Random firing of neurons

Twice this week I've gotten almost eight hours of sleep. The sleep app on my phone, which sends me off to slumber at night with the sound of ocean waves and wakes me, gradually, in the morning, also scores my sleep quality. I didn't know that scores approaching 100% were even possible until this morning, when the app scored my sleep from last night in the upper 90s.

I'm sure that's a good thing. I'm sure it's a goal I should place above my night-owl need to keep going -- past 11, past 11:30, past midnight. But we'll see. I like my late-night hours, and on the days when I'm up before 7, I like the early-morning hours as well. (Two o'clock in the afternoon? Enh.)

This week's two nights of almost eight hours of sleep (really, two mornings of sleeping late) were accompanied by two curious and at times, nearly coherent dreams. The kind of dreams in which real people that you know appear out of the blue and surprise you by being there or even by being other than you know them to be.

I woke up from one of those about an hour ago and I'll be puzzling over it off and on for several hours more, trying to recreate the feeling of the dream in my mind, trying to figure out how the dream came to be, and even playing with the idea that it means something.

There are heroes in the Bible, in The Odyssey, in legend and mythology and even history who changed their minds, made new plans, ventured out into new places, because of dreams in which an angel or God or a god showed them the way. I'm modern, or post-modern, and tend to believe that dreams are only the random firing of neurons, random energy traveling here and there along established neuronal networks, often the same ones that were recently busy while awake. And yet my brain or my consciousness or whoever I am needs to construct a story around them.

What's the story? This week it's something about venturing forth on long gravel roads, something about trusting kindness, and something about looms (seriously, fiber, weaving). As I sit outside this morning in the warm September sunshine, these things cohere.

I'm watching the female cardinal fly into the grape vines on the fence, where she pecks at the grape skins to get at the pulp. She's plumping up for cold days to come.

I feed on dreams.