To sleep, perchance to dream, aye, there's the rub

I realize I have yet again fallen behind in posting. And will probably continue to do some in the next few weeks, since I'm going walkabout on Sunday to go visit law schools. And friends. :)

At any rate, I have nothing to offer Sonja in the way of advice for getting up earlier... I love sleep. Not even cattle prods would convince me to wake up earlier if I didn't think i was ready to get up. My mom (and brynmuffin will corroborate this) used to be SO cheerful that she would sing obnoxiously cheery songs in the morning to wake us up. I once chucked a pillow at her and told her i was practicing for the weekend. This, however, did not work. Alas, as a result, now that I'm no longer forced to wake up for, say, work, I don't. Simple as that :) JB does occasionally drag me out of bed with him (the crazy man only needs a little bit of sleep! how weird is that?)

Anyways, to connect sleep and inspiration, I have 2 stories. One involves an old book and one involves a new one.

The first: While i was writing my first book as my senior thesis in college, I was having troubles coming up with a title for it. I strained my brain trying to think of something and couldn't come up with a title that suited it. So one night I went to sleep after a hard day's work of typing. Ah ha! Suddenly, I woke up in the middle of the night with the most insightful title i could never have thought up awake. I was so excited! It was perfect. The book would sell on the title alone. This was it. Of course, I thought that i should write it down, but couldn't find any paper near my bed and thought to myself "Well, it's so perfect, I'll never forget" Yep, bet you can guess the ending to this story... I woke up the next morning with the memory of having thought of the perfect title.... AND NO MEMORY OF THE TITLE ITSELF. Ugh. It took me several months to come up with another one that I'm quite sure isn't as good as the first: Misdirection. Of course, I'm left to wonder if i ever really came up with the perfect title or i just dreamed that I did. You know how when you dream and you think you've solved something perfectly and you wake up and are like "well, obviously my brain is on crack because that wouldn't work in a million years?" well, it's possible that's what happened. But i prefer to believe in my genius. And then my lameness in forgetting. :)

Oh, and I should add as a p.s. to that story that when I actually thought up Misdirection as a title, I was flying somewhere and had another ah ha moment. And then remembering my mistake of last time, asked the man sitting next to me if i could borrow his pen for a minute to write it down. :) Lesson learned.

The second story involves a dream from just the other night. It's all getting vaguer in my head as time passes, but it spawned an idea for a book that I still remember, so I'm counting that as progress. The dream involved a lot of lawyers, basically, and as the dream progressed in odd ways (which I'm not sharing because it'll take too long) I figured out that all of the lawyers for this law firm i was dreaming about were VAMPIRES. Yeah, basically, i can't figure out if I'm 1) reading too many vampire stories, 2) watching too many back episodes of Boston Legal or 3) am really nervous about becoming a lawyer and having everyone hate me. What do you all think?

My story idea, of course, is way cooler. :) But yes, it includes vampires and lawyers all the same. Lucky me!