I have a love-hate relationship with sleep. I love it. I need it. And yet, I can never get enough of it.

There’s nothing better than crawling into bed at the end of a long day, anticipating a prolonged state of semi-consciousness. And there’s nothing quite as cruel as being summoned out of dreamland more times than is reasonable, for longer than is reasonable; resulting in the inability to pry open eyelids when the sun says hello.

I was fast asleep, in the middle of a very vivid dream last night. Well, I use the phrase ‘very vivid’ loosely, since I can’t remember much of it now. But I was somewhere (?) with a friend (?). And all of a sudden, the friend was sitting on me. It didn’t fit at all with what was actually going on in my dream. So I opened my eyes, and, sure enough, even with my compromised vision, in the darkness of my bedroom, I could see (and feel) my three year old boy….sitting on me.

It was 3 o’clock in the morning.

I took him to the bathroom. I gave him a drink. And then I steered him back to our bedroom, where I lay beside him for forty five minutes. Neither of us sleeping. He, because ‘I don’t want covers…..it’s too itchy.’ And I, because I’ve learned the hard way not to fall asleep until the little people are asleep. (Being woken up after ten minutes of sleep is worse than lying awake for an hour.) Also, I was cold, due to the aforementioned ‘covers’ argument. Finally, when it was nearly 4 o’clock, I escorted the Hen back to his room. Leaving him to his own [insomniac] devices.

When I woke up at 7, the Hen was sleeping beside me. And the Gort was sleeping across my legs. And I could barely open my eyes.