I’m not sure if it has yet occurred to my brain that my body is sleep deprived.

Here is the evidence: every morning, I wake up when it’s still very dark outside. I’m wide awake. I think it’s time to get up and get going. I turn on the light. Then I look at the clock.

It’s 2 A.M. I’ve only been asleep for less than two hours. I then do what comes most naturally to a sleeper thus frustrated: I turn off the light, roll over, and go back to sleep.

Further evidence that my brain is trying to kill me through sleep deprivation: occasionally—and by “occasionally,” I mean “only on the days when I get a chance to sleep in past 5:30”—my brain will wake me up exactly one hour before my alarm was supposed to go off. There’s no noise that could have caused me to wake up. No sudden movements, no opened or slammed doors. My brain just decides that 3 hours and thirty minutes is enough.

My brain is wrong. Very wrong.

What’s even more interesting is when my brain wakes me up an hour earlier than necessary, and then proceeds to keep me awake by giving me a lovely adrenaline kick. You see, I cannot make myself fall asleep in a limited time frame. If I know that I only have one hour to sleep—then I won’t sleep. I will be concentrating so hard on trying to get myself to sleep that it just won’t happen. I’m not the sort who relaxes easily. So the harder I try, the less likely it is that I will sleep. If I wake up an hour before I need to get up, I’m awake. End of story.

But every once in a while, if I am very fortunate, I will wake up an hour early and still fall back to sleep. What happens is I can resign myself to my fate and just lie there with my eyes closed, fully believing that I will not be able to fall asleep.

Then my alarm goes off, and I wake up from some bizarre dream where I’m visiting Timbuktu with a friend and the ac in our hotel room malfunctions so we decide to use our angel wings and fly out to someplace cooler. Where there are dreams, there must have been sleep. Clearly I slept, even if I feel no more rested than I did before.

Frankly, I wish my brain would just get a clue that the body that houses it is tired and needs a solid several hours of sleep to function properly. And maybe, just maybe, if my brain would let itself rest, I could crank out those projects that are due this week.

Just maybe.