oops! you woke up inside a nightmare

for those who have a hard time getting up in the morning

Your alarm wakes you at seven sharp and rips you from the warm embrace of a dream you’re already starting to forget.

In your first two seconds of consciousness, you understand one simple truth: today is the most important day of the rest of your life.

You don’t know why you know this, but you do. It’s a feeling somewhere in your stomach or small intestine or gallbladder. Deep in that place you can’t quite pinpoint, but have every reason to trust. Today is the day.

Today is the day for what.

Why today.

It doesn’t matter.

The first day of the rest of your life. Congratulations.

We begin here in your bedroom, which is a good start. There are worse places to wake up. As you may very well soon find out.

Look at the mess of this place. Jesus. Who raised you.

Here's the sound of your alarm again. You still have to decide what to do about that. You try to remember the dream you were just in but it’s leaking out the edges of your consciousness.

It’s hot steam in a car with the windows down.

Watch it drift away. There it goes, it’s gone.

And here you are, wrapped in wool and polyester, as Apple's 'Radar' begins again from the top. This is how every champion's day begins. With the binary decision you are now faced with.

To confront the basic task of living or to roll back over into denial. This is your choice.

There's a gaunt streak of seven a.m. sunlight squeezing through the half inch slit of exposed window. It slices into the room, illuminating a crop circle of muffin crumbs on the floor.

You stare it down as you debate whether or not to get up and live your life or descend back into a sleep heavy with regret.

The radar sound goes dee dee dee dee comma dee dee dee dee dee and you’re thinking about your life and the future while the crumbs just sit there, smug, and now it's surely at least seven oh one.

Get up. Wake up. Rise. Shine. Execute. Go. Move.

F***.

It's so simple. It's just a set of mechanical actions, executed thoughtlessly one after the other. It's nothing.

It takes five seconds.

Four seconds.

Three.

Two.

One.

You haven't moved.

You're still here. Is this what you want for yourself. A life of inaction, hesitation, cowardice.

Dee dee dee dee, comma, dee dee dee dee dee.

Your ancestors are watching you right now. They're seeing this whole pathetic charade. Countless generations gazing down the great hallway of history to see you, their descendant, huddled under the covers like a frightened animal.

You are the offspring of mammoth hunters, of Ancient Mesopotamian warriors, of philosopher kings, medieval crusaders, renaissance thinkers. And you can't get yourself out of bed.

Do you think your great, great, great, et cetera grandparents had to debate whether or not to hit snooze.

No.

They had to rise and grind and hunt so they could put blubber on the table.

To prolong the bloodline for at least one more generation so that eventually your lazy ass could be born.

Within your very DNA lies the latent genetic potential of plague doctors and famine survivors and so many other resilient humans across centuries of material hardship. You come from a lineage of very tough people! If they could make it through the Bubonic Plague, and the Industrial Revolution, and the Reagan Eighties, I'm sure you can kick those covers off and step confidently into today!

Three.

Two.

One.

Dee dee dee dee. Dee dee dee dee.

Ok. This isn't working.

Time for some brutal honesty here. You feel that sinking feeling in your gut.

That’s not indigestion. Or hunger pangs. That's the universe telling you that you've reached a psycho-spiritual nexus point. Everything is about to change.

In fiction, they call this an inciting incident.

What it means, is that this tiny moment in time will fundamentally shift reality in one of two directions. Everything that happens to you after this, every stroke of luck, good and bad, every wayward detail, will be a direct reflection of this one choice.

Get up, or stay down.

Here you are at the axis of everything. Good morning sunshine.

Whatever you choose, reality will align itself with.

It's a simple decision. All you have to do is act.

Get up, or stay down. Dee dee dee dee, comma, dee dee de-

You get out of bed right now, turn off the alarm, and stand on your own two feet. You choose to live.

You hit snooze and roll back over into a sweet, dark cocoon of nothing. Eight minutes won't hurt anyone. You have plenty of time.

You make your bed, you brush your teeth, you do thirty pushups on the carpet floor. You dress in form fitting clothes after a cold shower and drink a full thirty two ounces of water before starting the coffee.

You wake again in eight minutes to find that you can't feel your toes. They seem to be asleep. You try wiggling them to encourage blood flow, but nope, nothing. Not even pins and needles. It's like there's nothing there.

