MONDAY, NOV. 18
You begin dreaming about your bed after lunch. Oh sure, you talk to people in the office about things you might do after work—meet friends; meet friends who can’t stand the other friends—but it’s all a lie, all you can think of is returning to that sweet, welcoming homeland within your bedroom that has always been there for you.
So why is it that, lately, your bed has turned from wonderland to battleground?
It started a little more than a week ago. You dreamed that you were the keyboard player in a popular band. Thing of it is, you didn’t know how to play keyboards. Somehow, you had hidden this from everyone, though you had started to sense their suspicions. Finally, one of your bandmates confronted you, asked you to play for him right away, all by yourself.
Panicked, you lashed out, reminding him you were “there for him” when everyone else had turned against him, your anger growing exponentially as you moved toward him and away from the keyboards. And then, in one fluid movement, you threw a punch; a beautiful punch, engaging the transfer of weight in your hips to deliver a blow landing hard on his jaw. And you threw another and another as you became painfully aware of two things: 1) this was, at best, a temporary solution to learning how to play a musical instrument and, 2) you’d become painfully aware that you were very aware of how painful this all felt.
And you woke up to find yourself on your left side, fully engaged with pummeling your bedside table, throwing haymaker after haymaker upon its multi-leveled, pressboard structure, your fists red and scuffed for the effort.
You thought that odd. Odd enough, that you Googled “wake up punching” and found that according to dream experts, punching in a dream means that you are dealing with unresolved issues of anger and you wonder immediately what one dreams of when they regularly state the completely obvious.
You go on with your life, figuring this is just some one-off occurrence that no one will ever find out about, like that time you did that thing and the only person who saw you do it, later had a heart attack and drove off the road because life is good. And then, yesterday morning, you woke up to find that the eyeglasses that you keep by your bed, on the same accursed bedside table, had been destroyed, torn in two. You have no memory of a dream in which you destroyed eyeglasses, but you slowly recall waking up in the middle of the night, rolling over on your left side, and grabbing the glasses that, overpriced as they may have been, did not deserve what they got.
Now you are concerned. The punching was one thing, but this was a concerted effort requiring fine motor skills and specificity of purpose. Also, you have to buy more glasses. And, unlike the punching, you have no idea how you arrived at this point, which now has you concerned that you will soon wake up, your bed strewn with those bags that have dollar signs on them, clutching a pair of mangled eyeglasses from a bank security guard just two days from retirement.
Another great thing: Sleep crime is a thing, having been used many times as a defense, perhaps most famously in Fain v. Commonwealth in the 1870s when a man fell asleep in a Kentucky hotel and shot a porter who tried to wake him, repeatedly yelling “Hoo-wee!” as he did this. The shooter eventually got off based on sleep issues.
Giving us a moment’s pause: Is it possible that punching the table had something to do with California’s relatively stagnate household furniture manufacturing industry which, though it generates more than $3 billion a year, has struggled with growth due, in part, to increased import penetration and high in-state operating costs?