I have two large dogs (Great Dane & Black Lab mix and a German Shorthaired Pointer) who are 14 years old. They’re in their “golden years.” What is not so golden is that they wake me up in the middle of the night because they need to go outside to the “bathroom.” I understand that waking up in the night to go to the bathroom is a common physical manifestation of aging experienced by many mammals. The problem is that I’m becoming sleep-deprived. They want to go out at different times. The pointer wakes me up by barking. I get out of bed to take the pointer out, and the Dane-lab just lays there. He won’t move. “Nope, I’m good. Don’t need to go. Go ahead and take the old guy out,” he says. So out I go with the pointer. We come back. I go back to sleep, and sure enough, an hour or two later, the Dane-lab nudges me with his head, waking me up. “I need to go out now,” he says.
I become cranky and tired when I don’t get enough sleep. That’s also normal. What is not normal (so I am told) is to get entire plots and individual scenes for books from dreams that occur in a serial fashion. I need the REM phase of sleep to write. I need the story to continue over a period of days or weeks in my dreams. It’s not happening. I’m still stuck in the prologue of the next book!
I’m working on a solution to this. I’ll keep you posted. . . .
