Friday, August 01, 2008

That nightmare with the nails

Every now & then I have a nightmare where I have to get up and walk around the house or watch lame 3am TV for a half hour to clear my head.  This week there was a good one: something about being in an arena surrounded by barbed wire, with shattered glass and bits of once-living things on the ground, only to be tackled by two emotionless zombies who pounded silver nails up under my kneecaps with heavy wooden mallets; I'd wrestle a hand free, twist out a nail with a claw hammer, only to have two more driven into other joints.  No rhyme or reason.  I could see waking up and having a cramp in my knees, maybe, and that would have explained it away -- body signals intruding on dream-space.  But no, it was simply pointless, restless, and mean.  My brain acting up.  Not even a story to enjoy.

Still, night time is the right time for me.  Silent.  Nobody expects anything of me after midnight.  No phone calls.  I can surf the web, draw maps of imaginary places, scribble words in whatever notebook is at the top of a pile, plan out video games I'll probably never actually write.  Normally, after midnight is my time, and I'll take every hour of it I can get.  It's a finite resource, and there's a comedy factor: if I stay up past 4am, an unquenchable hunger sets in.  So I try to hit the sheets before that.  And every night I try to leave some traces behind.

Time fries when not having fun.  What is fun anyway?

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2024 note: this was the intro to my newsletter Dark Windows #23, but since that since has been gone for years, I have added it to the flow of this blog.