To Dream, Perchance to Sleep.

I have a dream. My dream is that one day, I will be able to spend the whole night in my own bed, unaccompanied, and undisturbed. It's been a while.

Mog's latest lurgy has brought with it her own brand of sleeping problems - when she has a chest infection she struggles to breathe whilst lying down. Her bed is propped up at all times, but once she gets ill she usually needs hoiking out of bed and into her wheelchair sometime between midnight and 2AM. She'll then spend the rest of the night sleeping very happily in it. I'd leave her in her wheelchair from the start of the night, but it feels wrong somehow. She ought to be able to sleep in a bed. I haven't worked out yet whether that's more my problem or hers.

Little Fish's Nippy has been playing up a little too. In a new and interesting variation, it has started switching itself to continuous pressure, blowing a constant stream of air into her lungs, rather than alternating high and low pressure to allow her to breathe in and out. In fairness, it has only done this once. However I now have visions of it somehow exploding her lungs, and am forced to get up and check. It wouldn't actually explode her lungs; she'd open her mouth and let it out and then she'd rip the mask off and shout for me. But my dreams are slightly more graphic than that.

Then there are the daydreams. The dream that one day Bob will come back and finish working on the house. That one day my deeply pruned to the point of extinction hedge will burst back into flower. The dream that I'll finish all the admin I only remember after office hours, and get everything sorted and organised for our various holidays this summer. We'll not mention the definite-all-hope-of-sleep-destroying dreams about what happens if I don't get everything sorted and organised.

There are the "I've been reading too much and have now entered the world of the book" dreams - choose your books carefully here folks; a night at the Chalet School, or determinedly ignoring Gilbert whilst failing algebra, or sailing around Coniston Water is one thing; a night fighting vampires or sweeping chimneys is slightly less refreshing. And a night spent with The Provincial Lady or Parson Woodeforde is just plain disconcerting. And induces the inability to speak other than in short hand. Awkward.

These though are still better than the dreams which come unbidden in the darkest hours of the night, the dreams where more surgery is required and other complications arise and I am bereaved again. I'm not sure whether those dreams are easier or harder to wake from than the ones where Goldy is back in her bedroom being loud, and I'm getting up in the night as I so often did, to try to muffle her. It always takes a while in the morning to realise that I've been woken by a little voice shouting "Mum", not a loud voice singing and pretending to cough. To adjust to the realisation that the juddering is the ventilator vibrating on a shelf, not Goldy bouncing her bed against the wall. To be annoyed in a dream or desolate awake, which is better?

And then we'll move to the short little intense dreams which come in the five minute intervals between hitting the snooze button. Speed dreaming? Cameos? I'm on a plane with only three engines and we are hitting turbulence and bip bip bip bip it's 6.15, cancel that and I'm suddenly in a meeting in a job I had a decade ago and the phone is ringing and bip bip bippetty bip it's 6.20, cancel that and I'm up and drinking coffee, walking through my garden, taking a while to sit on the swingseat in the corner and enjoyingthe peace of the early morning, having a long conversation on the phone with a friend on her way home from work after a night shift; she's on a payphone so all to soon the pips start going and pip pip bippetty bip it's 6.25 and oh that wasn't a real cup of coffee, just another dream, drag myself out of bed and put the kettle on properly and the noise it makes as it boils is bip bip bippetty bip and now it's 6.30 and I really do manage to wake up this time.

All that dreaming, no wonder I don't have time to sleep.
Night,
Tia