The Midnight Lab

No, this isn't a cute dog story---

To facilitate sleep, it's great to have a bit of a routine. The dimming of lights, comfortable nightwear, lower activity, no big meals, a bad book or bad television, the usual. A nightcap? Sure.

Off we all go to Dreamland.

Or not.

There is the phenomenon of The Midnight Lab. As in Laboratory, factory, sweatshop, workhouse.

I think most of us are sleeping by this point, and the Night Shift carries on without us supervising it. Brain wheels whirling, obelisks raised, bridges erected, hammers slamming down, neuro-chimmneys steaming ideas into the contained holy of holies in your head. We dream through this most of the time, transforming back into the child without a care, weightlessly embraced by a hammock of oblivion. Oops, surfacing, gotta pee. Resume position and continue until morning.

I know about insomnia and the Tilt-o-Worry-Whirl, that's different than this. What I'm finding out is that my Midnight Lab requires more attention from me before it will shift into cruise control for the night. It reminds me of closing a large retail store, and needing to change the download back-up tapes in the refrigerated computer room before going home by midnight.
My inventing mind wants 30 minutes of my attention before lights out to download the newest brainstorms, make a few sketches or diagrams, make a ToDo list for tomorrow, put the wild ideas down on paper, capture the inspirations before rebooting in the morning. And the last few months, I will have to turn the light back on after two hours of not-sleeping when I don't take the notebook to bed with me.

You'd think I'd quit resisting and just do it, but no.

Last night it was the same again, so I thought this morning I would share it with you. And it's only occasionally flashes of brilliance, like ideas of time and space expansion, or the mass of light particles. (I'm not telling, so don't ask) Often, it's a cute bag handle idea, or a logo design for someone I know, or a lino cut I want to make, or a new duvet cover with vintage tablecloths, or how to rearrange my studio for better efficiency, or how to finally get the community garden in Steven's front yard idea going, how to build cabinets with the rough pine shelving racks from Fred Meyers as the base structure(with cut-outs). It goes on like this for pages, usually around one page a night, sometimes more. It often includes diagrams, which is why I think of it like a Lab, pages and pages of experiment ideas, A to B to C to D, on and on.

Then I can turn the light out again, and glide into the slipstream.
Writing in the morning can follow if the dreams were interesting and I remember them fairly easily, but I've already gone into that before.

Are you in touch with your Midnight Lab? Do you out-source? Is yours a Salon of sparkling characters, or a Cinema of Surrealism? What would your dogs or cats say? Think it over.