Close the sarcophagus. You're letting cats in.

It's not the tragedy of the world, but I couldn't sleep last night. I don't mean that I laid in bed for half an hour or forty-five minutes, staring at the ceiling interminably until I finally drifted off. I mean I couldn't sleep. All night.

This is always a miserable proposition, for those of you who aren't at least occasional insomniacs. Since this happens to me on a fairly regular basis, perhaps once or twice a month, I knew that sleep was a lost cause after lying in bed (or on the couch, as I was, trying to escape the aforementioned drip in the bedroom) for about an hour. I didn't get up and do anything, although I probably should have—evidently you're not supposed to just lie there and be frustrated, because that causes problems when you go back the next night. But I didn't really want to get up because it was cold and I had nothing worthwhile to do, so I stayed under my comforter. There was no reason I should be unable to sleep—my caffeine consumption had been minimal that day and had stopped almost eight hours before bed. No preoccupying dilemmas running their endless sprint sets on the track of my brain, back and forth, back and forth, until you want to rip the little Carl Lewises out and beat them to death with their stupid gold track spikes. Why couldn't I sleep?

I played little games while I was waiting for my conscious mind to give up control of my body. I pretended to be an Egyptian mummy, Nefertiti perhaps, flat on my back with my arms crossed just so over my chest. This was enjoyable until my cat pounced on my stomach and then laid on top of me at the point where my wrists crossed, compressing my sternum so I couldn't breathe and causing my breasts to point uncomfortably to the disparate poles. I kicked her out of bed and rolled into the fetal position. I put my comforter over my head and pretended to be in the womb, but that lost its allure when the air under the blanket turned stale. I laid on my stomach and let my arm and leg dangle off the edge of the couch, a mountain climber hanging precariously off the edge of a cliff after a long fall. Perhaps my imagination was too vivid for sleep last night.

Finally, around 5 a.m., after I kicked the cat out of bed for the third time and fluffed my pillows again, I achieved a sort of deep daydream state, not quite awake, but still completely aware that I wasn't asleep, either. This limbo is worse than being entirely awake, because you're conscious that you're not getting any good rest, but you're not motivated to do anything about it. I suffered until 7:45 when my alarm went off, and then got up and went about my day with no more lethargy than normal. I'll crash sometime this afternoon at work, I would imagine, when the flip side of insomnia—narcolepsy—comes out to play.