Today, everything changes. You get in your fuel efficient Hyundai Elantra. You drive to the office with a smile on your face and enter the workplace whistling Doris Day’s ‘Que Sera Sera.’

Your alarm is blaring again and you've just been ripped from yet another warm dream and your room is no less dark and cold than when you gave up on it eight and a half minutes ago. You wiggle those little tootsie-toes for three more seconds and then feel your frontal lobe offer up one more little “screw it” and you press snooze and return to slumber.

This time you do not dream of anything.

You infuse the whole office with positive energy. Heads turn to see you streaming in like an exploding star. In a good way. Coworkers seem to warm up at your very presence. From across your desk clump, you consider going up and finally talking to that one special person who occasionally glances your way. The one with the eyes and the face and the ineffable glow you can’t resist. You could just go up and say hi. But you’re not quite there yet. That’s more of a tomorrow thing. Still, today is pretty awesome.

You chose to get out of bed.

When you come to again, it's as if your legs are totally absent from the knee down. Like someone chopped you off at the patellas and left you in bed. You feel with your hands to see if anything's there, and thank God there they are, but hey isn't that weird that you can't feel anything. Your alarm is still echoing back and forth across the plain walls of your sleeping chamber.

You decide you might as well call in sick for the day, because hey, you deserve it. You literally can't feel your legs. How would you even ambulate yourself around the office. You'd be a useless lug and get in everyone's way. No one would want you there anyway. Better you just stay home.

Today is your performance review and today you will get the promotion. You step into your boss’s office, self assured. You get the promotion. Wow. Just like that. Now you have more responsibility and more money. Good thing you woke up on time, right.

You call your boss and tell him you're sick and he says OK and there's that opiate rush of a sick day, a feeling you've known and loved since childhood, where even when you're sick with food poisoning or strep throat or can't feel your legs from the knees down, you're still so happy to stay home, you hardly mind the symptoms. There’s a sweet relief to being sick. Ah, yes. Now nothing is expected of me. I’d choose illness over responsibility any and every day of the week.

You order gourmet sub sandwiches in for lunch, for everyone, demonstrating your natural leadership and productive generosity. Your boss watches this unfold from behind the squeegeed glass of his executive office and feels confident in the decision to promote you, a small parental part of him knowing that one day you’ll fill that very office yourself.

You try to rub your legs together like the happy little bed cricket you are, but then you remember you can't feel your calves so you instead turn to your cell phone where you order UberEats Burger King for breakfast because there's an old, dilapidated billboard for this particular fast food joint right outside your bedroom window, kind of peering downward at you at all times and you can just barely see it through the exposed crack of window and you say to yourself: well, might as well. You place a forty four dollar order, which is actually quite impressive, and then roll over, back to sleep, no longer concerned about your still totally asleep or missing legs.

You drive home with the same relaxed smile and prepare a wholesome dinner of single ingredient foods and eat without watching television, basking in the gratitude of your nourishment and mere consciousness. You go to bed at ten p.m., so as to make rising the next morning as effortless as possible. It is.

You wake for the fourth time this morning to the sound of your apartment buzzer. Your UberEats is here. Now that there’s food in the equation, you are somehow fully willing and able to jump right out of bed, but when you try to do this, you can't. Why can't you. You're finally ready. Your food is here. But unfortunately it appears you are now fully paralyzed from the waist down. Laid to waste down there. You jerk your upper body around to gain momentum, but only manage to sit up a little. Your neck is trapped at a horribly awkward angle against your bed’s headboard. You can’t move. But your UberEats delivery driver will only wait so long. You call his or her cell phone with the one complimentary call courtesy of UberEats and your driver picks up and offers a harsh grunt followed by ‘what,’ having already waited five to eight minutes for you to let them in, and you tell them sorry, sorry, but can you please let yourself in. The door code is 528491.

You repeat this day seamlessly. You are promoted again in less than a year, which is totally unheard of in this industry. On a Tuesday in July, sometime between ten fifteen and eleven forty five AM, you finally go up and talk to that special person in the break room. They’re wearing that special garment, the one that accentuates their electrifying eyes or hair or both. You say hi to them, and make some awkward small talk, and it’s clunky, but your special person actually finds it kind of sweet and endearing. They reveal this to you much later on, like years later, in the warm afterglow of lovemaking as you both lay there in the California King, tracing indecipherable symbols into each other’s flesh and reminiscing on those beautiful early days.

