My body has resorted to odd ways to try to get me to wake up and not miss this time of solitude.  Last week, on a morning when my alarm was accidentally not set, I actually heard an alarm in my head.  And it kept going off.  Over and over.  I finally realized that there was no real alarm but that my brain had created a short little song to wake me up.  How sweet.

This morning I had purposely set my alarm a little later because this is my exercise "off" morning.  At around 5:00, when my alarm is normally going off, I was having this dream that we were in Indonesia for a reality show.  We were not going to be in the reality show--I have no idea why we were there.  The six people actually participating in the show were all coming to Indonesia because the country had some tie to their past.  They were American, and were, in fact, gray and overweight and 60-ish.  The women participating had tightly permed hair.  The men were bald.  I happened to know, from watching the previews for the show, that two of these people would die, presumably of natural causes, and one would be murdered, presumably by another reality show contestant.  How I had managed to watch the previews of a show that I was actually living out in my dream is just one of those things you can know in a dream that you can't know in real life.  We made it to our destination, and while Amélie and Jack were settling themselves into their room I heard Amélie cry out with a horrific, blood-chilling scream.  I rushed to her room, but frankly I wasn't too worried, because I figured this was the part where someone must have gotten murdered, and I guessed that the body had been stuffed in her closet.  Alas, this was not the case.  Another little girl was hiding behind the clothes in her closet, and all Amélie could see was that her clothes were moving but could not see why.  I reassured her.  But that scream, though..........
That woke me up.  My heart was beating fast.  My legs were twitching.  My palms were sweaty.  I cursed my creative internal alarm clock and willed myself back to sleep, but it was too late.  I did, however, stubbornly lie there in bed until the phone alarm went off at 5:30.

This is the closest picture I could find that was like the raft in my dream, only there were no bikes on the raft (and the occupants in my dream were not quite this fit, either). 

Anyway, I tell you that dream because I thought it was funny, but also because I feel like my soul is going to creative lengths to get me out of bed to spend time in solitude.  I have had enough days with solitude and a smattering of days without to note a significant difference in how I feel when I have time alone and when I do not.  When I do not have time alone I am cranky, disorganized, and absolutely exhausted.  My day has no rhythm.  My body feels like my bones have been weighted with lead.  Despair seeps into the leaky places in my soul.  Solitude, I think, is necessary for my survival.    It is my soul's food, its drink. 

Tomorrow morning my alarm will be set once again to 5:00, so hopefully I won't find myself at 4:50 on a raft with reality show participants, because really...that was just kind of weird.