I tend to wake up with a song in my head. Usually a pop song. Not a slow one, a fast one usually. I bop my head to it while I go to the bathroom.
I wonder what it’d be like to sing it out loud. I’m thinking it would perfect, like filling a glass of fruit punch all the way to the top or laying back into a snow angel.
The wakeups are best when you just sort of a wake up.
Ah, the midday nap….
Coming into consciousness in my clothes, under a blanket, in daylight, in that sweet grogginess of wondering if I should get up or go back to sleep, I find myself in a lazy haze. Senses heightened. I notice the child’s drawing on the wall, stuck by only 3 thumbtacks, the 4th corner trembling in the gulf stream of the heat vent. I hear the uneven screeching of a jet plane’s turbine cracking open the sky. My own breaths, as hypnotic as lapping waves, soft and gently spaced apart.
So content, I sit on the precipice of comfort before it cascades into boredom.
And then, of course, there are the crappy wakeups. Being shaken out of peaceful dreamlessness on the couch by little fingers covered in marker and cookie crumbs. Hearing the growl of the garbage truck engine in the morning, 2 stories down and knowing I can’t make it out in time. The irrefutably ominous buzz of my cell phone on the bookshelf at 3am.
Whatever the time, when I’m woken up unnaturally, I come into awareness without logic. I bring my dreams into the real world, making others laugh with my ridiculous but earnest declarations:
I’d better not cook the eggs now.
Let’s look out for skunks.
It always draws a laugh.
But isn’t this also a state of a bliss? Unconstructive, outlandish thoughts elbowing out the pragmatism that hogs our synapses 16 hours a day.
Oh and the crappiest wakeup of all: the wakeup without the glorious go-back-tosleep, when that horrid claw of consciousness just won’t let go and the to-do lists scroll endlessly like a ticker tape at the bottom of a news cast.
We’ve all been there.
When you get down to it, they’re all great: the wakeups. Even the bad ones.
Coming back into the world, another shot, a chance to unwrap your gifts in a different way.
This time.
More precious minutes to collect.
Out of our brains and into our bodies, into the big bad world or the great big world or the great great world, the only place where dreams actually do come true.
We can celebrate that.
Can’t we?