1. My bedroom is very dark despite the one small window, and I turn off my alarm clock, so there are few natural cues to rouse me.
2. I stay up very late when unconstrained. I tend to peak creatively in the hours around midnight, and after riding that momentum to paint or code or otherwise do the things I can’t find motivation to complete during ordinary hours, the last thing my bubbling mind wants to do is shut it all off and sleep.
3. *First glimmerings of consciousness in the morning*
I feel the pains settle into my heart immediately. What are these feelings? Why do they feel the right to latch onto me? They weren’t there a second ago. I try to sink back into the peaceful empty space of the first glimmering. I want to lay in wait for them, like a birder in the grass, to catch them out, label them, band them maybe, and shoo them away before they have time to do their supersonic nesting. Or at least negotiate with them one on one, address their grievances in a reasonable manner. But instead the undergrowth of dreaming spreads over me again and I fall back asleep for a while.
The dream gets tired. I float back up to wakefulness. There it is again, the flock of mysterious sorrows, already weighing on my heart. Not fair! Who are you? I lay very still and try to feel them out by their movement, their pressure, to have some sense for what I am dealing with. I think about the last image I dreamt and receive a piece of its meaning, perceiving it more clearly from just across the other side of the glass. This feeling-sensing is not different enough from the dreaming to maintain me in consciousness though, and I drift down again.
This can repeat so many times, but eventually my bladder will betray me and I’ll have to get out of bed, at which point it’s too late, the pains have nestled in so deep that amid the cacophony of beta brain waves and the demands of the day, and soon enough, coffee, I can’t even make out their signals as anything but an amorphous tension, a tightened thread in the fabric of my being. I must accept them as part of me until I can shake or sift or settle them loose again and take them by name, rank and serial number.
Like a refugee 