Since it seems like EVERYONE is about to be walloped, I thought I would pull out this essay I wrote eons ago.

The first thing that you realize as consciousness overtakes your dream state is an odd quality to the light that hits your closed eyelids. It isn’t that squinty red feeling you get when toasting yourself on a beach, but a soothing whiteness. Your alarm clock hasn’t gone off yet, so you feel obligated to just lie there, trying to interpret the feeling. You realize that there is no sound in your world. You don’t hear the cars and doors and dogs and birds and all the other white noises that tend to occupy space and time.

The sounds you never notice until they leave a void. You feel particularly comfortable, not as if you would dread getting up, but you don’t have the same desire to stay abed…