awake, again

i got maybe 4 hours of sleep last night. i slept from 9 to 12 and at 12 i had to get up and go to the bathroom. after that i lay in bed for about 4 hours, thinking. i don't know what changed in my head during those 3 hours of sleep, as i'd fallen asleep fairly easily at 9, but something did. i have noticed over the last several nights, in which i slept well, that as i relax into sleep i see images on the insides of my lids when i close my eyes. i follow those images and am soon asleep. but after midnight last night when i closed my eyes all i saw was blackness. i thought about my job and what else i might want to do, a train of thought that is beginning to become irritating to me but of which i could not let go. before 12 i had a dream in which people were scaling the glass facade of a barn using hand-held suction cups. then they skated down the sloping top edge of the plate glass to the ground. yellow joined me on the bed for a while, on and off, lying on my chest or my back, depending (of course) on how i was positioned. i might have slept a bit between 4 and 5 this morning. kara is down with a cold, almost completely unable to breathe through her nose, and she got more rest last night than i did.