Sleepless Nights Redux

When I go days and days without solid sleep, I start to hallucinate. I'm only mildly kidding. After a while, I just get . . . in a word . . . nuts. I get weepy, my mind wanders, and strange thoughts and dreams pop into my head.

Welcome to my insanity. :-)

Demon Baby, as regular blog readers may know, had the croup. Thus I went a few days--maybe longer--without sleep more than in 30-minute snatches. He's over the croup, but not over the nighttime whimpering and crying. Then, last night, I just decided that I was getting so nuts that I would bunk in with my younger daughter (my parents are living with me for the month and have taken over my master bedroom). As luck would have it, Baby Girl felt sick all night long with an upset stomach, and moaned and cried, and needed, well . . . MOMMY.

And so, in the midst of yet another (!!!) sleepless night--Mom's Sleepless Insanity Part Deux--my writing became the focus of these strange hallucinatory thoughts. Plot points drifted in. Pieces of sentences I have yet to write. Characters' faces. Snippets of dialogue. Even when I would fall asleep, it wasn't R.E.M. sleep so the thoughts kept coming. Like a waking dream. And, in the oddest of thoughts, this strange sort of existential discussion arose in my head. Without me, they don't exist.

What do I mean? I look at my kids and think . . . well, Demon Baby wasn't even a twinkle in my eye four years ago. I didn't even know this little person was going to come along--at forty, no less--and change my life. He wasn't anything. Not a thought. Not a name, not a person, not even a few cells.

Same with my stories. Until I actually set them to paper, they don't exist. And as I am writing . . . it's this process of creation. If I died tomorrow and a story was unfinished, it would never come into being. It would cease right there.

BUT . . . my books live on. That's a theme in a book I am working on. At its center is an illuminated manuscript from the Middle Ages. When the heroine looks at it, she realizes she is seeing art from centuries and centuries ago. So someday, after I am long dead, if my grandkids or great-grandkids want to know who their wacky old Grandma was . . . they can read my books and try to find me in the pages.

So this is what I think about on sleepless nights.

Thoughts?

And feel free to say that yes, I have finally lost it.

Things That Go Bump in the Night

I am operating on about three hours of sleep courtesy of my air conditioning breaking on the hottest day of the year, with the heat index around 110. I was in bed, heart racing from the heat, feeling like I was suffocating. When I finally DID fall asleep, my baby son's musical potty chair malfunctioned and went off.

Yes, I said a musical potty chair. You pee, it plays a song. What will they think of next? But the chair decided it needed to play at odd hours of the night, and I went and hid the thing in the closet, thinking then I wouldn't hear it--but no, it was loud enough in a quiet house to hear even from the closet.

And THEN, when I finally dozed, because I wasn't properly in my sleep cycle, I had some killer nightmares.

From what I remember, the main one had to do with a rat biting my hand and latching on. I could FEEL its tail wrapping around my wrist, and the pain in my hand as its jaws tightened, and I woke up gasping for air, crying.

Now, I "get" why I had this dream. Once every three weeks or so, my significant other brings home a rat for Lydia, the python, to consume. The snake is my son's and she started out about the width of a pencil. Suffice it to say she is now over a foot long and pretty thick. She's very docile, but I just cannot even bring myself to touch her. When Lydia came home, I was very upset because I didn't, as a Buddhist, like the idea of sacrificing little animals to feed her. But I was overruled. So I basically told my son when he goes off to college in a few years, his roomie better like reptiles, because Lydia will be booted.

Anyway, this whole Wild Kingdom drama plays out every three weeks. I cry over the rat, my son consoles me and tells me to go outside while the kill is taking place. I sometimes even light a candle for the poor rats. BUT . . . BUT . . . I hate rats. I truly do. I would rather touch the snake than touch a rat. I hate them, hate them, hate them. Hence the nightmare--a combo of guilt and revulsion.

So there you go. I also have a really morbid fear of clowns (even Jimmy Stewart playing Buttons in The Greatest Show on Earth). Cockroaches send me over the edge. But I am surprisingly cool about spiders. I still sleep with a nightlight on though, and when I stay in hotel rooms when I travel alone to NYC, I always check under the bed and in the closet and the shower stall.

As a writer, I really think about these fears and phobias, because a good writer will use universal fears, as well as other creepy, crawly elements to make us pull the covers up as we read.

So . . . what is it that scares you? That when a masterful movie or book depicts it, you want to crawl under the blankets? What goes bump in the night.

E

P.S. And if I start having nightmares about singing, talking mutant toilets, I'll let you know.

A Busy Mind

I woke up at 3:00 a.m. today and couldn't fall back to sleep. I don't feel well, so part of it was . . . well, I didn't feel well. The other part of it was I had a lot on my mind. So I did what I usually do when I have a lot on my mind and I can't sleep. I prayed.

And while I am sure zillions (that's a real number, right?) of people the world over have a lot on their minds, I am equally sure that sometimes, writers have the corner market on busy minds.

Why? Well, because it's not just MY mind with problems. It's the 10 characters or so I am thinking about at any given time, and all THEIR problems, and plot difficulties and resolutions and subtle character shifts I have to think about.

It's waking up at two a.m. with a great book idea I have to scribble down. Or the perfect last sentence. Or the perfect first sentence.

And prayer did help to quiet my mind a bit. But I can tell it's going to be a long, TIRED day.

So how about you? A busy mind keep you up? What do you do when it happens? And is it the writing life that intrudes most often?