I awoke to some light creeping through the windows, late for me since I generally awake when it’s dark. My watch was charging, so I didn’t know the time, but it was time for coffee. I made a pot as my mind began catching up, thinking of the dream I just had.

The dream had stuck with me. I played through what I remembered. It had felt like I needed to accomplish many things in my dream. It was an old house I grew up in, and I was alone and was creating the normal mental checklist of things I had to accomplish for that day.

It seemed some things had piled up. The grass needed to be cut, there was writing to be done, and I left the front of the house to survey things. It ends up that somehow half of the grass had been cut, but I saw a pipe that was leaking and turned that off and headed to the back of the house so I could get the tools to repair that and, for some reason, a saw and a hammer.

The back door was locked, so I went back to the front door and on the way there I saw some other things that needed to be done, and by the time I got to the front of the house I had a whole bunch of new things to do, so I headed back to the back door again.

The back door was still locked. I needed to get the key to open it.

Again, I went to the front of the house, climbing those 2 flights of stairs, and went inside to the back of the house and got the keys, then walked back around to the back of the house. I’d picked up the wrong keys, so I went back to the front of the house, went inside, got the right keys, verified the keys – I have little ways of knowing which keys are which on the rings – and went back outside through the front to the back door.

It was then that I awoke, and as I sipped my first cup of coffee, I noted that at no point in the dream did I just unlock the back door from within the house, that I kept making the trek back and forth without doing that, and in doing things that way I got less done. I shook my head, heading outside to sip my coffee with the morning sunrise, but when I did, the sun was in the wrong place.

I had taken a nap. It was evening though it felt like morning to me, and I had not gotten some writing done that I wanted to because I had been dreaming about walking back and forth to a locked door that I could have unlocked in moments without wasting time. Habits, it seems, and not the sort nuns wear.

Just like I had made the coffee out of habit. Just like I had went outside out of habit.

In doing so, I’d misplaced the closest star to a place that I could still see.

Ahh, the tyranny of Time had visited once again.