Coffee After Midnight

I've posted before, several months ago at least, about the weirdness that happens in the early morning hours. I'm sticking to that story. I live it everyday and know it is true.

A painter, who only works at night and whose work I enjoy, once told a two-pronged tail about his creative process. I found it to be a perfect analogy for what happens to the mind between 3 and 5 AM. When asked first about how he paints he said he paints nothing rather a magic monkey paints most everything, his only job is to make the monkey show up. Further, when asked why he decided to paint something, he colorfully explained that a tiny Abraham Lincoln was sitting on his shoulder one night and told him what subject matter to use.

So, that's to say I have noticed this trend extends to children. Granted, I don't keep my children up until 4:11 AM just to see how they react, but as anyone with kids knows they sometimes wake up in the middle of the night. Last night was no exception.

Gray woke up at some hour, I didn't look at the clock but since I wasn't asleep until well after midnight, I know it was at weird:30. First off I hear him walk in our room. He doesn't speak, doesn't reach out and touch anyone, just stands there by the bed looking at me. Then I ask him what he needs, not a word. I ask him if he needs a snuggle, and he climbs in next to me. Finally he's lying there and flops his cast arm up in the air and brings it down squarely on my face. A note to any parents who may have a kid in a cast one day: casts in the face hurt, probably worse in the middle of the night.

Tracy seemingly isn't affected by the late night weirdness, but his time is coming. I don't think Gray was affected at the same age. Tracy still has the angry/sad/general crankiness in the middle of the night.

I don't know why this is, but one day I would like to find out. Is it simply that the brain really wants to be asleep, no matter how much rest you get during the day? Is it because of this you enter some sort of nether-world where you are awake and dreaming? Do you lose some sort of inhibition or judgement at this hour, where rational norms are changed due to some time-intrinsic lack of rationality? Is reality warped, time-zone-by-time-zone, all around the world late at night and we are never any-the-wiser?

Nothing in this post even remotely makes sense, does it? It probably has no real flow. It is 3:51 AM and there's a commercial on TV about stealing cookies from the cookie jar. Needless to say, even the commercials get strange at this hour.