Adrenaline Logic

It's the backwards impulses that run through your head when you're startled out of sleep, before you finish waking completely. Let's say you leave your door unlocked and your friend Lana comes in and wakes you up from your nap, and you see her and start screaming, and you recognize who she is and you still scream some more.

It's the logic that makes us try to answer the alarm clock, or bang on a ringing cell phone to make the alarm stop. And the early-morning contracts we make with ourselves that go something like this: "I can sleep for 5 more minutes and then I will get up, unassisted."

Or when you're startled out of sleep at 2:45am by your car alarm going off, and you look out the window and see a car driving away and your lights flashing and you think, "[expletive], I have to make this stop before it wakes my neighbors up," and you run around to find your keys and it stops, and then it starts up again spurring a new round of adrenaline logic, and you finally find the right button to push and you're standing there, on a chair looking out the high window at your car and breathing heavily and think, "whew, that's over" and then you get back in bed.

And waking up some more you think to go back to the window and look and look and finally realize--is that glass?