SHANE BROWN: A fretful night of almost sleeping

Shane Brown

What is wrong with my brain? I'm pretty sure it's broken.

I'm typing this at 1 a.m. so late on a Tuesday night that it's now technically Wednesday. I should be tucked in bed, blissfully resting for a challenging and productive workday ahead. Instead, I'm wide awake in a whirlwind of stress and worry until hopefully the fatigue in my body overtakes the stupidity of my brain.

Why am I awake in the pitch middle of the night? Because I know I need to wake up exactly thirty minutes early tomorrow — err, today.

I am not a morning person. I am, in fact, the exact opposite of a morning person. I make little to no sense in the mornings. I can't help it if my brain needs a few warm-up laps before the green flag waves. Most days, I'm pretty sure I'm not even technically awake until I've been at work for an hour and have at least one cup of coffee in me. Mornings shouldn't be for working. Mornings should be for grimacing, convincing yourself to get in the shower, and having a bowl of soggy cereal while watching weathermen tell 100-year-olds to have a happy birthday.

But in just a few hours, we have a staff meeting that starts thirty minutes before I usually get to work, so I need to show up a little early. Most folks in my office start their workdays at 8 a.m., but we like to have one person stay late in case there's any after-hours crises that need attending to. I'm the one who enthusiastically raised my hand and said, "Ooh! Pick me! Pick me!"

I'll gladly stay an extra half-hour late — because that means I get to sleep an extra half-hour in the mornings, and sleep is a precious commodity. What's the big deal about a half hour? Not much, I guess. But I moonlight on the weekends at a dance club until the wee hours. Having to constantly shift from an early morning weekdays to a weekend schedule where I often don't get home until 3 a.m. can be rough. I'll take every second of extra sleep I can muster. When I first started here at the paper back in the stone age, my schedule was 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. and I thought THAT was crazy early. On my first day, they asked me if I had a preferred time to take my lunch hour. I asked, "10 a.m. to 11 a.m.?" (It didn't fly.)

But in a few hours, we've got a staff meeting with some special guests from corporate who strangely don't seem to care about my weekend DJ schedule or my much-cherished bonus half hour of sleep, so I have to be all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed earlier than usual. Whenever my schedule is altered like this, my immediate instinct is to react with a combination of hostility and fear. Hostility of having to get up a wee bit early, and fear that I'll fail to do it.

I've now double and triple-checked my alarm, but I'm still in a panic that I've done it wrong or that it won't go off. Or worse, maybe it'll go off and I just won't hear it. That's actually happened before. I once had a vivid dream that I was in a castle in Germany watching Rod Stewart play a concert with Kool & the Gang (my dreams are routinely insane), when suddenly fire alarms started going off and it turned into a Towering Inferno-style nightmare where I had to escape a burning castle with my old college roommate, the clerk who works at the gas station down the street, rock legend Rod Stewart, and my high-school chemistry teacher (who proved surprisingly nimble in times of crisis, especially since I think he died, like, 20 years ago).

But then I woke up to my alarm clock blaring, which it had been doing for a half hour. Rather than wake me up, it just changed the course of my dream. What if that happens tomorrow? What if I oversleep and miss the meeting, or I show up late and all discussion stops and everyone points at me and laughs and then a nun starts ringing a bell and yelling "SHAME! SHAME!" like Game of Thrones and I get fired for being The Tardy Guy? This is what keeps me up at night. The mere knowledge that I have to wake up just a little bit early will be enough to keep me up half the night with worry.

Does EVERYONE'S brain do this? No? Just me? Swell. I've been so stressed about this meeting that I actually had a nightmare about it last night — a ridiculous, non-sensical nightmare, but a nightmare, nonetheless. In my dream, I had to get to the meeting, but the meeting was 50 miles away in my hometown at the newly constructed Galesburg Amphitheater that definitely does not exist. The good news was that, for some reason, my best friend's employer was ALSO having a staff meeting in the same room at the same amphitheater at the same time, so we got to travel together.

Except we missed our train (?) to the meeting, so we had to steal a bus (as you do) and drive there ourselves, along with a guy I used to work with decades ago at my first job (still not sure why he was there, but dream logic is not to be questioned.) The three of us arrived in Galesburg with minutes to spare, but the police had all the roads blocked off because Donald Trump (naturally) was the keynote speaker at our amphitheater work meeting. The closest place we could park was my parents' house.

My mom wasn't much help, because she was relaxing on a lawn chair in the yard while a rave was happening in my childhood home, and everyone was begging me to DJ. "I can't!" I yelled. "I have to get to work!" Eventually we got to the amphitheater and decided to sit in the very back row so we could heckle everyone, but just then all my co-workers and my boss showed up and demanded I sit front row with them. Begrudgingly, I headed up front, but instead bumped into my ex-girlfriend (because it's not a nightmare without her showing up somewhere).

By the time I was able to ditch her, the main doors had shut and the only way to get inside the meeting was to walk next door to the adjacent skyscraper, climb 24 flights of stairs, take the skybridge to the roof of the amphitheater, and rappel down a rope into the meeting. I was halfway down the rope when suddenly massive spotlights trained on me, Trump started pointing my way, and my pants promptly fell off and floated to the ground, leaving me dangling by a rope in my underwear while our 45th president led the sold-out crowd in a chant of "TIDY WHITIES! TIDY WHITIES!" And then I woke up in a cold sweat.

There are perhaps many things to learn from this — primarily that I should probably STOP eating hummus just before bed. But I learned that Galesburg would definitely be a lot cooler if it had an amphitheater with an adjacent skyscraper. I learned that I can't climb ropes even in my dreams. And I learned that even though I'm a grown adult, there's no fear more visceral than a roomful of people pointing and laughing at you — which is why I need to stop writing and try to get to sleep. I'm not sure which fate is worse, walking into a meeting late or walking into a meeting like a sleep-deprived zombie. I'll let you know in a few hours. Next time, I'm taking the loss, skipping the meeting and DJing at mom's rave instead.