Another Sleepless Night

For the fourth night in a row, I slept poorly.

At one point, I woke up from a dream that was turning into a nightmare. I had said something about Thing One to E.G., a girl I grew up with and haven't seen nor heard from since high school graduation. (Where does my subconscious drag these ideas from?) Thing One was angry with me and said, "You should've told her Azalea Sauce," then produced a bottle of something that looked like one of the orangey hot sauces but with a texture like ketchup and poured it onto a potted azalea.

Another time I woke up, the two poison ivy bumps on my hip were itching like mad, and I so wanted to scratch, but I wouldn't, and after who knows how long, I compromised and rubbed the area, and that calmed me enough to fall asleep again.

Then I dreamt I was visiting my friend Robomarkov and his wife Scribe Ari (and their children, and their cats, and....) They were playing me a computer story they had made, with fantastic drawings and music (she is a talented artist, and he is a computer wiz -- or is that "whiz"? -- well, whichever one doesn't mean "urinate"). It was a story about how I had phoned them, but the younger child didn't pass along the message to mama. One of the cats (in a big, floopy hat like you'd expect from medieval stories like "Puss in Boots"), though, knew the message was important, and this story was how he (or she) got the message to Robomarkov and Scribe Ari. I realized that the male narrator's voice was not Robomarkov's, so I asked him who was reading. "It's a magnet," he said, from which I inferred that the story was originally on a refrigerator magnet and then had been marketed as a whole line of products, including this computerized story.

Then I was awakened by a loud crack, and my bed shifted. I had the usual thoughts one has when one's bed appears to have broken in the middle of the night. "I wasn't even moving. I'm alone in bed, so you know I wasn't doing that. Demmit, it's a brand new bed! But is it any better to break an old bed? What if it's an antique or has sentimental value? Either way, you have to spend money on a new bed, unless, of course, it's still under warranty..."

I managed to fall asleep again (though I had debated staying up and reading, since it was just an hour before my alarm was set to go off, but it shows how tired I was that I fell asleep). When I got up and switched on the light, I lifted my mattress to look. The legs appeared okay. The brace in the middle appeared okay. The slats didn't look cracked. The bed wasn't tilted. What happened? I'm going to ask Thing One if she'd mind dropping by this evening to help me move the mattress and see if we can find anything broken.