My Observations Upon Waking Each Morning

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A small crack in the egg-smooth walls of sleep, and I can sense a day circulating around me. Thin air holds images: a man sweeping trodden debris of dream off city sidewalk one hour before any pedestrian footfall. Shy birds made of confusion and tissue paper. Dissipating, those intent silent seconds when one listens in vain to pull full sentences from the soft dinner-party murmur of dreams and reality. To sort the sounds of the real bedroom from the mingling sounds of the Protean. The world opens up between my eyelids, and my eyelids open onto white ceiling or white wall.

A breath-filled space where I keep who I am.

This is the absence to watch with wonder--I can't learn such blankness, can't buy it or excavate it from the day's events no matter how I dig, such blankness is already vanishing as I begin reflexively to find myself. I am: the unmarked margin of a book. A faint vibration. The sound of something far away. I am: a radio tuned to soft inchoate static. A tingling at the tips. I am: this hand, curled like a fern.

I used to believe that the first thing I saw when I woke up would fate my entire day. This conviction is founded on the fact that a single thing is almost impossible to find, is therefore magical. Everything in the world of the woken comes in twos or threes, more often in unintelligible stampedes. But open reviving eyes onto a chair, and for a few hushed seconds it will be the only object within the borders of consciousness. Everything that happens afterwards is a thin layer of paint around that one initial thing, that indelible form big enough to fill an entire mind. For the sake of this theory, I would go to sleep facing my favorite books, propping them up on the wall next to me, setting favorite stuffed animals on the night table. Invariably, I woke up looking at something ordinary--a pillow, a cup.

Why is it that we never wake up in the same position in which we went to sleep? What things does our body do when we are otherwise occupied? I am told that I kick. I am told that I am a "heavy breather." I have been known to snore. Sometimes I talk in my sleep, and when I do I am told that I say strange things, like "vampire werewolf ghost fire" over and over, or I talk about elements of the periodic table as though they were close personal friends.

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