It's Killing Time

I wrote a series of "quickwrites" for a physiology project about sleep, and I wanted to share them with everyone on Buzznet. Among the quickwrites I did a line-by-line breakdown of MCR's "Sleep," but it was a pain to format and I can't do it here.

Waking Up
    A subject that I briefly talked about on November fourth was that I wake up when my alarm clock tells me to. Last year I discovered why I jump out of bed in the mornings when I have to wake up before five to go on a trip. It’s because my brain hasn’t processed that I’m still tired. Or maybe I think I'm dreaming, but the instant my alarm clock goes off I get right out of bed. If I linger or look at my clock again I realize that I’m sleepy and another five minutes wouldn’t kill me…until that five turns into a half hour and I don’t have enough time to straighten my hair. As long as I get moving and keep trucking along until I’m awake and my eye’s have adjusted (curse our school system that forces me to wake up when it’s still dark outside) I resist going back to bed where it’s warm and soft, and I don’t have to go anywhere jus yet…it seems silly that we can’t stay in bed until ten every day. Then the morning people can do what they do best and us normal people get all the sleep we need. Because hitting the snooze button for an extra half hour in the morning just doesn’t cut it, I personally need an hour to get ready. Makeup, hair, breakfast, webcomics, I need it all in the morning.

Childhood Dreams
    Some of my childhood dreams still stay in my memory today. Even now, the nightmares of my childhood are more memorable than the ones that wake me up even now.
    One of the earliest of my childhood nightmares is what I call the “Barney Dream.” The dream was about me, about three or four years old, being chased by a miniature Barney the Dinosaur. The creepy thing chased me through a board meeting at some school and had me cornered in a tree house, snapping and squeaking at me from the ground. What I remember most was the color of Satan-Barney, the purple was so vibrant it was like a radioactive doll.
    Then there was the Aladdin Dream. The dream was of Aladdin taking me on a carpet ride over some forest and then us flying through a burning house under construction. The house was just plywood and two by four, but I would scream at Aladdin to take me out of the house but we just flew up the stairs and through the flames. The dream wasn’t triggered by the movie Aladdin, but probably me going through a house in our neighborhood under construction. It scared me for just the one night I had it, but I’ve never forgotten what it was like to fly up the stairs  and pass the flaming plywood shell of the house.
    The last nightmare of my childhood was terrifying, and I slept in my mom’s bed for three nights after it, but that dream let me cope with nightmares. Outside of my window I can get to the roof, then hop down to our shed, and the last part to the ground in climbing down our fence. In the dream I’m getting off the roof in the night like I’ve gotten out of bed to go on an adventure. I’m walking on the fence, balancing and looking into our neighbors yard. Then I look into the shadows and see a pair of glowing red eyes and snarling in the shadow of our neighbor’s garage. I woke up. I somehow identified the eyes as belonging to a large, black dog. I ran to my mom’s room and refused to go back to my own bed for a few nights. But when I had to go back to my own room, I thought about the dog. The red eyes belonged to a female dog, I decided. A large black guard dog. And she protected me in my dreams. I gave her a name (that I’m sad to say I’ve forgotten over time, was it Sarah?) and talked to her every night before I fell asleep. I talked to her like she controlled my dreams, and I asked her for pleasant dreams and would request from time to time a falling dream.

The Afternoon Crash
    If I take a nap in the afternoon, it’s no short affair. During the summer when it’s ninety in my room or in the winter when it’s sixty, if I fall asleep in the afternoon I’m out. At four or five, I fall asleep and I won’t wake up until my mom or brother (though I pretend that I can’t hear the brother) tell me to come down for dinner. Then I’m unpleasant and tired, telling everyone how wonderful it was to be asleep and how much I would love to just go back to bed. “Dinner will wake you up,” my mom says. “She needs her sleep, it’s tech week you know, oh never mind, I’m the one staying till ten every night, not her,” the brother says unhelpfully. I grumble and blink through the meal which does wake me up, and though I really wanted to just go back to sleep, I had to be taken from my favorite place to be with my family.

A Key To Jeanne’s Unpleasantness
    During the summer, I go to Hawaii time. Bedtime is anytime after two am, and I wake up sometime around eleven, before it becomes an oven in my room. Sadly, I know a few “morning people”  who think that I am awake by nine. My mother, happy to torment me, hands me the phone saying it’s one of my friends. First thing I say is some incomprehensible grumble. I don’t ask who it is or why they’ve called, but I give them a piece of my mind and shake my finger at them for calling before ten (literally, because I’m so dead that it doesn’t occur to me that they can’t see me over the phone).

Music to Nap To
    My brother listens to Cat Stevens, Zoë Keating, or Simon and Garfunkel to help him sleep. My dad used to listen to the sounds of a beach. People listen to classical, ambient tapes, and soothing sounds to help them sleep. I listen to heavy metal. I’m the black sheep in my family when it comes to music, but it still confuses me how I find it easier to fall asleep to Drowning Pool than cello.
    This strange musical choice occurred to me one summer afternoon. Maybe it was the heat, or maybe it was just that I was tired, but during the loudest song on my computer, Step Up by Drowning Pool, I lay back and fell asleep. I always remember which song I fall asleep to because it’s the song I’ll sing when I wake up. And that fateful afternoon I woke up to the Once soundtrack. It was a soft, melodic song that sounded very much like a lullaby, but when I opened my eyes and tapped the keyboard I realized that loud music put me to sleep, and soft music woke me up. Maybe it was just coincidence that day, but ever since when I want to take a nap I turn the volume up and play Step Up, and I’m out the moment my head hits the pillow.