Waking dreams

We have these weeks every now and then that really do us in; we trade off who gets to sleep and we revert back to an early college diet (yesterday was donuts and pizza with beer). This is one of those weeks.

I have seen the sun come up three times this week, and it's only Wednesday. No, Thursday now. I have not seen the sun rise because I am an early riser; quite the opposite, actually. I have watched, as that cold, clammy chill just before dawn creeps over my skin and makes my already strung tight body convulse with the shivers, the dark night fade, turning from shadows and depth to a foggy gray and then into a fully blush. The sun, damn him, wakes up shining. I am usually whimpering by this point, frantically and madly dashing out words and letters and numbers, hoping it's coherent enough to hide how close I'm clipping my deadlines.

I know I have at least one, perhaps two, more days of this. I am fighting down all that threatens to flood into my mind because there is not enough room or time to deal with it at the moment. Anxiety? I'm so sorry, but you'll have to take a number and hang out behind crazy, despair, uncertainty and fully coherent back there.

My Kindle is lonely, my own writing quietly huddling in the corner, lurking and teasing little snippets of guilt here and there. Scott and I keep teasing that we really just need to give up sleep to maximize the time in the day. Think of all that time given to dreaming. While I find my dreams to often be exciting, if quite confusing, I could make do without them in lieu of more time. They are often pretty epic:

And then there was an ambulance, and we got into the ambulance because this plane just tumbled out of the sky, end over end. Somersaulted down the field/runway (it was just a field but then it became a runway) and there was destruction. THINGS WERE JUST FALLING OUT OF THE SKY! So we stole an ambulance, but we only stole the ambulance after these giant blue beams of light came shining down from the sky. AND THEN PEOPLE WERE OBLITERATED. THEY JUST DIED. The ambulance we stole because it was better than a Hummer; it was a beast, and it could go anywhere, plus it had medical supplies. We had to drive around collecting people, and some were going to meet us at the safe house....[a lot more happened here but it gets confusing and really hard to explain--you try justifying why do you what you do in dreams]

Eventually there were some dinosaur-like creatures (aliens?) hunting us, and the safe house was compromised.  Everything was in tones of brown and sepia inside the safe house. 

The trouble with these dreams, though, is they leave me exhausted. I'm never sure if I would have been better off just staying up and watching the sun rise and then falling into that deep, dark sleep of the utterly exhausted for just two hours or going on to bed and wrestling with whatever my brain decides to throw at me for a full eight hours. For the moment, I suppose it doesn't really matter; eight hours of sleep this week (and possibly next week, too) is only a dream.