I've mentioned dreams before on this page, but for the first time in a long time, I had a dream of such vividness and emotion that it woke me up.
I've woken up with fright before (attackers made entirely of worms) and with happiness (balloon trips) and even with anger (someone hurting our cats) , but this was the first time I awoke with an overwhelming degree of sadness. The dream itself was unremarkable - I had in my hands a collection of coffee beans, and was frustrated by the challenge of turning them into coffee. I didn't know how, and I awoke feeling very sad and melancholy that I had failed.
I don't drink coffee (I prefer tea and cola), but I lay there, working over in my mind all the ways to prepare coffee. I remember the big red coffee-grinders at the A&P stores and my parent's old percolator with its steel basket and the drip machine we keep in the house for guests and the existence of freeze-dried coffee crystals and espresso machines. But the sadness remained, a melancholia that kept me awake for about a half hour before I finally surrendered to Morpheus and burrowed into sleep again.
Strange. More later,