Well, I had a dream the other night
You were in a bar in the corner on a chair
Wearing a long white leather coat
Purple glasses and glitter in your hair

-C. Cornell

In that space that you occupy, the inscrutable period of time between full-on sleep and first sip of coffee wakefulness, there is a strange but wonderful experience where things don’t make complete sense and you fail to realize that nonsense always rides roughshod over the very first moments of the day.

It’s that period where your head is still on the pillow, and you haven’t committed to opening your eyes. Perhaps you are emerging from a twisting dream of Seussian proportions. A Floating White House is moored a few hundred yards away. You’re seated at a dinner table with Lamborghinis waiting out front as you daintily pull apart bread with leaf-like sections that could very well be some poisonous ground cover picked in the darkest regions of an alpine forest. But it’s good so you continue eating, seemingly unfazed by the dimensions of it all. For now, this is normal.

Of course in normal life, matinal sequences rarely unfold where you can linger in this kind of tempo. Instead, you’re typically forcing your body upright like some reverse mouse trap, the alarm on your phone going off as you simultaneously try to mash it silent while navigating the first tender steps of the day. You fall over in slow-motion comedy-style after falsely threading both legs through the same hole of your running shorts. Where am I? Why is it so hard to unseal this bag of coffee beans and score a jolt of electricity for my morning blast-off?

I can see the allure in wanting to remain in bed on weekends when nothing is programmed for the day. No work, no self-inflicted appointments to meet. It allows for possibilities that are an overhang of what you inhabited in the dream world. The residual images are mixed with a lucid knowledge that you are enthusiastically open to a day of question marks. If you play your cards right, you could wind up just about anywhere.

Ninety percent of life is made up of us moving through our respective coal mines, day in and day out. Most of the time I don’t feel as though my brain has gotten its shit together before I am actually sitting on a train that is hopefully transporting me to the exact spot where I am expected. We humans both desire for our brains to function so that we don’t risk a public gaffe or silly error, while at the same time we immediately set to scanning our phones or imagination in order to be taken somewhere that is decidedly more colorful or inspired.

It’s the 10 percent of life— be time spent while on holiday or in a simple change of work atmosphere— these are the moments that I find most satisfying. Sometimes I feel as though we humans seek adventure in unusual places because it’s the only way to  replicate the experiences our brains encounter in the very first moments of wakefulness.

Holidays are cultivated from dark and rain splattered sacrifice that demands many early mornings and way too much linear thinking. It’s not glamorous at all, and in my case I find that by the time the sun has made its glorious daily premiere, I’ve missed it because I’m already tapping away at a computer. My life is spent mostly in the 90 percent. I’ve never seen the inside of a Lamborghini or a presidential yacht— but I have tasted that crazy-looking and decidedly nonpoisonous black bread. It is fantastic when served with a bit of salt-speckled butter.

Often I fear that I’m coming off as an ostentatious a-hole by posting photos of things that I find both fantastic and confusing. My life as I know it sends me to all kinds of places that, while I might not talk about it, do necessitate a hefty degree of stress and mental calisthenics. It can be exhausting, but I think I am one of those people who have always tended to find more interest in the nonsensical— and luckily for me I get to come across a lot of that in my day to day routines.