Sleeping too much is bad for your brain

In honor of Easter, I made a fresh strawberry pie and a spinach/cream cheese quiche (had to use some of those three dozen egg innards from the church activity!) I also made my favorite bunny cookies, which were a big hit - as they always are.

By 8 p.m. I was tired and nothing was on TV, so I curled up in bed with my book about Inuit culture and was a sleep before 9 p.m. Perfect, since I planned to get up early for the gym. Except that by the time the alarm went off, I'd already crossed into the too-much-sleep threshold. At that point, waking up is not an option.

I set the alarm forward another hour and fell fitfully into an unsettling dream: I was living in a lifeboat on a pirate ship where I seemed to be perpetually standing in line at the ship's cafeteria to fill my plate with moose meat, seal oil and berries.

The Eskimo food makes sense, given the book I'm reading. And surely I'm not the only one to have noticed that NPR might as well have stood for National Pirate Radio with all its coverage of the stand-off in Africa last week.

But if my subconscious was pulling dream material from the flotsam in my brain, I would have much preferred bunnies, strawberries and the sweet newborn I rocked to sleep at a friend's house during Easter dinner.