Author: Graeme McMillan

I rarely sleep in — there’s part of my subconsciousness that simply doesn’t allow it, preferring to prevent me from sleeping altogether rather than oversleeping if there’s an appointment or event that I have to be awake at a particular time for. I wish that wasn’t the case, but it is; nonetheless, this morning, I woke up a good half-hour later than I’d hoped, with a deadline looming over me that I had hoped to be awake early and eager to deal with.

My reaction to this unexpected event wasn’t panic, exactly, as much as curmudgeonly resignation; I didn’t think oh my God, I won’t be able to finish it in time — the deadline in question wasn’t a self-imposed one, but instead an embargo deadline agreed in advance with an interview subject and their PR team — but, instead, well, I guess this means I’ll have to just get it done somehow. I can’t tell if that’s admirable or simply ridiculous, but it was certainly motivational: purposefully ignoring all other distractions (like, for example, writing something here first thing in the morning as usual), I rushed and made the deadline, literally, with two minutes to spare.

Of  course, I am now fully expecting to find myself unable to sleep tonight as my body decides to overcompensate for this morning’s unexpected lack of self-discipline.

Another sign of my inevitable march of time is how cheered I’ve become lately by the earlier sunrises. With the clocks changing this weekend, this soon won’t be the case, of course, but right now the sun is rising before 7am again, which means it’s almost light when I wake up, making a dramatic change in my optimism about the day ahead. No longer does it feel like I’m getting started when the rest of the world is asleep — although, to be fair, that’s probably still the case, but it doesn’t feel like it, which is nice — and instead, it’s as if the day is waking up with me, if that makes sense.

Everything changes this Sunday, of course; the 6:45 sunrises will become 7:45 again, although the Internet promises me that we’ll be back to this point by the end of the month, which feels entirely do-able in a way that the seasons shifting didn’t this time last month. This wasn’t always the case for me; I didn’t used to be so happy about — or even conscious of — earlier mornings and when the sun rises. I’m putting it down to growing older, but why that should be the case, I have no idea.

It’s always strange when a dream goes from one thing — and a pleasant, lazily benign thing, for that matter — to something else without warning; something that has me wondering just what my subconsciousness is playing at, and working through. Last night/this morning’s dream is fading, already, but what I remember includes being at some comic convention of some kind in the U.K., where I ran into an old friend from school by accident — only for the two of us to suddenly be separated, with no idea of what happened. Turned out, both of us had lost our memories and the friend now had somebody’s head in his possession, much to his surprise and concern.

Despite what that sounds like, it didn’t turn into anything horrific, more oddly comedic and murder-mystery-ish: Who was behind our memories disappearing? Whose head was it, and how had my friend ended up with it? What do we do now? It was, in its own way, kind of wonderful, if utterly unexpected — an Edgar Wright movie of a dream, in many ways. But sadly, I woke up before I found out the truth behind my predicament. Perhaps that, in itself, is a lesson of sorts.

And then there are the posts I clearly closed the window on too quickly and so they didn’t actually post, like this:

As my body gets older, I find that the cliches come true all the more often; last night was a case in point, with a cup of tea at nine o’clock apparently wrecking my sleep for the rest of the night. Every couple of hours, pretty much on the dot, I’d wake up and just lie there thinking this is both impressive and ridiculous for a handful of minutes before it’d suddenly be two hours later and I’d be doing the same thing.

True, there are multiple reasons why this might have happened, most of which have nothing to do with tea — something that has never had this kind of effect on me before — but, for either comedy purposes or a lack of desire to search elsewhere for a reason, it’s something I landed on immediately. It makes me feel old and curmudgeonly to tell myself, and in this state of sleep-deprived disrepair, there’s something very fitting about that.