The Crack of Dawn

All this adventuring I do is very tiring, especially when it gets me out of bed at ungodly hours. You see, I’m an inveterate sleepwalker, and lots of my adventures happen at night.

The other night I happened to wake up with my head sticking out of the bedroom window. I haven’t the faintest idea why my head was sticking out of the window, because my short-term memory switches off as soon as I awake. But I was greeted by a wondrous sight.

It was daybreak, and my head was turned facing the rising sun. As it rose, the sun passed behind the peak of a small mountain and then came into view again on the other side. I’d never noticed this “double dawn” phenomenon before, but then I’d never had my head trapped under a fallen sash window before.

Anyway, as soon as I managed to extricate myself, it occurred to me that I’d never actually witnessed the absolute crack of dawn. I realised that my bedroom window might be the ideal vantage point, provided I was awake a little earlier the next morning with my head turned in exactly the same position as before.

Well, I spent an exciting day making preparations for the crack of dawn. There were lots of logistics to sort out, including thinking up a plan that would ensure my presence at the window at exactly the right time in the morning. The key issue was to ensure I would not be somewhere else - sleepwalking.

I came up with an ingenious idea. I wound up my alarm clock, set it to the right time, and strapped it to my wrist. Then I got a pencil and paper and listed all the places where I had previously woken up after a bout of sleepwalking. I got a local map, and carefully drew a circle around each of these places. This enabled me to identify the location that was furthest from my home, which happened to be the police station. Remarkably, and for reasons that are beyond me, I seem to wake up there quite frequently.

So off I went, to the police station, where I took a careful note of the time on my alarm clock, and then walked back home. On my return to my bedroom, I again noted the time on my alarm clock. I then set the alarm to ring at sunrise minus the elapsed time taken by my walk.

I reasoned that this would ensure my arrival back at my window in good time for the crack of dawn the following morning. I had even taken the precaution of wearing dark sunglasses on my trial walk back from the police station, to simulate the real night-time conditions that I was likely to encounter.

Well, to cut a long story short, the plan, which had left nothing to chance, worked brilliantly well. I can proudly say I was there. I actually witnessed the crack of dawn. And there were two cracks, not one.

I had propped up the sash window to prevent any further accident, and was knelt down in position at the very moment when the sun appeared. And as it appeared, I rose up in excitement, and heard the two cracks of dawn.

And would you believe it? One crack came from my left knee, and the other from my right. But my girlfriend, who always begs to differ, insists it was my head cracking against the bottom of the open sash window that woke her up.

Ho-hum. It is difficult for me to reason with her, because she says I was comatose at that precise instant in time.
:-)