Come Fly With Me!

Our cats seem to be hard-wired to want breakfast at 5 or 5:30 a.m. It used to be 6 or 6:30, but then the blasted time-change ruined that. I find this truth about the cats annoying, since they are also very good at disrupting human sleep enough to make their demand quite clear, and the humans in our house have become accustomed to keeping only slightly more reasonable hours than the average college student. We go to bed at midnight or a bit before, and at the appointed too-early hour the cats stomp on us, cry, try to pull the covers off of us, nuzzle us and demand to be petted with the regularity of a snoozed alarm until we submissively sit up and walk to the kitchen. This behavior is annoying at best and disruptive at worst, because I often cannot fall asleep easily again once I have regained enough consciousness to shoo them or groan at Daniel to make them stop by giving them food.

This groaning at Daniel is one of the many mercies of life with him. Dan, who can fall asleep just about anywhere and any time, is able (and gracious enough) to get up, feed them, go back to bed, and sleep. This means that most mornings I am spared having to wake up enough that I can't sleep further. It probably pays off for him in a way, because when I have had insufficient sleep, my charms wear rather thin and he is the first one to feel the brunt of my thundering sleep-deprived unreasonableness.

Dan has been gone several nights this week - off to his new work and the fascinating aromas and lumpy bed of a rather grubby extended-stay hotel. I, on the other hand, have the novelty of the whole bed to myself, which might mean spreading out more if I didn't have a cat on either side of me to pin me down. However enchanting the ability to spread out might be in theory and in practice, it comes at a rather steep price. I will not explore the emotional price now. Instead, I wish to explore the costly now-guess-who-gets-to-get-up-at-5-ish-to-feed-the-cats issue.

I might add that there is no locking them out of the room, both because I can't sleep as well if they aren't curled up near me (oh, the irony), and because locking them out is simply an invitation for them to rip the carpet under the door and whine incessantly trying to get in. That's enough to keep us from sleeping in the first place... so the cats stay. And we, like Pavlov's dog, do what we are conditioned to do.

I tried to outsmart them last night. I gave them an extra meal just before bed in hopes that their tummies would feel comfy enough that they would ignore the tugs of their circadian rhythms and leave off tugging on me, because after a couple of fitful husband-less nights, I was extraordinarily tired. Alas, at 5-ish when MooMoo greeted me with cries in the still-dark house, and walked on me until I knew there was no fighting it, I dragged myself out of bed and, leaving the lights off so as to not jar my sleepy senses further, I felt my way through the kitchen to the cans of food.

I had done everything I could to increase the odds that I could fall back to sleep after the kitchen trek (leaving lights out, moving slowly, trying to stay as unalert as is safe when actually walking around), while the kitties contentedly lapped at their processed meat product, but my brain was uncooperative. I lay there tossing and turning, my mind doing laps at my internal equivalent of the Indy-500, until I just gave up, got up and sat up at the computer.

Ah, but all was not lost...! The more pleasant discovery I have made of late is that sometimes I am able, after getting up and calming my mind a bit and maybe eating a little something, to go back to sleep for a while if I make another attempt at it. This morning, it worked! And did it ever!

I remember the feeling I sometimes had when falling asleep as a kid. I would suddenly start to float out of the bed and up into space, weightless and free. The heaviness of life eventually robbed me of that most charming entrance into the dream world. Most nights I am anchored in my own bed with my own problems. This morning, when it was time for sleep, take two, I found myself in a rather ordinary dream that soon became extraordinary. There I was, in a spot I visit frequently in my nighttime wanderings, outside my parents' house. I'm not sure how it happened, but I suddenly became aware that I could leave the ground. I didn't have wings or a jet pack, but sure as I was dreaming, I could float above the ground. I even had some control over direction and speed and height. So I flew up the street in the general direction of the park. I looked down on treetops and roofs and wondered if I had time or mental powers enough to make it to a more exotic locale.

I decided to aim for Sweden, a spot Dan and I both have added to our "someday when we have money and time" list. I don't think I quite made it, but I did alight on the top of a rather European-style building just on the coast of some unfamiliar land. The feeling of flight was so exhilarating and freeing that I didn't want to stay there on the rooftop long, so I took off again, this time flying over the crystal-clear ocean, teeming with dolphins and killer whales that froliced just below the lustrous surface of the deeps. It was indescribably beautiful, and I had such a feeling of joy and peace in that moment that my eyes are growing red and damp just thinking about it now.

The flight evaporated there over the ocean, but I remained in a lucid state, molding, to some limited extent, the shape of my dreams. When I awoke, MooMoo was curled up next to me again, perhaps in pursuit of her own ever-elusive dream mouse.

I have often felt so overwhelmed of late in my waking hours. To have such a dream now, when I am so tired, earthbound and burdened, was a really amazing thing. I can only hope that someday soon I find my wings again.