I was a strange kid, or at least I felt strange most of the time. And I wondered strange things, at least I think they were strange, although isn't that what kids do?
I distinctly remember this one time, I must have been about four years old because I remember standing next to the dining room table in our townhouse in Maryland, and I picked up my little brother's yellow dump truck. Back then toys weren't cheap plastic, this little thing was pretty daggone heavy for a small toy. But I needed to know something, so I held it up and dropped it right back to the ground. The loud crash startled everyone, and of course there was a version of "What the hell are you doing??!" although my parents never said 'hell'. I replied "I wanted to see if I could see it in mid-air" which was exactly what I was doing. Somehow I had realized that an object up high, when let go, would be in transit through the air for a period of time, no matter how brief, before it hit the ground. Even though it seemed to automatically be on the ground the very instant you let it loose, I just KNEW it didn't work that way and I wanted to see if I could capture that magical mid-air view with my eyes, and keep a mental snapshot of something appearing to float. But sadly, it didn't work out very well. Just a loud crash. I am pretty sure I tried it a few times before they took it away from me.
Another thing I wondered about was falling asleep. You go to bed, you close your eyes, it might take a few minutes and you might get in trouble for whispering with your sister or kicking your brother, but eventually it always happened...suddenly you are waking up and you don't have ANY memory of falling asleep. How does it happen? Why can't we feel when we are entering dreamland? I wanted to KNOW how it was, like opening a door and passing through it where sleep occurs once the door is shut again, with you on the other side. Why couldn't I experience that moment of passage?
And that, my friends, is something I never should have wished for. Because now I know and while it is indeed super cool and all that jazz, it happens because I am fighting so hard to get to sleep, and experiencing that transition means I have been awake for way too much of my night and the coming day is sure to be long and full of foggy moments. And the absolute worst part about it...I'm lying there, with the typical brain spin of thoughts going like a Ferris wheel on crack and occasionally a thought flies off of it and I travel that tangent for a bit, but then back to the spinning wheel I go and I play out conversations and make lists and think about must-dos for the next day ad nauseum and then suddenly, I realize I'm in a more relaxed state. I'm not burning 100 calories by flipping over every 2 minutes My body feels calm. And that excites me because I know SLEEP is coming! Which zaps away the relaxation. But I get there again, and then my mental conversations are actually happening, I'm not just thinking about them. And I'm having conversations with multiple people, but they are each in their own separate bubble, different bubbles of movies that I'm experiencing all floating around, with a background noise of all these people talking like a movie theater before the main feature starts. And I can zoom in on any bubble and hear just that one over the low rumble, and then zoom it out and choose another one, living a snippit of this one and then that one and then "Oh FINALLY! I'm falling asleep!" and boom, a bang of reality. Back awake.
Now if I could just figure out how not to get so excited, I'd probably get some sleep.
Karmen seems to be doing a pretty good job of it, though.
Now this one here, she's probably feeling a bit like I do when reality flashes me awake, like my camera just did to her.
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