Last night my sleep was torn apart by a bright light that came through my closed eyelids and a cracking rumble that finished the demolition of my slumbers. But, that was it, just the one burst and the hissing rattle of rain on the plastic deck awning. l looked at clock. The glowing red numbers showed that the time was 1:57.  I was thinking  why can’t weather keep more  businesslike hours, especially the loud disturbing manifestations. Unfortunately weather has no job to go to early in the morning and so can rage about all night with no consequences to itself, only to those of us of the human variety.

After a while I drifted back into sleep and into an old dream of a house made like a cave in the middle of a gigantic tree with shelves and furniture carved out of the wood of the tree. I was arranging some objects, a piece of driftwood, bear carved out of wood and some other things I can’t recall, on a counter that was connected at the bottom to the tree cave house. Suddenly a wind like a petulant hand came up knocking my arrangement into disorder. I set it up again, but the wind grew into a wall pushing me away from the the counter I was decorating. When it was done I was standing 5 feet away and the counter was empty. I had no idea where my things went. I knew what I had to do at that moment. I ran at the place I had been standing, holding my arms out. The wind came up and lifted me into the air. “Look!” I yelled to my wife who I could see below me in the large cavern room. She did. I woke up with a wildly beating heart. My sleep torn asunder again. 3:30 said the clock in demonic red numerals. I lay there until the clock said a 4:00 and gave up on sleep. Not much I could do about it. My dreams were just putting in there usual hours on the graveyard shift.