Waking Up

I guess I am what you call a morning person. I truly enjoy waking up. I enjoy it so much that I try to suspend it. I drag it out over my whole morning. When I go to bed at night, I look forward to the event of waking up. It feels a little bit like time travel. I never remember falling asleep. Who doesn't love a good nap? I give myself a solid bump on the arm if I know I got some solid REM. The sculptor Harry Geffert was asked once what motivates him to create art. He said "When I was about 8 years old, I fell sound asleep on top of a cow in a pasture in the middle of the day. I have spent the rest of my life trying to recapture that moment in my art." Sleep is a powerful thing. Waking up is the first experience you have every day (unless you stayed up all night.)

I never remember drifting off to sleep. Something grabs me and knocks me out. Somehow I am magically transported to 4:00, 5:30 or 6:30, when I hear the sound of Donna Summer on my alarm clock. I keep my alarm clock radio set to wake at 6:30 am on the seventies station. Nothing gets me reaching for the snooze button faster than a little disco. The songs are all engrained in my memory and they give me something to focus on to pull me into the world of the living.

I write on this topic because this is the season that sleep comes so easy for me. It's spring time. I'm not sure if it's the onset of warm weather, the time change or the frequent drops in barometric pressure with the rain storms. Spring is always the best season for sleep. I should really say that it’s the best season for waking up. Yes, the sleep is nice but it’s the waking up that I really enjoy. Most people say they hate to wake up. I hate to get up and go to work, but I love to wake up. I love to spend 30-45 minutes celebrating the new bed by lying motionless. It’s the act of waking up I enjoy. There are no worries, no mistakes made and no arguments…yet.

I stare at the ceiling for 10 minutes and run my feet back and forth under the covers. My dog Fiddler can hear me so he clicks his way across the hardwood floors and his nose pushes the bedroom door open. “CLICK, CLICK, CLICK, CLICK…” He practices his own waking ritual with a quick downward dog and a yelping yawn. He sniffs my shoes on the floor. Then he heads straight for my side of the bed banging his tail into everything and panting loudly. I roll over half crocked across the comforter. My movement makes him bang his tail that much faster. He knows I’m awake now.

I feel the cool, grass laden breezes coming through the open window. Sometimes it’s just starting to rain and I can make out a faint rumble off in the distance and drops of rain hitting the leaves outside. That’s the best. I can smell all of the new blossoms and green tree buds. If I’m lucky I will catch a hint of bacon on the air from a neighbor’s house. I can hear a loud exchange of a thousand cackles, twerps, cheeps and caws coming from hot and bothered birds. I sit up disoriented and unaware of my present situation. I take a few minutes to try and analyze the dream I just had. Sometimes I feel like calling in sick to work to spend some time working through whatever self psychoanalysis I can sort out from my dream. “This stuff is important!” I would tell them. “I am on the brink of a major self discovery.”

I think about hot tea or coffee to help clear my head. I think back on my dreams again. I start in on my dream again. What the hell did that mean? The golf tournament in Brazil that I can never make the tee time because of an affair I am having with my 3rd grade teacher. The purple sock I can’t get off of my foot because it’s a mile long. Did I mention that I’m sitting on the Chrysler building? There are always the snakes.

I fall back into my pillows and contemplate. I think to myself, “Today is different.” Of course it’s not. It’s the same day that I had yesterday. It’s the same day I will have tomorrow. I’ll usually forget about it half way to work on my commute. My blissful condition of rest and self affirmation is quickly replaced with rage for the jack-hole that just cut me off, “JACK-HOLE!” It begins again; the day that will leave me fraught with anxiety, fatigued and confused; the day that will die in my sleep and lead me back to another wake.