The Submarines Weren’t Even Yellow.

Gee, it’s been a week since I’ve written here. Not surprising, really, it’s been a heck of a week.

I’ve been working late a great deal – don’t think I’ve gone to bed before 1 a.m. even once in the last two weeks. However, this is not a sob story or plea for sympathy. I’ve worked stretches like this many times during my career (another signpost of getting old – you talk about your “career” instead of just about your “job”), but this time it’s different. This time it’s for something I believe in, something I own, something I find way more interesting than the financial reporting systems and human resources management systems and budget control systems and myriad other thrill-a-minute systems I’ve worked on before. So I don’t mind.

Unfortunately, I’m also finding as I get older that I can’t work these marathon stretches with four and five hours of sleep per night like I used to. When I was a young whippersnapper, armed only with a six-pack of Coke and some sugar-based food source, I could work until 2 or 3 a.m. for days straight and roll out of bed in the morning ready for more.

Now I find that after a few days of this, I am out of sorts and grumpy, as I was this weekend. And I find that my children have to expend a lot more energy bouncing on top of me and tickling me and sticking their fingers in my ears than used to be required to get me out of bed. I think nothing makes me feel worse than when the “work” part of my life infiltrates the “family” part of my life, and makes me not as nice and loving a person as I should be with my spouse and children. This always strikes me as boundlessly unfair to them.

Anyways, I can always tell when I have gotten too little sleep for a long period, because that is when I dream. I don’t normally dream – I think that I generally sleep for short enough stretches that my brain never gets to dream mode before I yank it back into conciousness again. I know many people who dream all the time, every night even, but to me dreams are so rare as to be remarkable when I have them.

Last night was one of those nights where my subconcious mounts an insurrection and says, “Hey, we’re going to get some REM sleep around here, dammit!” When I woke up this morning, my wife reported that I was twitching in my sleep and asked what I was dreaming about. That’s a tough question – see, I dream so infrequently that when I do dream my subconcious is hellbent on cramming in as much imagery as possible, while it has the chance.

Some people will have a dream about running through a field of wildflowers on a sunny day and seeing their grandmother in the distance. An easy analysis for any first-year psychology student. Then there are MY dreams.

When my wife asked what I was dreaming about last night and I started going through it, I got to the point where I couldn’t describe any more of the ludicrous details for lack of time. It started with her and I living in a beach house (talked about a holiday at the shore yesterday). We were going to have a clam bake (inspired by last night’s Simpsons, in which Homer gets attached to a lobster he plans to eat), so I went to get the clams. To get the clams, we had to use a submarine, but I was suspicious of this method, so I watched the submarines through a window that looked out into the ocean (like watching underwater at Sea World). The submarines were being depth-charged (too many WWII submarine movies as a child), and to make matters worse, the subs were actually made from school buses (drove by a bus parking lot yesterday and wondered at how many of them there were). Scene switched to a Russian nuclear submarine (hearing about nuclear disarmament on the radio yesterday) lying on the beach that was being converted to a museum. Was reminded by this that my son flew jets for the navy (he’s not old enough to DRIVE, don’t know where that came from) and his plane was due in. Went up on a pier that turned into an aircraft carrier deck, and was shocked to see the planes landing by flying into the water. Was reassured by an officer there that the planes were also submarines (too much Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea as a child – you know the clip they played EVERY SHOW of the flying sub diving into the water) and I could meet my son downstairs. Turned around and walked back into the beach house – “Sorry honey, couldn’t get the clams”. Went downstairs and ended up in a bullring about to fight a bull sans red cape (where the hell did THAT come from?). As the bull started to circle me, I woke up.

Like I said, the subconcious tries to cram in as much as it can, when it gets the chance.