Who Mugged My Head?

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I'm having one of those days when even intravenous caffeine couldn't have lifted my brain out of the mud. Every thought seemed to come free with a little slurpy 'plop' sensation like the one your feet make when you walk in the sand on the edge of the surf. I was wakened from a bizarre dream after more than an eight hour sleep and the disorientation stayed with me for more than the next eight hours with the images and emotions of the dream impinging on the waking world that took on the contours of a dreamworld. My fingers fumbled everything they touched and my tongue fumbled every word it formed.

Such days follow sleeps longer than six or seven hours often enough that memories of them instill a stubborn reisistance to surrendering to sleep once I get my brain awake again. That usually takes more than twelve hours which is still more than an hour off and so here I sit minutes after my sister and her son went downstairs to bed, listening to the quiet snores of my Mom, looking around my workstation at laptop, books, notebooks, todo lists and thinking of the hours of silence and solitude stretching ahead--those hours I crave with a glutuous greed--and find myself more inclined to join in a duet with my Mom than to open a file on my computer or a book. Even though I know that if I choose more sleep now, it'll be 24 hours before this opportunity for more than five minutes of uninterrupted thought comes round again.