Pre-Dawn Flights of Fancy

As I grew older, my sleep became more fragmented. My cousin once told me this was totally and entirely normal.

"When we were cave people, there was first sleep, which lasted 3-5 hours. After first sleep, we would take a turn watching the cave. Then later, there was second sleep--when someone else watched over the cave and its resting inhabitants." It was a plausible theory, and I believed my cousin--he was a history teacher. Of course, it could have also been one of those fallacious arguments along the lines of: It's on the internet; therefore, it must be true.

My fragmented sleep, though, had nothing to do with cave watching. It was, for me a vehicle to a magical time. I woke naturally around 3 or 4 a.m., always pre-dawn, pre-daybreak. The air seemed to be crisper, charged with some silent energy while the rest of the beings in the house slept--my husband softly snoring through my wakening. Sometimes one of the dogs would join me to see what I was going to be doing during my early morning, before second sleep might possibly kick in.

Sometimes I would knit or sew or watch something on television or listen to an audiobook or read or give myself a facial or just get my day started in the darkness I felt was a secret, special and personally invigorating time all my own. My mind conjured and seemed to occupy another space during this time of endless possibility in these wee hours. The rest of the time, I was a garden variety, staid adult, which was exhausting, boring, and tedious.

I made lists, so many lists. I would make them to plan my day and my week. I made lists of questions. Shopping lists. Lists of things I knew I would forget, and my lists sometimes worked as intended, and sometimes not. I had always been a science girl and decided on researching dead skin cells purely to satisfy my own curiosity. A lot of dust in the home comes from dead skin cells. Then I went down a rabbit hole with dust/skin questions, comprising a new list.

* How many skin cells were on human adults, children, toddlers, infants? (On infants, the estimate is 19 million per square inch).

* How much dust must accumulate to cover one square inch?

* How would one begin to separate the skin cells from other particles in the dust?

* Once all the skin cells were separated, could they be propagated? I had no way to do this at home or at work, but it was still a fascinating idea--making a new person from dust. Talk about ashes to ashes and dust to dust.

Even stranger, there could potentially be many different people's skin cells in the dust. This was wild stuff.

At some point during my early mornings, I began collecting dust around the house and depositing it in Zip-Lock bags. It didn't look like anything special, but over a period of months, maybe even a full year, I had what seemed like enough cells to form a human infant or toddler via some very fuzzy math calculations. Many bags appeared over time, and I kept them stashed in the basement, in a little-used suitcase in the storage space beneath the stairs. On some level, even I knew or acknowledged what I was doing was odd, possibly demented, and on the fringes of insanity. But the little experiment wasn't hurting anyone.

Living in the American Midwest, we experienced unpredictable weather--mostly gentle, but sometimes violent. During a particularly violent Spring, tornadoes ripped routes through cities and towns. Hail visited infrequently, but when it did, it made its mark with gusto, plunging many insurance adjusters into neighborhoods with suspected roof damage. Lightning speared the skies without regard to time of day.

My plan was simple: I would offer up my bags of dust during an electrical storm. Hardly an original idea, but it worked for Dr. Frankenstein (fiction, of course, but as Kermit the Frog said, "Somebody had a dream, and someone believed it.") This was pure fancy, but I wanted to see how it played out. Logic and science dictated that nothing would happen, with the exception of my bags getting soaked, and there was always the chance I would get struck by lighting when putting out my bags or retrieving them. One could never predict violent weather entirely. And, disclaimer here: I embarked on my folly in a particularly unscientific way. Intentionally. If by some miracle this worked, I didn't want it to be repeatable.

On a warmish pre-dawn morning, I found myself on my back patio with my bags stacked one on top of the other in an aluminum lasagna pan (like plastic noodles) with a metal coat hanger serving as a grounding agent (and perhaps as a lighting rod) should an electrical bolt from the sky look for a place to land on the earth.

The weather radar app on my phone showed thunderstorms around ten to fifteen minutes away. I went inside to watch the play of weather and my insane experiment. It could only be described as insane because putting faith into something that was so 1980's sci-fi wasn't really a 'thing' in the real world (Hello, My Science Project. Greetings, Weird Science!). Nonetheless, I made a cup of Irish breakfast tea and sat alone, in the dark, cocooned in a fleece blanket, gaze riveted on the little pan.

The storm delayed dawn, but in that time of early morning where anything is possible, nothing unexpected happened. My husband would awaken soon, joining me, and he would wonder what was on the patio. I couldn't leave my experiment outside. The dogs would need to go out, and god knew I didn't want them eating all the dust of getting skewered by some lightning intended for the pan and coat hanger.

My sneakers were sitting next to the door. Popular science argued that the rubber soles would ground the lightning if I got hit. So far, though, the timing between the thunder and lightning (as measured by one Mississippi, two Mississippi) proved the storm was bringing the noise, light show, and rain, but the lights and sound were a few miles away. It would only take a second to grab my experiment. But then the hail began. I really should wait. So, I did.

The hail started out like kosher salt, and within a few minutes it became pea-sized and progressed to golf ball-sized hail. Not a good time to let the dogs out, and probably not a good time to let myself out either. I think it would hurt a lot getting hit by one of those things. Everyone has seen that poor, sad car riddled with dents from being parked outside during a terrible hailstorm. People wouldn't fare much better: We had skin, not a protective steel shell.

In the time I waited for the hail to subside, the fun parts of the storm grew closer. There was so much violence outside my window. I made a list of decisions:

* Shoes vs no shoes vs get the pan vs stay inside.

Game time decision with the pressure on, two sides of the coin: My magical possibilities fading as quickly as dawn approached on one side, and on the other my magical possibilities brightening as the lightning came closer. Rationally thinking this through, wasn't it true that more people died by being trampled by elephants each year than by lightning strike?

Adding to my decision list:

* Vanity (I really didn't want my husband to think I'd lost the plot) vs magic and magical thinking (I couldn't bear losing that little piece of me that still held childlike wonder).

Which to choose. They both held their own elements of danger.