Roald Dahl once wrote a book called The BFG, about a young girl who is kidnapped by a large giant and whisked away to another dimension where she finds numerous wonders and terrors awaiting her. She becomes privy to another world that exists outside of the time and space she had previously thought to be so solid, and nothing is ever quite the same again.

How did this happen? She couldn't sleep. Something kept her well awake into the Witching Hour, that period of time that no waking human is supposed to see, when all of the dark things come out to play...

After midnight the juice flows. That's just how it works for certain people. Ask me to get up before noon with a smile on my face and the ability function in a relatively normal and courteous manner, and you know where you can stuff it. But cop out on the party or the killer conversation before two in the morning, and you won't hear the end of it.

Yeah, I'm one of those people. I have no patience for early risers. I'll never understand them. From the age of about twelve on, the diurnal cycle has never made any sense to me, just as the nocturnal is completely unfathomable to the devoted early riser.

However, there is no social stigma attached to being an early riser. All my life, I've heard the question, "How can you stand wasting your day like that?" My eternal reply: "Wasting? I'm not wasting anything, I'm SLEEPING!"

Now don't get me wrong, I've worked my fair share of day jobs - I know what it's like. But inevitably, without fail, the old cycle re-asserts itself the moment it gets the chance - weekends, holidays, or the ever-impending quit/move/end of season. Once that happens, it's right back into it. That's what finds me writing this at quater to four on a Monday morning. When I was younger I had a lot of guilt over this. Though I was reluctant to admit it, it's kind of hard not to when you find yourself so naturally pitted against something the entire waking world takes for granted. I tried, time and again, to get onto a daylight schedule.

Going to bed early didn't work - I would just lie there forever, waiting. (Sheep, my ass.) Forcing myself to get up early every day never worked. I would inevitably catch a second wind after 10 O'clock every night and be up till two or three. This would continue until I was a complete zombie, greatly increasing the already excruciating act of rising before my body was ready. The only thing that ever came close was pulling an all nighter, staying up right through the next day and managing to pass out by six or seven in the evening. But that was just insane. It's that whole Seinfeld bit: Day Guy vs Night Guy. Day guy can NEVER win.

Anyway, the point I'm driving at here is simply that people come with all kinds of various idiosyncrasies that they'll never be able to do anything about. These things are hard-wired into us somehow, and railing against them forever, for whatever reason, is simply pointless.

Hemingway, Bukowski, Kafka, all were nocturnal writers, and though they were generally miserable - Kafka especially, being more of an insomniac than nocturnal - people still read them today. They found something hidden in the Witching Hour, something the majority of people out there will only ever catch in dreams.

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