Crumbling Slumber

A haibun

My alarm goes off at 6:00 am. It has a large, extremely prominent snooze button, a way to tell it I want another totally useless, non-dream-state, wasted nine minutes of "sleep." And another. And yet another. Eventually my wife sics the seven-year-old and the five-year-old on me. Children do not have snooze buttons.

Forty winks—easy.
Repealing the moon is not.
Morning starts early.

I read that dreams are total gibberish until the last few seconds before you wake up. Then you remember a hazy surrealistic fragment of something semi-coherent. Not me. I experience the same episode of the same scenario at least five, sometimes six times in rapid sequence. They vary in some small but significant details. Eventually I realized I have to pee. I tell my bladder to go back to sleep—but it always wins.

Time passes quickly
When you are soundly asleep—
Until it doesn't.

No one warned me when I was single, that married couples sometimes share dreams. I'll be in a semi-lucid post-dream state and beside me, my wife will say, "I had the strangest dream last night. It was... 'insert explanation here.'" Now I'm wide awake. I roll over so we're face-to-face and say, "That's so weird. I had the same dream."

Don't say anything
Until after my breakfast—
Cornflakes, then chatter.