Xander....something?

I once heard a great story about Joanne Woodward. I'm sure it's apocryphal, and I'm sure the names change depending on who you hear the story from. It goes like this: Joanne Woodward thought she had solved all the problems of the world, since she kept having a dream that she solved all the problems of the world. Sadly, when she woke up, she couldn't remember the dream. She even tried orange juice, which supposedly can help you remember your dreams, but to no avail. Someone suggested that she put a pad of paper near her bed to write down what she was thinking, so that night she had the dream, wrote down the idea, and then went back to an assured sleep. When she woke up in the morning, she saw she had written "cottage cheese".

Insert game show "nice try" sound here.

I bring this up because I have pretty active dreams. And by pretty active I mean constant. And sometimes, as happened last night, I'll wake up composing something in my head. Usually, as it's 2, or 4 or some random time, I don't want to to turn on the light and write it down. On certain nights, I actually go pretty deeply into it, waking myself up, and convincing myself I'll remember it in the morning. I never do.

Last night, I woke up with a rhymed couplet in my head, something about a boy named Xander. Since it kept repeating, I woke up, grabbed a pen and paper and started to write on an open page in the dark. At the exact moment I was thinking perhaps this was not the brightest idea since I didn't really know if the page was blank or even I would be able to read my writing, I dropped the pen on the floor. Well, drat. I turned on the light, and managed to stay in bed while wrangling around the floor for my pen. Restful. I found out that the line I was writing was not on a blank page after all, but luckily in the top margin and actually legible - impressive. I turned to a blank page, wrote down the couplet, and then went back to sleep, stopping myself from going further into the idea. I'm getting over a cold. I need the sleep.

Lo and behold, I could not remember it this morning, except for Xander...something. Hopefully when I look at it, it will jog my memory. It won't save the world, but at least there's a record.