kfitz

Post-Red Eye

All things considered, the red-eye went quite well. R. has thanked me repeatedly for flying “all night” to come out here to see him, which is extremely sweet but a little befuddling to my poor scrambled brain, because what it feels like more than anything else is that there was no night. I just kinda skipped the night, and leapt right into more day.

I boarded my first flight at about 12.30 am Thursday morning, and landed in Houston three hours later, at 5.40 am. Since I was still awake before boarding the flight, it was evening in Ontario, and then because I was up and walking around, and people were showing up, and I was drinking coffee, it was morning in Houston. There was a little night on the plane, but there was by no means all of it.

I’m not generally able to sleep on planes, but I was able to doze, at least, on both flights, which had the benefit of making them seem pretty fast, and also made it possible for me not to be a complete wreck (only about half of one) on arriving at DCA. R. and I had some lunch, and then I came back to the apartment, and he went back to work, and I had the deepest, hardest nap I may ever have had, a nap that only ended because he came home and woke me up.

I also slept all night last night. And just woke up from another sleep-of-the-dead nap this morning.

The interesting thing about all of this sleeping is that I’m having insanely vivid, seriously wacky dreams. Loud dreams. In technicolor. The kind of dreams that make it difficult to get awake again afterward. And nearly all of them have had some element of one of my recurring dreams — the elevator that moves in directions other than the vertical, the house with extra rooms, and there’s another such motif than’s escaping me right now — but have built on that recurring element in weird ways.

For instance, in the nap I just woke up from, I dreamed that I was visiting my father, and remembered all those extra rooms, and decided to go visit them. And one of them looked so much like the archetypal extra room from my recurrent dreams that — at a point when I usually think, “wow, this is just like those recurrent dreams I have; I didn’t know that this really existed!” — this time I thought “oh man — this is one of those recurrent dreams, isn’t it?” And, having realized that it was a dream, I dreamed that I woke up, right there in R.’s bed, where I actually was, and that he and I got up and went about our day, including going out in the car to run some errands. That our day began to include increasingly wacky stuff, like a very threatening guy on the side of the road forcibly cleaning people’s windshields and then standing in front of their cars and refusing to move until they paid him, and then, a bit further down the road, a bunch of dressed-up chimpanzees posing in cars and on motorcycles for some kind of photo shoot, didn’t faze me in the least. It wasn’t until R. actually woke me up that I had any inkling I’d still been asleep.

I’m hoping that this is all post-red eye reaction, the sleep centers of my brain making up for lost time. Because it’s just a bit odd, otherwise.

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