If a thought occurs to you first thing after waking up, it's always best to write it down immediately. Is it good? Is it bad? Where does it come from? Those are questions to ask later, when you know for certain that you're awake, since it's a fact there's no use asking questions if you're still in a dream—no one ever has the decency to give a straight answer, that is, if they're talking at all.
""I'm going to invent the next great pink ball character,"" I thought when I got out of bed this morning, not sure whether or not this was important but taking care to write it down just the same. But then, looking down at what I'd just written, I became frightened, because I knew it meant that I must still be asleep—a thought like that simply has no place on a weekday morning.
Why so frightened? Awake, getting your feet on the bedroom floor means being five minutes from a hot shower, or you could go straight to breakfast. Asleep, there's no choice at all. One second you're sitting on the edge of the bed and the next you're tumbling down a mountainside or drunkenly cavorting on the back of an antelope, without anyone bothering to ask what your preference might be. It's terrible going to the effort of getting out of bed ,only to realize that you haven't gotten out of bed at all.
Annoyed with this circumstance, I stalled for a minute, knowing that it wouldn't do me any good.
""Pink ball character, indeed,"" I sniffed. ""What do I need with this or any other of your ideas?""
""It goes back to Plato and the simple perfection of the world of ideal forms itself,"" I answered, sounding like I was getting ready to go on and on for a long time. He's always so pompous! Drawling on about God knows what while I'm in agony, wondering if I'm about to be hurled out of this conversation and into a Moscow train wreck.
""...the lineage of the commercially viable pink-hued spheroid, traceable back through Jigglypuff and Kirby to..."" I rambled on somewhere—the blowhard!
I'll just have to wait until he runs out of steam, I thought, still sitting on the edge of the bed, or more likely, fast asleep yet and concentrating on ignoring myself. Oh, confusion!
""Leave me alone,"" I said, cutting him off. ""If I'm really awake, let me get up for a bowl of cereal and I'll think about this pink ball nonsense later. And if I'm really asleep and dreaming, where's the Archangel Gabriel from earlier, and why didn't he mention anything about ‘spheroids?'
This shut him up, but now the old Archangel, who'd been silent up until that point, started growling at me.
Aha, I thought, still a dream then. ""Growl if you like,"" I said. ""But where were you earlier when I was forced to sit through that idiotic lecture about dead Greeks and Japanese anthromorphs?"" I tried to sound confident, but the whole while I was thinking, ""Matt, you shouldn't browbeat the angels. People say they're so nice, but they can give a horrible tongue lashing if they're feeling low, and then you'll wish you really were in a flipped-over train rather than sitting, disheveled, in your underwear while the heralds of heaven stand over you raining abuse.""
Nevertheless, I kept scolding Gabriel, thinking, ""If this really is a dream I don't have a choice in the matter anyway."" ""It's cruel for you angels to sit back and watch a person torture themselves with these questions when they should be properly asleep or on a train somewhere on the way to a collision.""
At that the angel stopped his growling, clicked a few times and walked off.
Then a new, softer voice started in:
""That's alright, Matt, about the confusion. If you're awake or asleep, who knows? But either way, you'll be up for certain before you know it with a hot shower waiting for you.""
""And the yogurt and the grapefruit?"" I asked.
""Those too.""
Oh, I got terribly excited. ""Thanks!"" I told them.
Of course you'll say, ""Yes, yes, Matt. But who was it?"" But I don't have any idea. Or if I did, I didn't think to write it down, since I was still so sure it was a dream, and then it wouldn't have mattered anyway, who it was talking about the grapefruit, or if the horrible pink ball idea was mine or the angel's, or whether I was right when I said that if a thought occurs to you first thing after waking up it's always best to write it down immediately.
800 grams of sherry? E-mail Matt at hunziker@wisc.edu.
