Sometimes the delightful nature of hard-won sleep is interrupted by a nightmare which can cause you to scream with blood curdling intensity. Then, you may wake yourself up - wondering who is being murdered next door, and why they must scream so loudly in the process. But if you're lucky (or incredibly observant) you will realize it was your own scream - a detail only noticed because of the stripped nature of your vocal chords and the racing heartbeat which thumps your confused body up and down in a vertigo-inducing rhythm. As you catch your breath and swallow the sandpaper in your mouth, you try to remember what you were dreaming of that brought on such an adventure.
Once your heart stops pumping the arches of your feet and you stabelize, sleep returns.
And sometimes the delightful nature of post-terror, hard-won sleep is interrupted by a nightmare involving the incessant beeping of a time bomb. The anxiety begins to fill your belly and your heart does its thumpety thing again. You wake up and slowly integrate into your surroundings, a bomb still ticking. You quickly become annoyed with the familiar lack of rest. This dissolves into a realization that there really must be a corpse next door because it's 1:30 in the morning and their alarm clock is piercing the quiet air...something only a corpse could sleep through. And it continues to beep. And beep, it continues. And with the beeping, more beeps. Beep. B.e.e.p. B..e..e..p. B...e...e...p.
And so it goes. All windows flung wide. The beeping, a menace to your psyche. You begin to crack and think that perhaps the worst torture to inflict on any human is the revoked promise of delightful sleep. And beeping. Your college educated, rational brain drools out your ears and you slosh around the bed, flailing helplessly. Your pacifist mantra turns reptilian as you chant, "I hate them. I hate them. I hate them." You try to squirm out of your skin, but the damn body is stuck to you. I hate them. I hate them. I hate them.
At this point, you are weeping dry tears. Even though you were enjoying your own opened window, welcoming the elegant hillside into your troubled dreams, you slam shut the border between yourself and the night. The beeping penetrates. And though you hate it with unmatched passion, you turn on the sound machine. Its horrible static, cycling in edited loops, is unable to dull the beeping. You begin counting the cycles. Your ears reach for pitches in the static. You tap to measures and tempo. And you think, "this is as good as it will get," resigning yourself.
And so you sleep. SsssssTATIC....b.e.e.p...SssssTATIC...b.e.e.p...SssssTATIC.
In the morning, you snap at everything that moves. Or smiles. Or dares to look at you. And even though the air is crisp and cheery, you stare down the sun for daring to show its face after it abandoned you when you needed it most. What could scorch a family of 27 better than the blistering, murdering sun? Nothing, that's what.
