Saturday, May 12, 2007

The Art of Insomnia

My husband sleeps with his watch on. What is the purpose of that? Is he worried he'll be late for a dream? Or wake up in the night, and desperately need to know what time it is? He hardly ever wakes up in the middle of the night, and when he does, he goes right back to sleep. Unlike myself. 4:30 in the morning does not seem like an acceptable time to get out of bed. Yet somehow, my mind feels it is the perfect time to redesign my garden (I am using this term very loosely; it's more like a yard with some haphazard plantings). My mind also likes to play in the studio at this hour, although my body will not get out of bed, so I lay awake and THINK about cool things to do with the latest series of pieces...These sometims pan out and most times not. It seems that THINKING about art, and actually doing it are very different things. But I did have some ideas that I want to try today. If I can stay awake...

I wonder what would happen if I DID choose to get out of bed at 4:30 in the morning, and stagger into my studio to actually work instead of think. Is that a good time to work, or does it only SEEM so from the comfort of my comforter?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I loved loved this blog about Insomnia because I am a chronic insomniac. I challenge Ambien to make a drug that will shut my mind off, especially if I'm in the middle of a project. Can't sleep, no problem - get up and process large image files in Photoshop on a Celleron laptop. I mean, you've got all night.

melissa lanitis gregory said...

So you actually DO get up and work; and in the morning, does the stuff still look good to you? Sometimes that idea that looked great at midnight can seem a tad bit silly in the morning...

Anonymous said...

That's the beauty of shooting RAW and using software that supports layers, you can always look at this the next morning and say "I think my creative license has been temporarily revoked"

melissa lanitis gregory said...

That's clever; did you make that up? I was up at 2 am last night with an idea I'm going to try today...the full moon (or almost full) usually guarantees that I'm up in the middle of the night!