The writer Aimee Bender gets up straight from bed and goes to her computer. She says she likes to write when her mind is only half awake because connections between seemingly disparate things are much more apparent then. Her creativity can flow when her conscious mind hasn’t quite revived.

I can’t say I’m writing a novel, but I have noticed a few things in the twilight of the dawn.

  • Sleep deprivation does a very strange thing to the experience of time. Sure, the days run and blur into each other and it’s hard to know when it’s week and when it’s end. But wakefulness s t r e t c h e s the hours and days. This morning feels like yesterday and yesterday was two weeks ago. That doctor’s appointment was when? This crisis is just 18 hours old? When did you say you called?
  • Nobody — and I mean like zero on the friend count — is on Facebook between the hours of 2 and 4:30 am.
  • Singing and dancing at four in the morning is worth double — maybe triple — any other time of day. I knew this before but was not able to articulate it.
  • Websites actually close. The signs don’t say, “Closed / Cerrado,” instead it’s, “Temporarily down for maintenance.” But closed is closed if you ask me, no matter what words they use.
  • 4:48 in the morning is just sleepy. Very, very sleepy.
  • Reassurance has a half-life of precisely 45 minutes. Worry goes on for weeks and weeks. And by that I mean maybe a day or two.

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