FU 4am

I have a late start this morning, it is Saturday and I actually slept in- have not done that in ages😴. I have tried really hard to regulate my sleep pattern, I am a person who needs a lot of sleep but would sleep 24/7 if I let myself. So I have a bedtime routine, we go to bed really early around here.  Usually the little and I are asleep by 9 and I get up anywhere between 4-5:30. There is something about 4 am for me. Maybe it’s my witching hour but it is not a time I want to see regularly I always talk about my turbulence and its always on high around that time if I am awake, sometimes I wake up panicking at that time. I have always been a very vivid dreamer, I have always walked and talked in my sleep and my dreams feel very real even when I can’t remember what happened I have the feeling they left. I think part of the reason I started going to bed so early is that I know that more often than not I will wake up at that time and sometimes not fall back to sleep.  Reflecting back, I feel like I can pinpoint where 4 am started for me. I couldn’t tell you the first time I remember waking up at 4 am. I was spending the night at my Uncles, he is my dads brother and he was a pretty hands on uncle… I can’t express how lucky I was to have all the people I had in my childhood. Anyhow, I was staying with my uncle and aunt but I think it was before they were married, I know they didn’t have kids. They lived in a second story apartment and there was a gas station either under it or across the street and the store was robbed or someone was assaulted… I honestly can’t remember now- in my brain it was just a bad guy. Straight across the street from their apartment were huge blackberry bushes and there were police running around, one had a dog….. My aunt and uncle were looking out the window but I was supposed to stay back because it was dangerous but I kept sneaking a peak and at the end once the danger was over they let me watch.  I saw the dogs tail fluffy poking out of the bushes, there was a ton of screaming and the guys clothes were being ripped by the dog. It was scary and exciting at the same time- it was before the tv show cops so I had never seen anything like it before. That night I slept on the couch, I had a hard time sleeping because I kept replaying in my head, I was not scared but I was scared if that makes sense. There was a clock on the VCR and I watched it until 2 something and fell asleep. Right off the bat my dreams were running wild at some point the dream went from rewatching the arrest earlier in the day to me running from the headless horseman…. I rolled over to wake up and look at the clock and my aunt and uncle had a foot stool that looked like a mushroom to me and on top of that foot rest was the headless horseman’s head, I flipped back over so fast all the way to my tummy then I made a hole to peak out and used the blanket to block where the stool was and the VCR read 4:03.  It makes me laugh now to think back on that memory but 4 has always been a repetitive theme in my life… for the most part all the 4’s in my life are good… 4 sisters, 4 kids, birthdates contain 4 but 4 am…. Four in the morning can get lost because it is an asshole that I do my best to avoid! I just realized I am 44 this year, what an interesting new perspective that adds. 🤔