All Shook Up
The weather recently has been nice enough to sleep with the window open. For some reason, I have always felt that I sleep better when I can hear the outside world. It’s more peacefully some how, even if the outside isn’t at peace.
The downside to sleeping with the window open, is that loud noises will wake you up. You would think this would happen more often than it does. The first time I woke up today, the time was 4:08am. I always look at the clock, even if I know it’s not time to get up yet. I don’t know what exactly made the noise, probably the cat, but instead of going straight back to bed, I decided to use the restroom first. When I came back, I noticed it was very quiet outside. Usually there are birds and usually the cat is lounging on the cabinet under my window, but she wasn’t there. I didn’t think much of it at the time, so I climbed back into bed, pulled the blanket over my head and went to sleep.
I remember I was having a good dream; I was dreaming that I had just got a sixty inch HD TV, and I was setting it up. I woke with a start, to a peculiar sensation: my bed was swaying. Current Time: 4:36am. My first thought? I thought the cat had jumped on the bed, but the sensation persisted. My second thought was that I was still dreaming. You know, like when the tv is on, and you are about to fall asleep, and you hear what the people are saying on tv, but it feels like its coming from a dream? So I sat up, determined to wake myself from this waking dream.
The bed stopped swaying. I looked around the room, to see if I could tell: was I going crazy? was that a dream? did I just have some weird seizure or something? Or maybe, maybe it was an earthquake. The cat was sitting on the cabinet now, she was looking right at me, so I asked her if she felt it too. But she didn’t say anything, so I guess you can put one point in the not crazy category. I grabbed my cell phone, and surfed over to the local NBC and FOX affiliate websites. (I am so glad I have unlimited data/internet on my phone) I couldn’t find anything, so I ran a google search on the word earthquake. One of the listings was usgs.gov, and on their website it showed that there had been an earthquake way over on the other side of the state.
Now fully awake Josh would say it’s too much of a coincidence that there was an earthquake on the other side of the state, and I woke up from shaking for it to be something else (I don’t believe in coincidences anyway). But 4:30 am Josh said, “Thats too damn far away.” So I closed my window, pulled the blanket back over my head and tried to get to sleep. I rationalized that a loud vehicle had gone by, and my brain had interpreted it as swaying, and so I dreamed it. Before I could get to sleep though, I got a text message from my brother, “Did you feel that earthquake? Kind of scary.”
