

Israel was probably the only time in my entire life that I actually went to bed like a normal person. And that's only because I wanted to be the first one downstairs in the morning to get chocolate chip pancakes (yes, my school made us chocolate chip pancakes every other morning).

Now in college, I don't hide away in my room anymore at night because I have plenty of alone time hours during the day. I started to like being around my friends a lot more. I would get lonely at night and need to visit them or gchat with them - or both. Being in a dorm without roommates can be rather lonely. At home you've got your family all over the house. In school there's no one there unless you seek them out. I used to get afraid of missing out on something, no matter how unrealistic. Once everyone's asleep - what is there to miss out on??? Or if they're all studying - what? I want to go study with them? Of course not. So what is with my obsession about needing people around all the time when I'm usually not missing out on anything?

It's sort of the same as when I would want to be awake with the adults as a little kid. They weren't talking about anything I could understand, so why would I want to stay up with them just to be bored?

It must be that I just don't like going to sleep.

I remember one year when I was in sleepaway camp - I think I was around eleven or twelve years old - and we were having a conversation in the bunk about sleeping. My counselor said that sleep is 1/60 of death and I got so disturbed and creeped out by that idea that I refused to fall asleep that night. Of course, I did end up doing so eventually, but for about a week I was terrified of falling asleep.

Then I went through a weird phase where I would try to catch myself just before falling asleep. I always wondered what it felt like to fall asleep. You can't really remember doing it, you know? It sort of just happens without your knowledge.

But mostly, I have been, am, and probably always will be reluctant to go to sleep. There are people to talk to, there are things happening, there's the whole world still existing around you. There are books to be read, stories to write, people to gchat, thoughts to think, ponderings to ponder...who has time for sleeping? Who wants to shut all of that out by hours of unconsciousness? It's like giving up on the day.

Too bad we can't function without sleep because if we could - I don't think I ever would.

(Of course, if I never slept then I'd never dream and I'm probably the world's most vivid dreamer, so perhaps I would go to sleep. Sometimes.)

Before the break of day

It is 6:40 in the morning. Why am I awake now, you ask, when my first class of the day is at 10:30? For the past two nights I have hardly gotten any sleep at all due to a very annoying cough, which last night turned into a full blown cold. I got into bed at around midnight, read some Virginia Woolf until around 12:30, and then tried to go to sleep. I say tried because, well, I did sleep from the hours of 1 to 3. That was about it. I was up the rest of the night coughing and headachy and blowing my nose and generally feeling miserable. And yes, I did take advil for my headache - no, it did not help as nicely as I would have liked it to. Today my number one project is to buy cough medicine, preferably Nyquil so I can actually sleep at night.

But why am I writing this post.

For the first time in a very long time, I am awake in that odd time of day when it is technically morning but the sun has not yet risen. I am fully washed and dressed and ready for the day and I have my window shade open. Outside, it is dark, but it is interesting to watch the apartment building outside my window (at least, I think it's an apartment building) and see how many other people are awake now. How many windows have light seeping through. Most of the windows have a dim light - people could be awake or it could have been that way all night long. Who knows? But it is a strange feeling being the only one awake on my floor. I always wonder, when I am up at strange hours, who else is awake? Who else shares my sleeplessness?

Virginia Woolf has a gorgeous passage about night settling in from her book To the Lighthouse which I would like to share with you.

So with the lamps all put out, the moon sunk, and a thin rain drumming on the roof a downpouring of immense darkness began. Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness which, creeping in at keyholes and crevices, stole round window blinds, came into bedrooms, swallowed up here a jug and basin, there a bowl of red and yellow dahlias, there the sharp edges and firm bulk of a chest of drawers. Not only was furniture confounded; there was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say, "This is he" or "This is she." Sometimes a hand was raised as if to clutch something or ward off something, or somebody groaned, or somebody laughed aloud as if sharing a joke with nothingness.

Nothing stirred in the drawing-room or in the dining-room or on the staircase. Only through the rusty hinges and swollen sea-moistened woodwork certain airs, detached from the body of the wind (the house was ramshackle after all) crept round corners and ventured indoors. Almost one might imagine them, as they entered the drawing-room questioning and wondering, toying with the flap of hanging wall-paper, asking, would it hang much longer? Would it fall? Then smoothly brushing the walls, they passed on musingly as if asking the red and yellow roses on the wall-paper whether they would fade, and questioning (gently, for there was time at their disposal) the torn letters in the wastepaper basket, the flowers, the books, all of which were now open to them and asking, Were they allies? Were they enemies? How long would they endure?

So some random light directing them with its pale footfall upon stair and mat, from some uncovered star, or wandering ship, or the Lighthouse even, the little airs mounted the staircase and nosed round bedroom doors. But here surely, they must cease. Whatever else may perish and disappear, what lies here is steadfast. Here one might say to those sliding lights, those fumbling airs that breathe and bend over the bed itself, here you can neither touch nor destroy. Upon which, wearily, ghostily, as if they had feather-light fingers and the light persistency of feathers, they would look, once, on the shut eyes, and the loosely clasping fingers, and fold their garments wearily and disappear. And so, nosing, rubbing, they went to the window on the staircase, to the servants' bedrooms, to the boxes in the attics; descending, blanched the apples on the dining-room table, fumbled the petals of roses, tried the picture on the easel, brushed the mat and blew a little sand along the floor. At length, desisting, all ceased together, gathered together, all sighed together; all together gave off an aimless gust of lamentation to which some door in the kitchen replied; swung wide; admitted nothing; and slammed to.
[Here Mr. Carmichael, who was reading Virgil, blew out his candle. It was midnight.]

But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave.

And here, too, the sky has begun to turn from black to blue and soon it shall be day. It is 7:00 am.

Have a wonderful day, everyone! I think I shall spend mine sleeping, though, after my morning class (and after I buy some Nyquil).