Marquis is the name of your delivery driver and he makes his way into your bedroom even though this is totally atypical and he drops the bag of food on your bed, along with the iced caramel frappe thing which immediately spills everywhere. You can’t shift your lower half at all so you just lay there as cold milky fluid soaks through your comforter and into the part of your legs that’s still getting sensory feedback. It feels like the opposite of pissing yourself.

Marquis says nothing about you laying in bed with your neck pinned against the headboard in that bizarre, twisted position that just can't possibly be comfortable. Marquis sees himself out and closes the door behind him. He leaves you a two star rating on the app. You don't tip.

The two of you are smiling at each other in the break room. You’re alone. After two minutes of conversation, the tension in the room is a dense wall of humidity and someone has to cut through it. Finally, you ask them on a date. They say yes before you finish your sentence. You go out dancing together that very night, and though you’re not much of a dancer, your special person also somehow finds that endearing and has the grace to teach you without making you feel embarrassed at all. And it’s there, in that run down dive bar, under heavy crimson lights and alcohol, you nearly drown in this person’s eyes, only to come up for air and realize:

They are the one for you.

It's a gymnastic feat for you to eat your breakfast sandwich and hash browns in the position you're in. Especially since your ribs and thoracic cavity are starting to freeze up. By the end of the meal, you can't move any part of your body.

"They're gonna have to roll me out of here."

This is something you usually say hyperbolically after a large, heavy meal. It gets a courtesy laugh like a quarter of the time, but right now, nobody's laughing.

One, because you're alone in this dark, greasy bedroom and two, you no longer have control over your facial muscles. You just lay there, not digesting, until your alarm goes off again.

It is nine oh five in the morning.

You marry in less than two years which is totally unheard of in this industry.

You're asleep again. You're in a dream again. It's not the same warm dream as before, but there's something familiar about it. You're laying in a bed exactly like your own. Your bed is in a dark room exactly like your own. But it is not your own and you don't know how or why you know that. Perhaps you are not dreaming. It no longer seems to matter. There's a person standing right above you, looking down on you. Someone familiar. A person you may have passed on the street. A name and face just on the tip of your tongue but not quite there. The person smiles wide and this fills you with no warmth. The room is very cold. You try to move but can't. The silence can only be described as totalitarian.

You hard launch a family on a gorgeous little ranch house in upstate New York where you both hold high-level remote positions and maintain phenomenal work life balance. You excel in your professional life and find yourself continuing to develop as a natural leader in the organization. Responsibility comes to you naturally given your competence, charm, and general good nature, which exudes off of you like sunlight, warming all the people who orbit you and creating a productive photosynthesis within the workplace. Even in your involved, highly lucrative leadership role, you still manage to make the kids breakfast every morning and sit with them for quality, enriching conversation before locking in for the day.

Your eyes are open and won't close. The familiar person above you is still smiling and their eyelids are open all the way. Without breaking their gaze, they put something into your mouth. A hose. A hose made of something rubbery, but not rubber. It fits perfectly within your oral cavity. The familiar person's grin shines alabaster white in the timeless dim of this place.

Here are your three little ones, all bright and shining, each of them striking a perfect visual blend in their genetic makeup between you and your partner so there’s never any unspoken resentment around the kids looking or behaving more like either one of you.

Why is your mouth open.

Were you screaming.

No sound escapes you.

The familiar holds the hose in your mouth and tilts their head thirty degrees to the right, observing. Then the hose starts pumping.

Every morning, the buckwheat pancakes feature a smiley face of blueberries to welcome your three pride and joys into the world for that day. You’ve always believed in waking up and getting out of bed with excitement. You do your best to replicate this experience for them. Every morning you drive them to school with classic Americana music playing on the radio, blasting out the open windows of the Honda Odyssey accompanied by the angelic and harmonized voices of your kiddos, just like you practiced.

You can't see what it is, but a tingly substance secretes itself into your mouth. It is delicious. Impossibly, irresistibly delicious. Your taste buds light up.

