Forty winks; just a big ol’ pipe dream.

Posted in Books, deprivation, Humor, Leaders by Shelley Sackier

To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub.

And it tends to be the rubbing that keeps me from the dreaming. Let me explain. And get your mind out of the gutter for Pete’s sake.

At the end of a long day, there is nothing I look forward to more than closing up shop, crawling beneath the covers and turning out the light to welcome sleep—and it’s oftentimes one of the most entertaining parts of any twenty-four hours. But it’s not just the snoozing part that’s so engaging, but rather the movie reel that starts up upon giving in to unconsciousness.

Except … a few things tend to get in the way of that absorbing experience.

1. The cat.

2. The cat.

3. And oh yes, the cat.

There’s all this fuss that happens down at the bottom of the bed where my finicky, fault-finding furball insists upon setting up her midnight shop. Her nightly ablutions are hardly a muted affair. And all that business keeps me from falling into an otherworldly locus of illusion.

I love that place.

It is rich and restorative, mythic and impractical, and a source I rely upon like water and air and Oprah.

Sleep—in particular the part of sleep that allows one to dream—is an achievement I do not take lightly, and practice with the devotion of an Olympian.

Now, don’t get me wrong. That’s not a revealing statement that suggests my aim in life is to compete for the gold in the category of best Napping Nelly in the supine division. Not entirely. But the 7.5 hours I apply to cultivating this skill nightly is an activity I devote my whole brain and body to. And you might too if you dreamed like I do.

My dreams are not just snippets of faces, conversations or the occasional experience of flying and falling. They are chapters of many ongoing stories with the same characters and an actual plot line.

The disturbing thing is that I’m the author of said characters and plot lines, and occasionally I find some wonky, huddling conclave my brain develops where everyone I write about spews their opinions, making wisecracks about what a proper load of codswollop I’ve made with their tales. I’m sure there are sections of my brain that if autopsied would have forensic scientists wondering how that handful of goop that looks like week-old cake batter managed to find its way in.

I’m pretty sure this is the part that I’m working with in the wee hours of the night.

It’s fluid. And I kinda like it like that.

I specifically work hard at following a storyline of interest as soon as I close my eyes, running a groove into it that’s both familiar and happy to take over on autopilot. If all goes according to my mental master plan, I continue on unconsciously. Of course, if the cat has a stretch of fur that is particularly polluted, all that licking gets in the way of the narrative and ensuing arc of the story.

And then I find all the folks in my dream are coughing up hairballs. And I wake up cranky.

We spend nearly a third of our lives unconscious (although I’m sure we all know people who wander through theirs never fully fast on the draw even while operating their daily heavy machinery) and I understand the importance of that period of restoration. Yes, there’s a lot of biological activity taking place: muscles recovering, internal organs repairing, our brain unraveling the many befuddling Gordian knots we pushed to the side during the day, and we allow the internal keeper of cognizance—our brain’s personal secretary—to begin the process of sorting through and filing all the memories we just made that day.

It’s exhausting work. And must be done. Even at the expense of the cat’s nightly purification rituals.

It’s crucial I reach the REM stage of my evening’s training program because without it occurring, I drift about the next day barely able to recall where my desk is located, let alone its function and purpose.

Did you know that although a cow can sleep standing up, they can only dream when lying down?

Me too!

Did you know that whales and dolphins only allow one-half of their brains to fall asleep at a time because the other half is needed to keep them swimming and breathing?

WHY CAN’T I DO THAT??

This might prove ideal, as at least with this scenario, I’d be able to still utilize the opportunity to dream. I’m assuming the cat does not recognize the importance or necessity of allowing me to dream. But perhaps I could set up a short power point presentation that could illustrate key figures in history whose dreams were vital to the world as we know it.

I will show her a picture of:

Mohammad (That Night Journey dream was a biggie.)

Shakespeare (I’m pretty sure if he got stuck with any plot, he just made his characters dream something prophetic. How convenient.)

Dorothy Gale (This is purely self-explanatory, as I cannot imagine a world without Glinda.)

Abraham (Had his cat kept him from dreaming, a good chunk of the Bible might have been taking place in modern day Turkey.)

Mary Shelly (Thank you for Frankenstein.)

Robert Lewis Stevenson (Well done on Jekyll and Hyde.)

President Lincoln (Had he paid more attention to his dreams, he’d still be alive today. And I think we both know what I meant to say.)

Paul McCartney (Had this fellow not had a little REM, no one would be humming along tomorrow the melody of Yesterday.)

Martin Luther King (Yeah, that’s a lot of guilt to throw at a cat.)

So, ultimately, if there’s any hope of me making this list someday, I can foresee only one way out of my dilemma. I’m going to have to teach the cat to be a pig.

Sheesh … what a nightmare.

~Shelley

Don’t forget to check out what we’re cookin’ in the Scullery and what we all talked about down in the pub. Plus, you can see more of Robin Gott‘s humor–all from the only pen carved from a human funny bone.

