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Lying in bed, and thinking wonderful thoughts

By Carl Heintze

This morning after I woke up I was lying in bed thinking about, well, thinking about lying in bed. Lying in bed semiconscious, that is, with that delicious feeling that you don't have to get up until you want to.

I didn't have to and I didn't want to, either.

We don't often get to lie in bed in the morning and think about not getting up or about not getting up right away. At least I don't.

Life isn't like that.

Most mornings we have to get up to go to work or to make breakfast or to wake the children and get them ready for school or to wonder how the children are doing, wherever they are, or to realize, worst of all, that we are sick and we can't get up.

I'm not talking about any of those things. I'm talking about lying in bed, barely awake, but awake enough to know that we don't have to get up--not right away, anyway.

There is a difference between waking up and knowing you either have to get up or you can't get up and getting up but at some time not yet quite in sight.

Lying in bed, not having to rise right away and still not being quite asleep is a condition without parallel so far as I'm concerned.

I think it's a little like what it must be to be cushioned in your mother's womb, protected by her amniotic fluid and her tummy wall from the outside world; sort of there, but not there, aware there is a world out there, but not a world with which you have to deal with right now.

You can curl up just as you did in the womb, warm and cushioned by your blankets or quilts. Somewhere the clock ticks away quietly, making you dimly aware that you are alive, but not so alive that you have to deal with the slings and arrows the world may soon toss at you.

In such a state, your mind wanders through not just the world in which you really are, but also through the worlds you imagine, the worlds you would like to be a part of, except they have not yet been created. As a matter of fact, with a little effort you can lie there and manufacture several of these places. Some of them are populated with many of the good memories of your past: that wonderful vacation in Hawaii, the first time you seriously kissed someone, a minor triumph or two of your teen years that seemed major ... such as winning the 440-yard dash or receiving a prize for the best essay in your school.

I have a couple of memories like this I occasionally drag out when I am lying there half-conscious. One of them is waking up for the first time after being married and knowing I was no longer alone in the world. Another was waking up on a ship bouncing its way across the Atlantic in 1946. It suddenly dawned on me that morning that I was going to dock that afternoon in New York harbor; I had survived World War II and I was going to be back home again soon.

I suppose all of us have wakin- ups of similar quality. But there also are those fantasies we make up as we are lying there, most of which evaporate before we are more than an hour or two older. At the time we half-dream them, when we are cozy and warm in our beds they seem entirely possible: that I will yet write The Great American Novel, that I will once again be young and handsome (not that I ever really was, anyway), that my children all will be wildly successful and will credit me for most of what they've accomplished. (It's not that they're not successful, it's rather that I really didn't have much of anything to do with how they prospered.)

Such dreams are limited only by your ability to imagine and by your ability to make them at least temporarily real. You could call them daydreams, but they really are not quite day and not quite dreams, either. They are part of an indescribable state I have been trying to describe for you.

I suppose I haven't done a very good job.

But that's because I'm now awake and not lying in my bed, curled up like an unborn baby, half awake and half asleep.

But I wish I were.