My first thought upon waking up this morning was one of dismal triumph for having managed to fall asleep at all. Achieving unconsciousness shouldn't count as a personal victory, I think that's aiming a little low even for me. You can think of sleep as a neutral change in state, simply the opposite of being awake. No better or worse, just something you do, a mandate of nature. You can think of it as a blissful situation, the gift of oblivion, a welcome reprieve from the pain or banality of living. Or if you're like me, you can think of it as a condition of reluctant surrender, a giving up of hard-won ground. Sleep is the failure to be awake, a tedious longueurs to which I return over and over against my will, a nightmare of recurring monotony induced by the daily administering of some mysterious biological narcotic. Sleep may be an enigma but what it mainly is is annoying. It's been theorized that sleep is the engine of creativity in some crucial way, and this is probably true, so I just try to think about that when I'm tossing and turning and cursing my churning brain. I need sleep, I tell myself, in order to be able to summon the language I need to complain about it later. As revenge goes that isn't much, but it's all I've got.