10Mar2013

Daylight savings, nighttime losses …

Posted in Calendar, Farming, Humor, Math, Nature by Shelley Sackier

Sleeping Baby (Photo credit: Lisa Rosario Photography)

Sleep is important.

Personally, it’s more important to me than most anything I can think of. I would gladly give up my favorite meal, a thick wad of cash or even the spare fifty IQ points I tell people that I have if it means I could rid myself of the wretched sluggishness that comes after I’ve overdrawn on my sleep bank account.

In fact, I’d happily give my left lung to simply have back the one hour stolen from me every year in March.

I hate Daylight Savings Time.

Ohio Clock in the U.S. Capitol being turned forward for the country’s first daylight saving time in 1918 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Except when it works in my favor.

The present moment does not fall into that category.

We are a society so tightly wound, so minutely organized, that we refuse to acknowledge our animalism. Our train tables, our baseball games and our prime time television shows fight for an adaptable clock, while our bodily clocks question the strategy.

My bodily clock does not just ask, “Are you sure about this?”—it rebels.

For six months until it gets its way.

My body wants a solar clock. Rise when the sun smacks you in the eye, and start shutting things down right after dinner, dishes and a Downton Abbey.

I am so attuned to the tiny shifts in the astronomical hours that it no longer surprises me to crack open an eyelid ten seconds before a tiny pinprick of pink light nudges above the horizon, announcing an aurora worthy of watching. Of course, the precursor to that event might have something to do with the fact that fifteen seconds prior to sunrise, a weight of around eight pounds, evenly distributed across four tiny paws and wrapped in fur, has perched on my chest and willed my eyes to open, which they remarkably do. It’s uncanny. Or uncatty.

Still, miraculous, right?

Retailers generally favor DST. United Cigar Stores hailed a 1918 DST bill. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

And to be wholly pedantic with semantics, the official phrase is Daylight Saving Time, not Savings. And to be wholly persnickety with the phrase, there is no saving. It’s shifting, adjusting or simply sliding the assignment of a named hour to a slot that we like better than where it resided previously.

We’re control freaks.

We’re like tiny gods waving sticks up at the air and shouting, “Take that!”

And if Mother Nature happens to catch a glimpse of us, she’s probably shaking her head and she might even throw out one of our people’s best vernacular comebacks: Whatever.

Yeah, that about sums up our collective human maturity when it comes to thinking we’ve got it all under control. We’re teenagers.

I understand the rationale behind the thinking, to make better use of daylight, but it seems absurd that we’re attempting to make the Earth bend to our will—our preferred and ‘set in stone’ tablets of behavior and time.

Thou shalt not golf in the dark.

I believe this absurdity (failure to coerce the Earth, not golf blindly) to be true only from past blundered experiments where my scientist daughter has repeatedly attempted to explain to me that no matter how hard I wish it to be so, no amount of positive thinking will change the laws of physics and discoveries of science. Mathematical equations will remain true to form no matter how many times you may cheer on the concept that 2 + 2 = 5. A four is a four is a four. Period.

Except when it isn’t.

Example? Some infinities are bigger than others. Thank you, 19th century mathematician Georg Cantor. Trying to wrap your head around that concept is likely to trigger a small brain hemorrhage. And since I covet every cell remaining in that gray amorphous matter residing between my ears, I can’t risk the possibility of injury. But if you’ve got extra, click here or here for more on Georg and his brain dissolving theory. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

But there’s more to this than math. There’s biology, which happens to be my main beef. Try to convince a dairy cow that, because the milk truck will arrive an hour earlier tomorrow morning, she’d better pump up the volume tout de suite, or worse, tell her to hold that bursting udder for another sixty minutes because you’re planning to hit the snooze bar for the next six months, and you will likely form a new theory all your own. Cranky cows like to kick.

I follow the sage advice of my yoga teacher who for countless years has been reminding me, and a throng of other zen-for-a-moment seekers, to “Listen to the wisdom of your body.” This mantra has been sewn into the very fabric of me. Every molecule. It’s found in the strain of my downward facing dog DNA.

I know there are countless reasons to support DST, but there exist just as many for why it interferes or doesn’t make sense. My favorite?

Allegedly, in order to keep to their published timetables, Amtrak trains must not leave a station before the time printed. Therefore, when the clocks fall back in October, all Amtrak trains in the U.S. that are running on time stop at 2:00 a.m. and wait.

For one hour before putting it into drive again.

Sleepy, confused passengers are surely scratching their noggins over the clever corporate decisions made in that boardroom.

There is so much more to say on this subject. Seriously, I could … yawn … go on and on with my argument.

Instead, I’m going to go take a nap. See you in an hour.

~Shelley

Don’t forget to check out what we’re cookin’ in the Scullery (here) and what we all talked about down in the pub (here). And to see more of Robin Gott’s humor–all from the only pen carved from a human funny bone–click here.

30Sep2012

Sleepblogging.

