It’s nearly 5 am, and I’ve been tossing and turning since going to bed at 12:30. I finally gave up and got up and made some tea–too much torture to listen to my roommates breathing peacefully. There’s a mosquito hawk beating itself against the monitor as I type this, which is only slightly disturbing.

Jeez! This is my third night of difficult sleep here. You would think, with all the crazy physical activity, that I would conk out every night. Tonight is the worst, though, maybe because yesterday was a day off and I didn’t break a sweat even once. I probably should have, since my body’s used to that now. In fact, that’s even one of my artist rules! Argh! That’ll show me to break ‘em.

My brain is buzzing–about the piece I’m working on, about the people at Double Edge, about home, about why I can’t seem to fall asleep, about the mosquito bites I seem to have acquired on the top of my foot that I’m trying not to scratch. I keep trying to focus on my breathing, to relax each part of my body sequentially, to breathe deeply, but nothing seems to be working. Tomorrow (today) is going to murder me. Grrr.

Hannah just walked past and gave me a sleepy quizzical look before heading off to the bathroom. On her way back, she asked if I was ok. It’s a good question–I feel good, actually, if frustrated about the whole sleeping thing. Very alert. Sigh.

While I’m here, things I forgot to mention in the last post: After training yesterday (well, Friday) morning, we headed straight for the pond and jumped in, which was wonderfully cold (the day was the hottest we’ve had yet). I worked in the garden on Wednesday or Thursday, I forget, and we mulched two plots and chatted about the native flora, and that was awfully fun. I got a little sunburn on my face that’s starting to peel now, which is decidedly unattractive. J., one of the girls here taking the intensive, is teaching me to spin poi during our breaks. Um…my feet feel like abused clubs, uncomfortable and remote from me, between the repeat-offender blisters and the soreness and the mosquito bites. The lake in Ashfield is really nice to walk around. We’re playing soccer instead of our run tomorrow morning, yay!

I’ve been watching for unusual dreams, but nothing particularly bizarre yet. I did have one dream where I was alone in a movie theatre, watching a film about a spy girl in fishnets and a shiny trenchcoat running away from the bad guys in an urban landscape. Later in the dream I was driving through a tunnel at high speeds, getting away from bad guys myself. It was very sexy.

I did have one fascinating dream the week before I came here, though. I dreamt I was in some city like New Orleans that I associate with a certain amount of mysticism. I was changing in the dressing room of a clothing store, trying something on, when a shimmery white patch appeared in the air before me. It was fuzzy, but I understood that it was a magic path that I could follow. I walked into it, straight through the wall of the dressing room, and into a room where there was a wise old woman holding a chicken bone. She directed me to continue following the path out to the end of the hallway where there was a mirror, and that I was to go through the mirror. I followed her instructions. Once through the mirror, I looked around; this world was exactly the same as the one I had left. An empty hallway, just backwards. Anticlimactic, and the shimmery path was gone.

I wandered into the next room, and encountered a somewhat grizzled man, older than me but not older than forty-five or fifty, who I didn’t trust. I also understood in the dream that he was myself, the representative of me in this mirror world, and that we should stick together. We found ourselves in what looked like the seafood section of a grocery store, with lobsters lined up on a big bed of ice. There was no one else around, and it was cold in there.

Suddenly, my counterpart started to get strangely stupid. He was staggering a little, and speaking very slowly with little sense…I think he said “loooobsssssterrrr” and then he was stooping and clutching his chest. I was worried about him, since after all he was me, and asked him what was wrong. He came staggering toward me and said that he was hatching. I asked if he was hatching something, and he said yes; then he started pushing on my stomach. I asked if it was me he was hatching, and he said yes, and so with some trepidation I looked around for a couch or somewhere comfortable on which to allow myself to split open so that something could emerge.

That’s when I woke up. Pretty obviously symbolic, eh? On the whole, I think promising, despite the vague anxiety I felt once I met my mirror-self.

It’s 5:16 now, completely light out, and it just started pouring. I’m not even a little bit sleepy, despite the warm herbal tea I’m drinking, despite the soothing rain sounds. Maybe I’ll go stretch in the space or something.

Thanks for keeping me company in the lonely dawn hours!