Zzzzzzs

I've had a hard time falling asleep this week, which is unusual. Normally if I'm going to have insomnia, it will be the type where I wake up in the middle of the night and have anxious thoughts until I fall back asleep. But this week it's been all about lying awake for hours until my body finally gives up. The reason why may be the dorkiest reason ever. I've finally done something that I've been telling myself (and everyone else around me) I should do for a long time. I created a dream journal and I've been excited to get new material.

There's been an element of self-mocking whenever I speak of this dream journal but the embarrassing truth is that this isn't even my first one. I'm a big writer but I wouldn't call them journals. I would call them disjointed thoughts written down for possible song use. But years ago, I used to keep a dream journal. I'm far better at recording events than making sense of them and dreams kind of make sense of events for you so when I read back through this journal, more than any other, I have a sense of who I was at that age and what I was going through.

Recently my wife brought home a small blank journal that she received as a free gift from a vendor. She'd had a choice between a journal and a tote bag. She choose wisely as we have twenty tote bags. I already have a regular journal going but it's hard to not write in a fresh one when it's just sitting there, the blank pages giving me that look like, "come be all crazy here." I realized that if I made this my dream journal I could start writing in it right away so I slapped a cover on it last Sunday, when I was dorking out with many creative projects (such as a wooden moustache) and decided to start recording what my brain thinks about when I sleep.

When I wake up in the middle of the night it is not because of anxiety. Sure, I have anxious thoughts but I have them every waking second so that's not noteworthy. I think the reason I wake up is because of Vina, the rottweiler. You see, Vina used to wake up randomly and bark her thunderous bark for no reason at about three or four in the morning. Eight years of waking up every night kind of made it a habit. She also used to wake me up with her disgusting, obsessive bed licking. Since she was deaf, it wasn't like I could just yell at her to stop. Instead I'd smack her with my pillow then make rude hand gestures. But she didn't sleep on my side of the bed so I'd have to lean over my wife and do this sweeping, pillow smack so that everyone in the room could be awake. I like sharing.