I know I’m not the only one this happens to. I know there are several of you out there who have made this same comment before. You’re in between deep sleep and waking up, but your mind is going a mile a minute. Ideas are rushing through your head at lightning speed, and you’re doing your best to hang onto them. This happens to me, too.
Sometimes I can hang onto them, and sometimes I can’t. But one thing I noticed is that most of them aren’t as good as I thought they were when I get up. And then I’m annoyed that I couldn’t sleep.
I am not a morning person. I never have been and I probably never will be. Ask my family. They’ll tell you what a treat I am in the morning. But the crazy thing about that is that I have to get up early. Between the kids and the dogs, sleeping in is incredibly rare. And during the week days, I’m up before 5:00 am four days a week so I can work out.
Granted, the boys are getting old enough now that they can keep themselves entertained and get their own breakfasts, so I don’t have to worry about them as much. But the dogs, they’re a different story. They can’t let themselves out or get their own food.
I feel like I’m getting a little better about being up in the morning. As long as no one talks to me unless I talk to them first, we’re good. And since I know I have to be up, I pep talk myself that it’s going to be an amazing day. I try to be tolerable in the morning. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.
My days start early, and I’ve tried to adapt. But some days start even earlier with my brain working overtime. I’ve gotten some great story ideas when my brain does this, but more often than not, the ideas it comes up with are terrible. They’ll be fantastic at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, but when I’m fully awake and think them through, they’re awful.
There have been a few times when I thought I had a fantastic idea for a story that portrayed itself so vividly in my brain. All the details were there, how the words will form on the page, the opening lines. Then I wake up and think about them and realize the idea was my brain re-enacting a movie I watched or another story I had read that day. That’s really disappointing.
I’ll have hilarious ideas for Tweets to post the next day, but when I wake up, they’re not so funny. In fact, some of them are just confusing, and I question my unconscious brain. Does it really have that bad of a sense of humor?
But then there are other times when it works out in my favor. Life After the Undead was created after a moment like this. Ideas for promotion have come to me in my half-awake brain. I appreciate that my mind is constantly working and helping me become better, but sometimes I wish it would do it when I was awake.
