Sleep-writing

All the “how to be a fab author” books and forums advise you to keep a pad and pencil by the bed to write down any nocturnal thoughts that might contribute to your writing.  Of course this gets more tricky as you age: now my eyesight is such that anything written without my reading glasses is completely illegible, and scrabbling around for glasses, pad and pencil tends to wake grumpled rumpled husband, and the subsequent hissing argument about who woke whom drives all clever thoughts from my mind.

But this week I am away for work, and so entirely at liberty to turn on the bedside light and make proper notes.  Sadly, it turns out that a thought that seemed spectacular and insightful at 0436 is simply goobledegook at 0721.  “Sam in storm” it says.  Did I mean a literal storm, or a storm of protest, or a storm of emotion or indecision?  Turns out that my night-time writing mind is even more chaotic than my daytime one.