What Cheer, Netop?

Every once in a while, when I'm very tired, my brain will try to convince me that I'm in fact already awake and up and doing stuff, so I don't really have to actually get up. It's a silly tactic because it usually only works for half a minute, and even while it's working it's not very satisfactory sleep -- there's always an underlying anxiety that I'm late for work that makes this form of sleep very fitful.

This morning was particularly extreme; I would 'wake up', wander around my apartment a little, realize I was still asleep, 'wake up' again, wander around my apartment, realize I was still asleep, and so on, repeating this process maybe a dozen times. Several times in my sleep I found myself looking at the clock and discovering that I was almost (but not quite) late for work. (I work from home so I can cut things pretty close.) Because of the repetitiousness of all of this, I became increasingly concerned that I had turned off my alarm clock and, if I didn't get my act together, I was really going to seriously be late for work. (Of course now I'm up and it's about an hour and a half before I normally get up. Stupid brain.)

But owing to the number of times my brain put me through this this morning I can now put together a list of some of the things that tell me that this is going on, and also why I'm pretty sure that I'm not still asleep and typing this in a dream.

1. In this kind of situation, I often eventually become aware that my eyes are closed. Sometimes my eyes are closed but I can still see perfectly well; other times my eyes are closed and I can't see but this isn't an obstacle to my getting around my apartment or, in extreme cases, doing things like using my computer. My brain tries to explain this away by saying, "you're really tired and keeping your eyes closed makes things more restful, doesn't it?" but I will not be fooled!

2. There are usually a few vivid images (the clock showing 8:59 is one I particularly remember this morning) but my brain can't really keep it up and so everything tends to be pretty fuzzy, and if I bump into things it doesn't really register, etc. Admittedly when you're really tired there is a certain numbness to your surroundings but this goes well beyond that. I think my brain is trying to conserve its resources and is just throwing the minimum possible stimulation at me so I won't make it wake up. (This may also be a partial explanation for item 1.)

3. I pretty much never make it to my computer, or at most I turn it on and then nothing much happens. My brain is not prepared to simulate email, the world wide web, podcasts, or the other stuff that make up my morning computer routine. This is probably a wise choice, but it's also a dead giveaway.

So, from the fact that my eyes are open, and when I look around everything is pretty detailed, and my computer is on and I've been able to check my email, I deduce that I am, in fact, awake.

I hope this is useful to anyone else out there who is wondering if they're awake.

Edit: And then one of the first things I see is this cartoon and I wonder if my brain is playing some kind of long con on me.

* 'For Better Or For Worse'.

* Dropping my iPod.

Last night I had a dream that I had made a mistake renewing the registration on my car and had to go to the DMV to straighten it out. The dream took place in the world of Zardoz. It was a strange and frustrating dream.

I had a dream last night where me and a few people I know (but I'm not sure if they were people from real life or not) got transferred to a different world where we had to find our way around. There was a place where people could go for shelter and food; it had sort of gambling machines on the walls that were sort of like slot machines; after a few days they activated and you could pull a lever and money might come out.

You might get a bunch (or a little) of coins all at once, or it might instead shell out a few coins at a time every few minutes all day -- the idea was that if you got a slow machine and stuck with it for a while you would get more money than if you hopped from machine to machine and concentrated on the quick fix, so this was some sort of attempt to reward patience.

What happened instead was that some people (not people I knew from Earth) jumped from machine to machine, then pushed aside the people who were waiting at their slot machines and took their money, then started fighting among themselves over the money they had acquired.

Since there didn't seem to be anything to buy around there it all seemed kind of pointless, so we left them to it.

We swam across a cove to a castle where I was mistaken for someone important who, I think, was supposed to be dead, and so we were taken in and instantly got enmeshed in castle politics. I don't remember a lot of details about this, but at some point there was a murder, and everyone started suspecting everyone else. At some point I did something that resulted in everyone distrusting me -- they didn't think I was the killer (although maybe they weren't sure either way) but they were kind of disgusted with me and didn't want to be around me any more. (I don't remember what I did, but I think it was something innocent, or maybe slightly jerky but you know not that bad, which events conspired to build into apparent assholery of stupendous dimensions.) So the rest of the dream was me going around this weird, unfamiliar castle trying to talk to my friends and having them all snub me. Then I woke up.

I had a dream last night in which me and a bunch of knitting folks were discussing the practice of sniffing glue, and I then produced a little round box which I jokingly claimed was used for sniffing glue, and a few of us then acted out a scene from Pulp Fiction using the little box and changing all the heroin references to glue references.

The only other thing I remember about the dream was that during the conversation I kept waiting for the opportunity to use a funny line that I thought up, but the opportunity somehow never arose. The line was, 'Don't worry, I just sniff glue medicinally.'

What?

Last night, I dreamed that I took an introductory programming course, and our first assignment was: Given a sequence of points on a graph that outline a face, come up with an algorithm that slowly modifies the position of those points to make the face less angry.

Last night, I had a dream in which I was talking to an acquaintance who was feeling bad. At one point, she said something like "And I keep getting depressed!"

In the dream, I wanted to make some sort of wry point about how what with one thing and another getting depressed is a pretty normal reaction to things and you shouldn't worry about being depressed because that just makes it worse, so I was going to say something to the effect of, "If you don't get depressed sometimes, that's not normal!" and go from there. But instead I decided to say, "If you don't get depressed at least once a _____, that's not normal!"

But then I had to think about how common getting depressed really is. Once a year? No. Month? Mmmm ... no, probably not. I ended up saying, "If you don't get depressed at least once an hour, that's not normal!"

Immediately upon saying this, I felt very depressed indeed.

Go, subconscious!

Now I will go back to bed.

(In the dream, after I said that the woman I was talking to said, "What?" and I said that I couldn't repeat what I had just said because it was too depressing. Doesn't keep me from posting it here, though!)

I had a dream last night in which I went to Hell.

Most of the dream took place in a Limbo-like place where I and a bunch of other people were waiting to be judged. (I think we went there by bus.) It transpired that God had only recently actually begun creating things, and that everything and everyone that I had previously encountered had been fake (and I myself had not been real), just sort of a thought experiment by God to make sure he got everything right.

Then God finally got around to making some stuff. The first two things He made were the tenth and third levels of Hell. [I don't know if Hell is actually supposed to have that many levels, or if so what they're for, but that's what it was in the dream.] Then, once those were sorted out, He made me and one other guy named Ray Bonneville (not someone I know in real life). Then, being as we were unrepentant sinners and all, he sent us to Hell (10th level). The next day he created about a dozen other people and sent them to Hell too. This is about where I woke up.

It turns out that if there's just you and one other guy in Hell it's not that bad -- hot and humid and far from pleasant, but, you know, you adapt. (Or at least I did; Ray got pretty morose.) [Providence is going through a muggy spell -- in Providence we call these spells 'summer' -- and I think this influenced my vision of Hell.]

Also, there was a toy store in Hell. It sold some odd crushed objects that I realized after a couple of minutes were models of cars that had been in bad car wrecks.

Despite the potentially grim subject matter, the overall mood pervading this dream was cynical amusement.