Your nerve endings light up. Here are all the yummy flavors from childhood you forgot your body remembered until right now. You're confused as your mouth explodes with pleasure because, hey, maybe this isn't such a bad dream.

The flavor is just exceptional and makes your whole central nervous system feel like a major metropolitan city at night, with all its countless yellow dots of windows illuminated and scattered evenly across the distant skyscrapers.

Every morning they dash out from America’s top ranked minivan into the schoolyard, eager to greet their many charming and nearly-as-intelligent-but-not-quite friends, excited to nourish their minds for the day. You beam after them. They never look back.

The figure above you is still smiling as your brainstem and frontal lobe and all the other bits and pieces explode with light, catching fire.

The local radio station plays 'More Than a Feeling' on the drive back to the ranch house. You put in another hard day's work which is met with gratitude from your many subordinates. In the afternoon, you make time for your budding equestrianism and somehow also prioritize piano lessons, French, and Bikram Hot Yoga. You're planning on surprising your special person with a trip to Italy, or France, or India for your anniversary.

The hose pumps and pumps and you finally understand what’s happening. Every corner of your psyche bursts into euphoric opiate flame and sizzles with pleasure until they each, one by one, succumb to the heat and there is nothing left of you but a tiny speck of awareness, somewhere at the top of the spinal cord, and even that’s starting to fade into the oblivion lull of pleasure.

Your children all grow up and become legends in their own right. Your daughter is now the nation's top cardiothoracic surgeon. When the President suffers a heart murmur and the whole administration gets a little nervous about it, your daughter’s the one they go to. Your son, the wild child, is an up and coming fashion model and LGBTQ+ activist, inspiring young men everywhere to be who they are. He frequently and publicly attributes his confidence and uncompromising trueness to self, to you. He tells the press, you're the one who taught him to seize life by the reins and attack every day like it's his last. You taught him to wake up at seven every morning and get out of bed right away.

Your youngest daughter is in law enforcement and for this reason, doesn't get on as well with the other two, but given her rank and stature within the Central Intelligence Agency, a not unreasonable case could be made that she's secretly the best and brightest of all three of your little ones, despite her stark differences in temperament and ideology, but you would never reveal this thought to anyone but her. And although you yourself disagree with her politics, you've been able to compartmentalize this simply because you're just so damn proud of her.

You have almost fully evaporated at this point. There is nothing left. Nothing but a little pearl of consciousness. This final piece of you, that small speck of instinct that remains, clings on to the light.

This is the part that learned to procreate somewhere in a forgotten ocean billions of years ago. This is the part that crawled to shore in the pursuit of legs because it felt like the right thing to do at the time. This last shining, living bit of you looks up one last time at the familiar person above, only to recognize that it is you holding the hose.

It always has been.

And somehow, with the hose still in your mouth, you smile at an old friend, as the both of you disappear together.

These are your children and you look upon all of them with pride, knowing you did a good job.

You and your spouse, who after all these years, you still love passionately.

And while sure, the physical dynamic might not be what it once was, it's still totally satisfying and intimate and dare you say, spicy.

You both just love each other so much, and it shows. Your subordinates mention it at every Christmas party. You are politely pestered for how you pull off a marriage like this.

How do you guys do it. How do you stay so busy and so successful and so happy, year after year after year.

All you can offer them is some vague aphorism that belongs on a coffee mug or kitchen wall hanging, something like "oh, it's nothing special, I just get up every morning on time, with a big smile on my face" and everyone in the office Oohs and Aahs at your profound, yet accessible musings on a clearly well lived life.

And then you and your person return home and make sweet, passionate love once again, just as you used to, and it's in that warm afterglow that you remember how you first met that day, and thank god you got out of bed on time because it was that one simple act of autonomy that imbued you with the necessary confidence to finally approach this special person, and now look at this perfect little life we've co-created. I love you.

–

It's seven oh one. You're here in your room, alone. Another tiny crumb detaches from the detritus of the muffin on your floor. Your alarm is blaring still. Dee dee dee dee. Dee dee dee dee. The next minute, and the next day, and the next lifetime lies ahead of you, an infinite sidewalk of potential extending out into the horizon. Here you are at the very beginning. A ladyfinger of light peeks through the exposed patch of window. And just behind it, is the great big dilapidated lettering of a billboard that once read: HAVE IT YOUR WAY.