Are you a night owl or are you the early bird? What’s your most productive time of day? When do you do your best work?

I can’t write- because I’m tired.

I can’t write because I’m fresh out of ideas.

I don’t want to write because I’d rather eat pizza and watch Cupcake Wars.

Boy.

When you write that down and look at it, you’d think a writer come come up with better excuses than that.

The problem is I stopped writing and I got a little rusty.

So my excuses got lame.

They were so lame I never said them out loud.

I just did them.

Until the nightmares started.

I was having dreams about being lost in abandoned buildings,  fancy grand hotels and empty streets

The signs on the buildings and street signs were a jumble of letters and numbers- which isn’t a surprise. When I dream I can’t read , everything is a collection of letters I don’t even recognize.

I thought I was looking for a way out of the dream. Maybe I thought I could walk through the right door, go down the right street and I’d be back in my bed safe and sleeping.

I would dream a man- sometimes I talked to him directly. Sometimes he would walk by me in a crowd or I’d saw his face in a picture hanging on a wall.

In the last ghost town dream I had he was walking towards me and as we passed each other he said, ” Needs must as the devil drives.”

I asked what.

He stopped.

” How would you like to come back here every night?”

” It’s daytime.” I looked up into the dream sky- which was blue and the sun was shining.

” You know what I mean. Lost in one place or another every night of your life until the day you die.”

” Lost in my own head?”

” No. Lost in mine.”

” This is my dream.”

He looked around.

I looked around.

” This.Is. My. Dream.” he insisted.

It was true.

That’s why nothing was familiar in these dreams.

I screamed myself awake.

Needs must as the devil drives- no matter how tired I am or how tasty the cupcakes look,  I write every night now before I go to sleep.

And when I dream, they’re my dreams.

For now.