THE ZZZZZZ MEME.

My Ricola-chawing, leiderhosen-wearing, perpetually-yodelling friend, Canadian-Swiss, tagged me on a meme recently. She also tagged Tiiiiina, TBFs and Michael.

Memes are always good fodder for easy, gratuitous blog meat...especially at the fingertips of a currently less-than-motivated blogger. So, here goes.

6 WEIRD THINGS THAT I DO WHILE GETTING READY TO SLEEP OR WHILE SLEEPING.

1. My pre-bedtime, metrosexual routine: Wash hands; remove contact lenses; wash face; brush teeth; floss teeth (it's important, folks!); wipe-down face with an astringent (preferably Aqua-Glycolic, but normally Clean 'n Clear); spot-treatment using AcneFree (because it has very little benzoyle peroxide and thus won't bleach my pillowcases). Yes...as you might've gathered, I have pretty oily skin.

2. For most of my life, I slept on my stomach. Over time, however, this proved to be murder on my neck. So with a considerable amount of effort, I trained myself--about fifteen years ago--to fall asleep on my back each night. To this day, however, I've almost never wake-up in the morning on my back.

3. I don't snore. I don't thrash-around. I almost never need night-time wee-wee breaks. I just don't. Wee-wee breaks were, for some reason, a source of fixation for the others who were tagged on the meme. I felt obligated to make some mention of it myself.

4. Falling asleep usually isn't a problem--mainly because of the excessive quantities of exercise that I get each day. During times of stress, however, waking up at 2-4am (and staying awake) is a frequently a problem.

5. Without an alarm clock, I'll wake-up between 7am and 8:30am. No later. This is true regardless of how late I stayed up the night before. To me, there are few feelings as utterly miserable as sleeping late in the morning. The day is wasted, and the mind and body feel like they're swimming in glue for the remainder of the day. Total, complete misery. Ick! Makes me shudder just thinking about it. I don't know how 99.999% of the Spanish population can do it.

6. I've more or less trained myself to realize when I'm dreaming that I am, in fact, dreaming. I can't always do it, but it happens often enough. It's called "lucid dreaming"--i.e., knowing that you are dreaming and controlling what happens in those dreams. Lemme tell you...it's fun!

BONUS FACTOID: Somewhere out there in cyberspace is another blog that I write. It's an anonymous blog. It's pretty much a download of the bizarre dreams that I've had--written in as much detail as I can remember, and written asap after waking-up. I haven't been terribly diligent with its upkeep. But there's enough material in there to be pretty interesting. Beside me, only one other person in the world knows where that blog is located and has read it. Only one.

Intriguing, eh?