I live in a third floor one-room studio apartment with a window whose view is the apartment building opposite across a tiny alley. I never get direct sunlight; sometimes an oblique sunlight early in the morning when the sun is rising. I'm rarely fully awake at that time but catch it during insomnia.

Sounds coming out of other apartments are reflected in the alley and I can often hear activity in other apartments. Mostly conversations, sometimes arguments, that I can't understand or the sound of cooking and the attendant fragrance.

It's mostly non-intrusive, except for one apartment that I can't locate where some kid is having a horrible childhood. I've lived here for over six years and the child was born in that time. I remember hearing the infant cries. There may be a second infant by now.

But the first infant has grown somewhat, enough to have his disturbed, battleaxe of a grandmother, I'm guessing, hollering at him in a banshee screech whenever she perceives he's done something wrong. Even when the child starts wailing, she continues screaming at him. It's child abuse as far as I'm concerned, and this woman should be arrested and put into therapy.

As I mentioned, I can't locate the apartment. It might be the one directly above me. I know they have small children. I've seen the stroller, I've picked up tiny slippers that had fallen off in the stairwell and brought them up and put them outside their door.

But even if I could locate the apartment, what am I gonna do? I don't speak the language. And it's controversial whether calling the police is the best course of action, acknowledging the sad state of social services in this regard.

I thought of seeking out public social services which might have informational flyers on domestic violence and child abuse and suggestions on what to do. I've noticed that the main front doors of apartment buildings around here have clear plastic pockets where community notices can be posted.

I thought maybe if I could get informational flyers, I could put them on all the main doors in the area, which at least might put the abusive family on notice that someone notices. But even doing that seems way beyond my means to pursue. I'm still in touch with my last Mandarin teacher and we get together every once in a while. I suppose I'll brainstorm with her when we meet again.

Until then, I decided, if I ever hear abuse happening, I'm going to place my meditation bell right by the window and ring it at intervals in mindfulness fashion for the duration of the screaming and crying.

After 3 mornings of fading in and out sleep with continued crazy, carnival-esque dreams, I should have and did anticipate insomnia; back-end this morning after 3 hours of sleep. On the other hand I could have reverted to normal sleep like I had last week. There are no patterns or predictors what sort of sleep I'll have.

And it's useless to make any connection between insomnia and the fact that I went on a ride yesterday with over 2,700' of climbing total. That's a lot for me these days. The most in a long time, I shouldn't wonder. It did entail, however, freely allowing myself to go down to the granny gear and even the lowest gear and going as slow as I was able. At my age, it's encouraging that when every next section of climbing appeared, I just had at it and tackled it despite being at no impressive strength or speed.

Energy expenditure has nothing to do with insomnia, nor does fatigue. Yesterday was a warm one as days have been getting cooler into autumn. Climbing was hot and when I got home, I used the air con to lower my core temp (air con has been off for several weeks now). My body temperature remained high into the evening and night and it may or may not have contributed to insomnia.

Today was a wreck. Probably because I started drinking even though insomnia. I think there's a window in which insomnia combined with alcohol leads to a mess of a day. If I had managed to lay off for several hours, I may have been fine. Instead I put on a DVD of a movie, "Suzhou River"; an art/foreign film I used to love, but I'm not sure where I stand with film now. I enjoyed watching it, but not with the depth I did when the film first came out. I suspect the same with many films I've bought on DVD over the years.

I drank through the course of watching the film and did manage some zzzz's afterwards. Riding and gym were eliminated as options but I productively got laundry done. Including my sheets, which requires going to a laundromat to dry them before use at night.

Laundromat has come to mean Domino's pizza, which is on the way to the laundromat. Wash the sheets at home, en route to dry them place an order at Domino's, dry sheets, pick up order on the way home. In the U.S., I never ordered from Domino's, but here it's a taste of home. I'm not sure I appreciated it as much slightly sloshed as I would sober.

To recap since my last post, it was definitely a low-grade cold that kept me in all day on Tuesday, too. Sniffling, sneezing, not feeling too bad, but enough to convince me to stay home, although honestly it doesn't take a lot to do that. It's a daily labor to get myself out the door.

On Wednesday I went on a short, 20-mile "recovery/fitness" ride, even though it wasn't that bad of a cold. However, I hadn't eaten anything substantial those two days, so no gas. 20 miles was about all I could handle.

On Thursday I went on a more substantial 35-mile bikeway ride, also not having eaten much on Wednesday. I bonked towards the end and took a short-cut home. My leg muscles were fried.

Then yesterday and today were gym days. Yesterday I probably went too hard on running and felt some aches I shouldn't have, but today I'm feeling my strength and nutrition are normalizing.

Sleep has been good until this morning, but it wasn't insomnia. It was fading in and out, and then came the crazy dreams and the lucid dreaming. There was so much going on in this sequence of dreaming that trying to describe it would just be visual gibberish.

So many details I can't even begin to describe, when apparently a Namie Amuro song came on outside the dream on my CD player, and suddenly there she was in the dream and out of nowhere her background dancers arrive and they dance the song.

Then the next song comes on, a teeny-bopper Taiwanese pop song that I was embarrassed to have liked when I first heard it in 2005. But I've adopted the principle that if I listen to a song and it hooks me and I like it, I'm gonna accept it as a good song (but I accept the descriptive of 'bad song that I inexplicably like'; everyone has those), therefore it's on the CD. Unlike my musical integrity.

I think I may have wondered if that singer was going to show, but then Namie is still there in a different costume and performs this song (I don't remember what either of these performances looked like, just that they happened). When I faded out of sleep, I groggily thought I should've known it was a dream when Namie's costume changed without explanation.

