Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

I don't know what I did on Tuesday, but it put me out like a light.

I woke up Wednesday morning with the vague feeling that something was wrong. I rolled over to look at my clock and, even without my glasses on, saw the time was blinking. The power must have gone out. I checked my cell phone and saw that I had overslept by 35 minutes.

What's even odder than the point of this post is that not all of my clocks reset when the power went out. My bedroom clock went out, but the one in my study did not. My VCR and answering machine were fine, but the clock in my phone was affected. Even odder, the phone and answering machine are plugged into the same outlet, but only one of them reset. My thermostat appears to be all right, too.

By talking to people throughout the day, I discovered two things. 1) I was the only employee who lost power. 2) There was a tremendous storm from about 9:30 - 10:00 p.m. Tuesday night (which concurs with the time my power went out). There was so much lightning, and the thunder was so loud, that people I spoke with either were awakened or could not get to sleep.

Where was I during all of this? Oh yeah, I was slumbering peacefully.

This is different than last week, when the city's fireworks display kept me awake. I think that's because I hadn't fallen asleep yet.

This isn't the first time I've done something like this. My sophomore year in college, the fire alarm went off in my dorm, sometime in the night. I didn't hear it. It was right outside my door, yet I didn't hear it. My RA, who was searching the rooms to make sure everyone evacuated (it ended up being either a false alarm or a fire drill), had to physically shake me awake. "Don't you hear the alarm?" he asked. I gave it a few moments for my brain to approach awake mode, and I said, "Oh yeah. Now I do." (That's when I learned the alarm was right outside my door.) The poor guy probably thought I had something wrong with me.

I'm fairly certain I inherited this condition from my father. One time, during a business trip to southern California, he slept through an earthquake, a fairly sizable one that even the natives noticed. He said he asked the front desk why the lobby was such a mess in the morning, and that's when he found out about the earthquake.