Avoidance Sleeping and Cheesy Dreams

I'm an unabashed morning person, able to tackle the early hours with a cup of coffee and an infuriatingly cheerful attitude. Especially in the summer. My body clock adjusts happily to the lengthening days.

After a rocky adjustment to daylight saving time, my body seems to have embraced its summer routine. Three days this week, I've woken up at 4 am, raring to go. I should have leapt out of bed and got on with things, but I didn't. I rolled over and went back to sleep.

Why? Why would I go back to sleep when I wasn’t even tired? It was simply avoidance sleeping. I was sleeping because I didn't want to think about a variety of issues, from home life to work life and everything in between. The willingness to engage in avoidance sleeping is a personal demon I have to battle on a regular basis.

The worst part is that I know as I'm doing it that it's absolutely the wrong thing to do. When I go against my body on the sleep issue, I always lose. I know most people lose on the under-sleeping count. Losing on the over-sleeping count can be just as disorienting and groggy-making.

When my alarm finally went off, I didn't wake up feeling well rested and ready-to-go. I felt befuddled, exhausted, and annoyed. It doesn't help that I was awoken in the middle of bizarre dream.

It's my strong contention (as Lex can tell you) that eating cheese before bedtime causes strange dreams. I don't know if I can blame the deep-friend brie I had for dinner could affect a dream I had at 4 am, but it seems a likely culprit.

Editorial aside – I know that deep-fried brie is against the strict rules of my spring diet and is punishable by having to shop with a supermodel who will berate me as I try to cram my ever-widening ass into skinny jeans and straight skirts. But, as a mitigating factor, I was in a steakhouse in Wicklow town, so it's not like there were other items on the menu that I could eat.

Back to bizarre dreamland, here are the highlights:

• Somehow, I came to have a baby, a very weird little foundling. I could put him into a Big Gulp cup and he could swim around. He could also sing underwater like mermaid. But then when I took him out of the Big Gulp, he'd expand into a regular-sized baby. He could talk too – fully formed sentences.



• I took the foundling to the Hilton on the river in Chicago, where I had a big fight with the front desk staff. They were speaking about me in Italian, but I could see subtitles and knew what they were saying about me. They kept telling me I had to wait for my key because their system was down, but I knew they were just being mean because they didn't like me.



• The desk clerk couldn't understand my last name, so I went to write it on a notepad, only to see the name was already written there, in my grandfather's handwriting.



• My dad, grandfather, and uncle showed up, which I guess explains my grandfather's handwriting. I wanted to talk to them, to find out what they were doing there, but they said they had to go to a meeting and they would talk to me later.



• The Jack Bauer showed up to protect me and the foundling. I'd apparently had a pre-Peter relationship with Jack, which he wanted to rekindle but I wouldn't because of Peter. Jack Bauer is not a man who is interested in taking no for an answer.



• When my dad, grandfather, and uncle finally showed up, they brought along some refugees from Sierra Leone, all of whom were missing at least one hand.



• When we went outside, the bridge over the river at Michigan Avenue was gone and was replaced with an impossibly tall Thai temple with a river gushing down its front steps.



• Then there was a car chase, with Jack Bauer driving, but I have no idea where we were going or who we were chasing.

My alarm went off at this point. When I recounted this dream to Peter, he asked if I was upset that I didn't get to find out what happened. I told him I was sort of relieved, because Jack Bauer was starting to get really pushy.

I don't know what the dream means, if anything, but I think perhaps I need to skip the cheese and the avoidance sleeping in future.