Posted in Humor, mothers, Mountain life, Relationships, Survival, Virginia, women by Shelley Sackier

Sleeping (Photo credit: Moyan_Brenn)

I cannot write if I cannot sleep.

I even find it too taxing to breathe if I’m deprived of undisturbed slumber. My mindset is basically, Why bother? Just end it all now. And by end it all, I mean leap off a cliff, not leap out of bed.

Last night I nearly came to the end of my tether, and all because of something no larger than a raisin. To be frank, a squished raisin was what I had in mind come morning, if only I could locate the culprit.

Falling into bed, exhausted from a day in which I crammed more hours than nature traditionally allows, I was prepared to lose consciousness before my eyelids fully closed. And I would have, if the dog wouldn’t have started a low rumble, indicating a breach of territory.

It was just the two of us in the room that night, as Sir Sackier was already starting a day in the UK that hadn’t been given a thought to in the US. I told the dog to give the first shift of night duty to the cat. She could handle the job, seeing that most of the deadly nocturnal action around our house didn’t begin until our two sheep, who act as if their meadow is the ultimate nightclub and they’re the self-elected goons guarding its entrance, have announced last call and locked up for the evening.

Well, the dog gave up reluctantly. Maybe reluctant isn’t the right word. He remained suspicious, as if he were going to be judged on the cat’s performance. Therefore, he made sure I knew that even though his eyes were closed, his ears were on high alert, and he made a small test woof about every fifteen to twenty seconds lest I forgot.

His act probably lasted no more than three minutes before the cat leapt up on the bed and did a tight rope routine across the length of my body. Her message was clear. Oh Captain, my Captain! Something is amiss in the control room.

I listened for a blurry five seconds before asking her to get off my head and then, taking my non-response for lack of leadership, she approached my second-in-command. The dog followed her out the bedroom and down the hall, reminding me I needed to remove his toenails come daylight.

I’m guessing I must have been asleep for about sixty seconds before my alarm clock went off. Well, I thought it was my alarm clock, but after I hit it three times and then finally threw it across the room, it kept going. I was forced to open my eyes and reacquaint myself with consciousness.

Somewhere, somebody’s weird alarm was going off. And since neither the dog nor cat has made it that far in my How to manipulate household appliances training manual, I was going to have to handle this one myself. I did, however, make a mental note to skip to that chapter with my furry on-call staff first thing in the morning.

I walked toward the kitchen, hearing the piercing little siren grow louder with each step. In my head, all I could think about was how both my kids were always showing me new tricks with their iPhones, programming their devices to chirp, whistle, rattle, and purr. This is the language of “teen speak,” which most adults usually mistake for embarrassing bodily noises they’re too polite to address or faulty air-conditioning units.

When I flipped on the kitchen light, ready to rewire some Apple hardware, the knife-like distress signal immediately halted. The dog and cat stood looking up at me, blinking back at the sharp, bright light of that which is needed for human eyesight.

“What is going on here?” I asked my night watchmen. No one uttered a word. “This had better not be a prank, because there will be hell to pay, and remember, only I know how to unscrew the lid from the treat jar, guys.” They were tight. No one was willing to squeal.

I thought about organizing a witch hunt, but I’d need torches, some rope and a few hundred angry townspeople for that. I was too tired. I flipped off the light and went back to bed, leaving them both in charge.

My head just grazed the pillow when the miniature shrieking siren took up its wicked pitch. I wondered if I could sleep through it. I tried for sixty seconds. Too loud. I fumbled in my bedside table and found some earplugs from 1972 and shoved them in as far as the human ear canal allowed. Now the sound of my own breathing was keeping me awake. I pulled them out and flung back the covers, determined to find the source.

Returning to the kitchen and then whipping on the lights, the room went silent. The only things I saw were two furry bottoms sticking up in the air, while two furry heads were buried deep beneath the ovens, clearly pointing out where the distress signal was coming from.

I got a flashlight and added my bottom to the chorus line. We shined, we peered, we scoured. One tiny black-bodied cricket looked back at us from a cloud of dust bunnies and a few dried chickpeas that must have escaped from a dish I served last Thanksgiving.

Jiminy Cricket (Photo credit: .Cromo.)

“Jiminy Cricket, are you trying to tell me that’s just ONE CRICKET?” I shouted at both of them. The dog gave me a roll of the eyes as if to say, “Yeah, right, tell me about it.” That cat refused to say anything because, of course, cats don’t talk. And seeing as I wasn’t about to get any shuteye, I set up my laptop on the floor, wrote my blog post and then played a few rounds of gin rummy with the cat and the cricket, who as it turns out, is a slick little card shark.

Okay, I’m not entirely sure that last part happened, but sleep deprivation wreaks havoc with your memory, and at this point, I’m not questioning anything. Stranger things have happened, but they usually happen somewhere around me.

(Yawn) Shelley

Don’t forget to check out what’s cookin’ in the Scullery this week (here) and what we’re all talkin’ about down in the pub (here)!