It’s 5:50 a.m. and I’ve woken up to a migraine. Too bad, since I was having an enthralling dream about midgets and talking cats. The cats could clearly pronounce the letters D and P, and they would go around saying deeeee peeee, deeeee peeee, deeeee peeee over and over. It appeared to be their way of purring. You could tell which ones they were even before they started purring because they were each branded with the letters D and P.

But back to the midgets. I was with my first boyfriend, and when I exclaimed that the midgets were so cute!, he reprimanded me for: 1. classifying people by their size, and 2. judging people by their size. These were both valid points. I felt ashamed of myself, as I often do in dreams.

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I am only at my computer at this unholy hour for three reasons: 1. There’s no way I am going to sleep until this migraine goes away, or at least until it is dulled by the migraine medicine I took, 2. I am practicing good “sleep hygiene” by getting out of bed when I can’t sleep so that I don’t start associating the bed with the place I lie around awake and instead reserve it for the place I actually sleep, and 3. My computer desk is in front of a large window, and supposedly exposure to bright light in the morning helps regulate one’s sleep-wake cycle.

The problem with reason #3 is that I live in the Seattle area. This means there is rarely bright light, as is the case this morning. The sky almost always falls somewhere between the color of wet cement and Crest toothpaste — and I am talking about the old-school kind of Crest toothpaste, not the new azure and turquoise gel variants. Not exactly bright. Or light. Seattle is definitely not the right place to live if you have sleep issues and rely on the sun to help keep your internal clock functioning correctly.

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I’ve stolen my husband’s pajama pants and I’m not ashamed to admit it. I need all the comfort I can get right now.

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There were other dreams, too. Crowded places and my trying to navigate through all the people while holding a large soda in each hand. Seeing people from high school who haven’t aged at all since high school, as if they’d been deep frozen all these years and thawed out only to annoy me in my dreams. How awkward it was running into them and being (nearly) old enough to be their mother.

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For me, the migraine starts at the back of my head and seems to plunge deep into my posterior fossa then come out in a large swath across my forehead. Imagine a plane of pain slicing through my brain and being intersected by another plane of pain that lies flat against my forehead.

My neurologist thinks all my recent symptoms (the paresthesia, numbness, fatigue, sensitive hearing, vision problems — have I mentioned there are vision problems?) could be caused by this migraine. Atypical migraine, she says. A relatively rare variant.

She thinks I might be having waves of migraines that are giving me these symptoms nearly nonstop. Apparently the symptoms from one of these migraines can last for several days. So if you have two of them a week, you are pretty much hosed 24/7. This is just one possibility the neurologist is exploring. But I have to say I’m getting tired of the exploration. I want answers. An answer. The answer.

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Jon just woke up. He has realized that I’ve taken his pajama pants. Fortunately, he’s not making me give them back.

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I never said my posts would be interesting.

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This getting-out-of-bed-when-you-can’t-sleep-thing is for the birds. Now I am wide awake and I have this blasted migraine, which I am forced to experience in my wide-awake state. Who came up with the phrase “sleep hygiene” anyway? I’m not wild about the term. Makes me feel like I am being dirty if I don’t follow the sleep hygiene rules. And not dirty in a good way, but dirty in a dirty, sleepless way.

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One last thing. At my new job, the convention is to use terminal commas and two spaces after punctuation. Can I just tell you how frustrating that is for me? Some people would not be bothered by style issues like this, but I find myself thinking about it often and bristling at the thought every time. Whenever I have to insert an additional space after a period, I feel a bit nauseated. Not unlike how I feel now, as this migraine is doing its bad work on my body.

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Note: I don’t support branding of cats or any other animals. It’s simply how the dream went down. I also do not support classifying or judging people based on their size. Again, it’s the dream, not me.