I don't what in the hell is wrong with me, but for years, about once a month, my body just crashes and burns like one of those movies where a car zooms off a rocky cliff and explodes at the moment of impact.
Today was one of those days: dragging since waking, struggling to keep the eyelids open, hating my body's complete immunity to highly sugared, caffeine-infused beverages, and slumping over my desk and wishing I had a big comfy pillow in front of me instead of a file stuffed with memos, sales figures and hard copies of e-mails.
Finally an hour after lunch, I called it a day, came home and slept hard for five hours. When I awoke in my now-darkened bedroom five hours later, my body felt refreshed and my mind was crystal clear from some extremely bizarre and detailed dreams. It was as if someone took a dustblower to the inside of my brain and then backed that up with a thorough scrubbing using an industrial strength cleanser and an SOS pad.
This happens every month like clockwork.
Today was one of those days: dragging since waking, struggling to keep the eyelids open, hating my body's complete immunity to highly sugared, caffeine-infused beverages, and slumping over my desk and wishing I had a big comfy pillow in front of me instead of a file stuffed with memos, sales figures and hard copies of e-mails.
Finally an hour after lunch, I called it a day, came home and slept hard for five hours. When I awoke in my now-darkened bedroom five hours later, my body felt refreshed and my mind was crystal clear from some extremely bizarre and detailed dreams. It was as if someone took a dustblower to the inside of my brain and then backed that up with a thorough scrubbing using an industrial strength cleanser and an SOS pad.
This happens every month like clockwork.
* * *
My dreams this afternoon, I would venture, have never been more crisp. These were widescreen Technicolor suckers full of pleasant faces from my past and present, melodic and captivating songs that come out of nowhere and still stick in my skull hours after waking, and exciting scenes of satisfying adventures that are possible in this world.
I hesitate to call my mood melancholy after they end and I awake, but it's odd how all of these buried possibilities shimmy to the surface when slumber allows the mind to shed all sense of reality. It makes you wonder what you could do if the physical world simply caved and yielded to that something in your belly that can only be revealed when the body is turned off and defenseless.
I mean, listening to some of the songs in my dreams today, convince me that...well, I could be the next Tony Orlando.
Sigh.
