Archive Columns: Personal

When Comes the Dawn

    Somehow it doesn't seem right that something so necessary should feel so horribly wrong.  You'd swear, right at the time you're supposed to do it, that this is no way to go through life.

    I'm speaking here of getting up in the morning.

    Not that dreamland is so rosy.  You can't find where you're supposed to go, and you're late, and dead relatives keep chiming in, resurrected in various states of health.

    There's a little anxiety there, granted, and even more when, not infrequently, all of these things are happening in a place like, say, Strawbridge's and you come to realize you're not wearing pants.

    As if the tardiness and the dead relatives weren't enough.

    But the good thing about dreamland is that you're already awake -- or rather, you think you're awake -- so in a dream, if you'll notice, no matter how bad things are going, the plot almost never involves having to get up in the morning.  Also, no matter how distressing a dream is, it always ends well because finally you know that it was only a dream

    Contrast this to real life.  Upon awakening, you not only think you are awake but you actually are awake.  Maybe you are actually not wearing pants too though this, to be fair, is not so bad unless you are waking up in the middle of Strawbridge's. Here is the disturbing thing: unlike a dream, waking puts you right down in reality.& nbsp; The deus ex machina thing completely breaks down.  It's just all bad.  You're awake and you know you're awake.  It's dark and bleak and you're not dreaming any of it.

    And you have to get up.

    What you would prefer is another sort of waking experience, where instead of going from dreamland right to the intolerable-consciousness-of-having-to-get-up, you go from the awakened state right to being dressed and caffeinated and vertical with no memory of having done it.  What you want is to momentarily surrender responsibility for your own agency.  It is not that you want someone else to force you to get up.  It is that you want to be already up and with no memory of the act.

    This doesn't happen, of course, and you can't help but wonder how the species has survived under the burden of what see ms like a huge evolutionary screw-up.  I suppose it has something to do with gravity and the simple physics of lifting but where's the adrenalin and memory loss when you could really use it?

    Maybe I'm wrong to say "you" here, to assume this is some sort of universal sensation when maybe I'm the only one who's lying there in the dark thinking "Is this any way to begin a day?"   I see you trotting off to work or riding your bicycles across the South Street Bridge and I wonder that you show no signs of having been recently horizontal and muttering to yourselves "Zut!," followed by a Herculean act of courage.  And yet, I suspect you have.  Not that I wish it on you but it does help a body to know that everyone you see up had to, well, get up.   I'd just like to thank you because it helps me to get up and get through the day.  After which I go to sleep, after which -- your help notwithstanding -- I'm afraid things get way too circular.

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