Weird Night

I’ve been reading S.M. Stirling’s “Change” series. I think I just finished the first book in the second series, and have started on the first book of the first series (mainly because my library app has the first, third, and fourth books of the second series. I HATE when that happens!). The basic premise is that “something” happens to shut down all electricity and electrical equipment in the world, and render gunpowder useless. Then, the SCA takes over on the West coast (THERE’s a surprise) and cowboys and indians everywhere else. That’s the VERY basic premise.

Anyway, the first book has to do with what happens immediately after “The Change”–how people cope, survive, and die in droves. I read it for a while last night before bed, and you can imagine the kinds of dreams it prompted! Fascinating ones, for sure. What made it worse was that our power actually went out around 1:30am.

I awoke to the UPS on the computer beeping. While Sweetie went to turn it off, I called the power company to report the outage. I was apparently the first, because I got a real human, and not a recorded update. We got back to sleep, and I woke up a little when Sweetie left for work around 5:30. The power was still out then, so I called the power company again for an update. Apparently, only 15 customers were out of power due to an “equipment failure” and the estimated time of repair was going to be 4:51am (how they knew it wasn’t going to be 4:50 or 4:52, I’ll never know–but it wasn’t on by 5:35 when I called, so they were wrong, anyway).

I went back to sleep, having more odd dreams about the end of the industrial/civilized world. Around 6, my alarm went off. Still no power. Then I heard the UPS beep to life (well, it was still shut down, but I’m pretty sure I heard it announce that the power was back on) around 6:30. I decided to continue sleeping, since water wasn’t going to be hot enough for a shower right away. STILL more weird dreams.

So, waking up to a world that’s still intact, physically and civilly, was kind of disconcerting this morning.

I should probably read something “normal” before bed from now on. 🙂