Tuesday,
August 3, 1999

I am such a slug.

But hey, it's my vacation, so I can do what I want, right? So what if I wanted to sleep most of today in order to pay off my sleep deficit from the weekend -- I'm on holiday, dammit, and I'll sleep when I like!

Sorry. It's just that people have tried to make me feel guilty about the amount of shut-eye I like to get. My mother and my sister used to get on my case about it, and Lyndon has mentioned now and again that I do tend towards 12 hours when I can get them. I don't know why -- I can go with less sleep when I have to, and can even manage an entire week on 6 hours of sleep a night or less (yeah, yeah, I hear you 4-hours-a-night owls cackling in derision out there), but when I get a chance I do like to put my head down and keep it there.

I think part of it is that I dream so damn much. I can always tell when I haven't been getting enough sleep, because the first chance I get to sleep late will be the time when I have fifteen million vivid, intense, bizarre dreams. And we're talking Technicolor, THX SurroundSound, special effects from Industrial Light and Magic dreams here -- no simple things when I'm wandering the halls of my high school looking for a class. Frex, last night starred a very long, very intense dream where I was in a small house, battling a misshapen man who was the embodiment of Death. For some reason, we were using rifles that spat acid, and he cornered me in the living room when I ran out of places to run. I remember crouching there, seeing him raise his rifle and feeling this ice-cold fear go through me. I couldn't stop this, couldn't beat him, and I was going to die.

Ah, but that wasn't the only part of the dream. I dream in layers -- see, while this battle was going on, I also knew that Death was searching for a mate, and wanted to test me to see how well I did under mortal pressure. I must have done something right, because he didn't kill me -- instead, he sent me out to the back yard, where there was a small field and a garage/barn structure, and told me to wait out there for my fate. Once I was gone, he changed into his real form (which looked strikingly like Paul McGann, don't ask me why) and was busy arguing with God about why he had to test potential mates this way. God asked him if he honestly thought I could come to love him after he almost killed me, and Death had a good think about that.

Meanwhile, I'm out in the back yard, looking up at a twilit sky and wondering if I was about to die after all. Somehow, thought, I knew that Death wanted me to care for him, and I had these two huge, contrasting emotions fighting inside me -- fear and love.

Of course, that's when I woke up, so I never found out what happened. But with downtime mental gymnastics like this, you can understand why I need a lot of sleep! Besides which, where do you think I get half my story ideas?