Believe it or not I don’t have many pictures of me sleeping. (I know!) Anyway, I do have this one, weirdly, which is a POV angle of me in bed. I think this might have been when I was sick a few years ago. It’s a picture of the snuggly dog but it works for this post.

(Sunday Paper, Year VIII, Issue 7)

I have not been sleeping well lately.

I’m still sleeping - just not like I used to.

Sometimes I’m too warm in the bed.

Sometimes I fall asleep but the smallest thing wakes me up and I have trouble going back to sleep.

It’s not unlike what millions of other people experience….it’s just somewhat new to me because I used to fall asleep easily and sleep through anything.

And another new experience - and I don’t know whether it’s related or not - is that I’m remembering some of my dreams.

And boy have they been weird dreams.

I’ve never been a terribly vivid dreamer…and unlike some people I know who can recite the happenings of their dreams, I (much) more often than not have no memory of my dreams at all.

I am certainly not a person like Kathy who can step in and control what she’s dreaming. (She also has told me she can take flight in her dreams if she cares to. This is not something I can do. In fact, if there’s any consistent dream that I remember it is the opposite of that - just falling and falling and falling.)

So it’s notable - whether you’re interested in this or not - that I’ve had dreams I remember lately.

Like the one where I was being chased by some goons through a hotel and I knew my way around the place well enough to evade them but woke up knowing I was running out of places to hide.

Or the one where me and my brother Matt were in Philadelphia (I somehow knew it was Philadelphia without any distinguishing features) and we were running the Philadelphia Marathon together. He did well. I don’t know how I did because I was much more concerned about where to leave our belongings while we were running.

And, the winner when it comes to details remembered as well as weirdness: Where I was driving with the girls, we made a wrong turn, and ended up on some kind of movie set. The producers and other people in charge were very mad and made a big stink and called over the director to settle things and she didn’t care. She was so cool about it that we became friends and hung out for a while. That director? Greta Gerwig. She was super nice, my friend Greta.

I’ve always been fascinated by dreams. But I like the mystique surrounding the ones I remember, thinking about maybe what they could be symbolizing. I don’t go digging into dream interpretation websites to try to find too much out - I think that might be a dangerous path for me to go down. I just don’t have the time.

But everything surrounding dreams - the clarity of remembering them, whether or not you can control them like Kathy does, even being able to go back to a dream and picking up where you left off…in the same night or I think some people can do that on different nights, even - these things all fascinate me.

It’s kind of neat to think maybe my brain is developing better dream management.

And if that’s the case, I look forward to picking up our conversation next time, Greta.

What I’ve Been Enjoying

I’m back to reading pretty consistently, so maybe at the end of the year I’ll have a good list of books I read to tell you about. But that doesn’t mean I can’t tell you about some of them throughout the year as well. I just finished Liberation Day, the newest collection of stories by George Saunders. If you don’t know his work, I don’t know that I am capable of explaining it to you. But he’s an amazing writer and his voice is so distinct and I love reading anything of his (and also listening to him talk about writing or anything, for that matter) and this was as good a collection of writing as the rest of his work. Complex, but easy to read, and deep and meaningful and I just love it.

Notes

*The Super Bowl squares are set. Perhaps you watched me draw the numbers live on Facebook, or watched the video of said drawing later. BUT in the interest of having all of the payout information in one place, here’s how it all breaks down

There was a total of $2,650 from the squares sold
That means $1,325 goes to prizes, and $1,325 will be donated to Ronald McDonald House Charities. Way to go everyone!
As for the $1,325 in the squares pool, here’s how that will break down:
- We’ll do usual prizes at the end of each quarter:
  - Score at end of first quarter: $175 prize
  - Score at halftime: $375 prize
  - Score at end of third quarter: $175 prize
  - FINAL score (note, no end of 4th if it goes to OT): $500
- We’ll also add these fun twists for a $50 prize each:
  - Like last year we’ll pay out the first score of the game - so someone in the zero column is guaranteed a win. (If it’s a touchdown, it’ll be 6-0 that wins the first score, not 7.)
  - And, just for fun and to mix in another prize, we’ll also reward the jersey number of THE PLAYER WHO SCORES THE FIRST POINTS (ones column). So, if Mahomes (#15) runs it in, that would be a win for KC 5, PHI 0. If he throws it in to Kelce (#87), it will be KC 7, PHI 0. If it’s, say, an Elliott (#4) field goal, PHI 4, KC 0 wins…and so does PHI 3, KC 0 for the previous bullet point.

Let me know if you have questions about any of this. Hopefully we get a wider diversity of payouts this year - rooting for lots of scoring!

*Some quick donation math: If 100 people had bought one square at $30 each, that would have been $3,000 in the pool and a $1,500 donation. That was the maximum. The minimum would have been 25 people buying 4 each at $100 per person, so $2,500 total and a $1,250 donation. So $1,325 is a pretty good donation from these squares. Thanks again everyone!

*I don’t care who wins the game, by the way. I’m just looking forward to eating a lot of junk all day and hanging with the family and watching the Puppy Bowl together.

*Oh, here’s a fun number thing - I usually pick square 78 in the squares pool if it’s available. For transparency sake I’m JS in the squares grid I sent out to players. Box 78 turned out to be KC 7 PHI 7. So a great square, yes, but also, unbelievably, my birthday.

*Running Update: Did an 11-mile run on Saturday, the last of the longer runs for this training cycle. Our daughter works about 10 miles from here so I timed it so that I would finish my run when Kathy was dropping her off at work, then we could drive home together. It worked out well. And that’s the last time until August/September that I’ll be relying on Kathy for a ride after a run. She’s a real good support system. She’s earned these six months off.

*We’re now just 13 days away from the Wilmington Marathon. (That’s one Sunday Paper!) I feel about as ready as I can be.

*Social media links are below. Of course, these days I recommend the Instagram one, but you never know - I enjoyed drawing the numbers live on the Facebook page - maybe I’ll just do that every week and do a little chit chat. You can follow the page just in case.