Feb. 3rd

Hi.

I've been waking up in the middle of the night again - almost every night and usually for about two hours. Sometimes I'm too lazy or cold to get up, so I lie there and let my mind go nowhere special until I am ready to face the fact that unless I get up, I will not be able to go back to sleep again. That is the trick: getting up to do something that focuses my mind until it realises how tired it is.

Usually, I read The Guardian and sometimes, I work on my thesis. I can't do anything too active or exciting, like bake or sew, because then I'll never go back to bed, and going back to bed - to sleep - is the goal. Otherwise I'm sleeping at work.

It works. Sometimes, upon returning to bed, I will lie there for a little bit before falling asleep again. That usually happens when I've gone back too soon due to impatience with that inevitable fatigue. But I always have really great dreams afterwards.

By 'great' I mean 'vivid'. Here was this morning's, had sometime between 5:15 and 6:00am:

As is normally the case of late, I dreamt about the wedding. It is the day of. I arrive on the scene early to the basement of a house and some of the guests are there - all friends of my old boyfriend, and few of whom I'd remembered inviting, so I begin to wonder how the rest of them will fit at the reception to eat.

Suddenly, it's time to go to the ceremony. I feel about as ready as I would if it were to take place TODAY, so, utterly unprepared. We don't have rings and we had missed our meeting with the JP days before, among other things. I am astounded by how totally disorganised we are. How could this have happened? I had all those lists...

I haven't done my hair (which is long, blond and scraggly) and I'm not dressed. I am, however, wearing about nineteen layers, all with very intricate buttons. I start to madly undo them. I'm getting hot. I'm running late. I skip the buttons and just yank everything off over my head. I put on my dress. I go to the bathroom. The end of the dress falls in the toilet. I rinse it off and the colour - sparkly green - starts to come out and then change to a white and gold pattern, but only in that one area. At least it's pretty, I think. I don't have any make-up on and there is no time to do that hair (whoever's hair that is). No shower, nothing. I am all sweaty. I am really not feeling my best.

Dad picks me up in some car with the steering wheel on the right and I sit in the back seat, wondering what the JP is going to say, until I realise that I want to walk to the ceremony. We are coming out of an underground parking lot and I decide to jump out as soon as the car emerges from the dungeon. It is a warm, sunny day, even though it's February. I don't even need a wrap. Then I wake up to the sound of the radio.

It's true that we have a lot to do between now and the end of the month, but if we did have to do it tomorrow, it wouldn't be that bad. My guess is the dress-in-toilet thing is prophetic, though. That keeps happening with this silly belted cardigan I have.

I look forward to tomorrow morning's dream.