My phone went off, reminding me that it was bedtime. Somehow, getting to bed at a reasonable hour had been more of a luxury than ever since the plague had struck, but I was determined to make it happen. I’d been comfortable with my schedule, until a week before, when I’d had an online appointment with my doctor and said I was “accustomed to sleeping about five hours a night”. She’d given me a tolerant smile and said that until recently I’d been “accustomed to being twenty pounds overweight”, and I’d managed to change my habits there, hadn’t I?
I’d been more than a little taken aback by that analogy, and had promised to mend my ways. She had given me a link to oneiros.org, which offered advice on how to sleep, and I’d been trying to follow it. I’d been especially tempted by the site’s promise that I could train my brain to dream more frequently and more vividly.
I pulled my phone from my pocket and for a moment allowed it to continue to play its pleasant tune, a song I remembered fondly from my teenage years. Then I silenced it, saved the chapter I was working on and shut down the computer. My doctor had been right about that one, too: I was writing better now that I was sleeping better. I thought this book would be an even bigger seller than my last one.
I went into the kitchen, microwaved a cup of water, opened my box of Sleepy Tea, admiring its image of an anthropomorphic platypus in pajamas sitting before a table with a steaming cup of tea, its bed in the background. I steeped a bag, enjoying the smell of the tea, and sat to relish it while I held a slim book of haiku.
Finishing the tea, which I took without honey so I wouldn’t need to brush my teeth again, I put the cup in the sink and went to my bed, shucking off my pants and sliding between its sheets. I plugged in my phone and opened oneiros.com on it. I selected “Sleeping Porch on a Warm, Rainy Summer Night”, and heard the distinctive sounds of rain falling on shrubbery and a shingled porch roof.
I turned out the light and drifted off to the sound of the rain, with occasional thunderclaps rolling in softly from a distance.
I woke to the screech of my alarm clock across the room, reeled to it and silenced it. I picked up my dream journal and made this entry, noting that I had once again dreamed of going to bed in a setting much more conducive to sleep than my real one. This one had really been remarkable, with its exotic advanced technology. I wished I had a phone like the one I’d dreamed about, a little flat slab like a piece of black glass with an Internet connection. I supposed there would be phones like that one day: when I had one, I’d probably give up my landline phone entirely. I looked over at my desk, where a sheet was sitting half-finished in its roller. I promised to work on it tonight after work.
As I dressed, I decided I would also stop at the library after work to use one of their Internet computers. I’d find out if there really were such a site as “oneiros.com”, and if so whether it bore any resemblance to the one in my dream.
I pulled my notebook from my pocket and opened it to my shopping list. I wrote “Sleepy Tea?” Maybe it was a real product that I’d seen on the shelf. If not, I’d buy another box of Walden’s Chamomile.
https://spad1.wordpress.com/2010/03/31/when-my-car-broke-down/
The Magic Eight-Ball says, "If you can dream, and not make dreams your master...."
No comments:
Post a Comment