,,s

-World Book quote: "WORLD, HISTORY OF. The history of the world is the story of man--from the first civilization to the space age", my edition is ancient, to say the least... they barely include the moon landing-

My dreams last night were not quite as detailed upon recall as the previous two nights', though as far as I know they at least were not fixated on running away from imagined peril.

Yet another small despondency: rhythmic bed-creaks. Always occur in greatest frequency when one is worn out but has a whirring mind, and therefore is already having trouble falling asleep to begin with. You will be lying back in your comfortable bed, presumably not doing your BED any harm, for goodness' sakes, and suddenly there will be an alarming CRICK! like the mattress is contemplating caving in on the bed slats and dumping you very painfully into your own trestle. This protest would be bearable, if only it occurred singularly, much as hiccups are not all that bad one by one. Instead, your bed insists on repeating the performance, with mechanical precision, as if some parallel civilization is measuring time by the perfectly spaced tick-tock-cricks emanating from your bedroom.

And why, after all, DOES it repeat itself so regularly? It is not as if you are leaping up and down upon your docile bed, as your mother so strictly forbode in your formative years. No! You are lying perfectly still, barely even breathing (and you are certainly not breathing in time to the sounds), so how can the mattress possibly mroink down, then recock itself so it can mroink down again, all with such perfectly even spacing? It is this fact, this fruitless philosophical musing, that more than anything else makes the rhythmic bed-creak impossible to tune out.

Reality check. If you are fleeing a factory run by children with the founder of Craigslist, you may be in a dream.