I Wake Up in Stages

Dear Wal,

I set my alarm clock (lol, at first I typed: "alarm clark") for 7:30. I usually don't get to bed until after midnight. I keep telling myself that this is an irresponsible decision, but it hasn't quite sunk in yet. Anyway, when I actually get adequate sleep, this it what happens:

1) Deep sleep. At this point, I don't hear anything or sense anything outside of sleeping. If I dream, I don't remember any of it.

2) Crazy dreams. I start having all kinds of strange dreams. Everything from superheroes, superheroes, and more superheroes to bizarre premonitions of other worlds and strange, horrific visions. Most of the time, I remember these dreams, or snippets of them. This stage is where some of my greatest ideas for fiction have come from. I've come to consider my dreams a direct conduit into my imagination, one that I exploit as much as I can. Strangely, my dreams rarely include Batman (at least, not that I can remember).

3) Lucid/Awareness. I officially know that I'm a human being on planet Earth, third planet orbiting the star Sol. I know I'm beginning to wake up, but I haven't quite gotten there yet. It's at this point I can decide whether or not to stay asleep, and I can control my dreams. But strangely, it's not my actions (or the actions of the characters in my dreams, because most of the time I dream in third person) that I can control, but the conditions around me; the structure of a world, or a story, in the dream. As I've gotten older, my ability to manipulate my dreams has gotten to be less and less.

4) Officially waking up. There's no turning back now. I'm too aware to go back to sleep. The dreams have kissed me goodbye and run away to the dark recesses of my imagination. Very slowly, I come back from the world of sleep and back to the real world.

5) Denial. I want to be asleep. I don't want to be awake. Being awake sucks. Usually, at this point I lay in bed for a few hours, drifting in and out of stages #3 and #4, and pretending desperately to be asleep whenever someone walks in to bother me, or feed the cat, or something. Finally, I decide it's time to get up. When I don't have school, I get up around 11 or 12. It's the most wonderful thing on the planet. When I go to bed early on a school night, the alarm clark wakes me up around #3 or #4. When I don't get enough sleep, the alarm clark wakes me up at #1. No dreams for me. ):

/endrant