So I thought (still not very clearly) that if I find myself in another dream, I'd try to kick myself into lucid dreaming by telling myself that I'd go out from wherever I was and run down the street and put both hands against a wall. It sounds completely bonkers writing it out now, but it made sense at the time.

I'm not sure I was all that successful. I did go into a dream and I remembered and ran out of wherever I was, but there was no street to run down, just like a lawn on a college campus. But I ran anyway, but then there was this kid running ahead of me and he got to the wall of a building and put both hands against it.

Yea, I think at this point I think my dreaming mind hijacked the lucid attempt and I was just dreaming. But it continues and becomes inception-ish because I was in the dream thinking I was lucid dreaming, and I was supposed to meet someone else who was also lucid dreaming and we had some mission to do.

So I'm at the meeting point but I don't know who it is, but I notice someone who looks suspicious and I tentatively approach, and he makes a tentative response and then decides I'm not the person he's supposed to meet, but then I remember there's a code and I call out the first phrase of the code, of which he's supposed to give me the response, and so we do make contact.

That line of dream doesn't get any more interesting, kind of a bust, and we part ways as I feel my sleep getting lighter, but then going back to where I started in the dream I realized I was on a U.S. college campus! Pizza! And in a few steps I'm in a food area and a pizza counter is right in front of me.

But I'm having trouble reading the options, so the pizza guy hands me a menu but I'm still having trouble reading it. Suddenly a line starts to form behind me, and I hate being the guy who gets to the front of the line (although I was already there) and hasn't decided what to order.

So the pizza guy makes a suggestion and I say, "Yea, that!", and he goes to start preparing the ingredients without ringing me up first. While he's doing that, I reach for my back pocket where I always put my cash these days and realize I only have Taiwanese money. And I realize the only way out of it is to wake up, which I did.

Kind of a quasi-lucid dream.

* a final note about that insidious Taiwanese pop song that no one needs to know: I liked the song in 2005. I didn't get into K-pop until roughly 2010. If someone pressed me to name my favorite K-pop act, it wouldn't be a second Hallyu wave group, but solo singer Lee Jung Hyun who came to prominence during the domestic first Hallyu wave in the mid- to late-90s. It turns out that the Taiwanese song is a re-make of a Lee Jung Hyun song. Bam. (and strangely I think the Taiwanese song is "slightly better" because the hooks are clearer)

My body needs a better means of communication with my brain. Today was an absolute ride or gym day, but neither was happening. Sleep has been alright for the past several days, so no disruption there.

I am a baseball fan, so I did turn on the National League series live after waking up and morning regulars, including sitting. But the communications going on between body and brain regarding getting out for a ride or to the gym afterwards were just ridiculous.

The bottom line being the body has a bit of a cold, sniffle and sneezing, which is a legitimate reason for calling off physical activity, but then my body needs to communicate that clearly to my brain. Not all this waffling through the afternoon about it.

Ultimately I didn't get out at all today. Fine. I was sick. Tomorrow, no excuse. If I'm sick, it's not that bad. Ride or gym or just get out.

I had a flurry of unsettled sleep this past weekend, but last Thursday into Friday I had unequivocal back-end insomnia. It settles my prior mention of insomnia as not being insomnia. Mere unsettled sleep is not insomnia. Insomnia is the switch flipping and nothing happening; unable to sleep, fuhgeddaboudit. Even constant waking up and drifting off into fragile doze is still not insomnia. There is rest still being accomplished.

I finished my most recent recitation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I don't know if it's a new thought, but it affirmed for me that the recitation isn't strict and should be thought about and can be altered to given situations. As I mentioned before, I would think about removing any suggestive negative portions; don't even bring that stuff up. Reading it that way is fine for contemplation, but I'm uneasy about it in directed recitations.

Also, something I noticed is that there are passages that seem out of place. Deep within some description of a bardo phase might be a general descriptive that sounds like it would be much better as an introduction. From a narrative point of view, it would seem logical that the passage was stated earlier. So I might go through my edition of the book and make notes and rearrange passages.

That sort of deconstruction might be influenced by one of my recent reads on the Hebrew Bible (the Christians' so-called "Old Testament"), Richard Elliott Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible? I gather the book is nothing new amongst biblical scholars, and is only one voice in an ongoing scholarly debate about the origins of the Bible.

To me it was fascinating. I know next to nothing about the Hebrew Bible except what is generally known culturally (Christian culture); the names and stories are familiar. I've gone through a phase of fascination about how the New Testament came about, and it's nothing what most Christians believe or are taught.

I don't accept the Christian co-option of the Hebrew Bible and making it their "Old Testament". I find that nonsensical and offensive, given how much anti-Semitism there is and how Christianity rejects Judaism and denies that Jesus was Jewish or disconnects Jesus from his Jewishness. It's the ultimate in cultural appropriation whereby a culture is stolen and claimed as its own and original claims to its own culture denied. If the "Old Testament" is part of the Christian tradition, so is Judaism. Accept it, respect it.

I digress. Anyway, it's a fascinating and compelling read which in its course guided me through the history of Judaism as told in the bible, and although nothing new to people well-read in the subject, was a bit of a breakthrough for me.

I also take it as a sign of human progress when so-believed sacred, ancient texts are challenged. Generations and generations are told and taught a certain work is one thing, but then someone comes along with a critical mind and notices something wrong and asks what's really going on.

None of the critical scholarship on the Hebrew Bible, which began in the 19th century, is definitive, but it seems there's a lively debate going on about the sources of the bible and when it was written and by whom. It's compelling when the evidence suggests who the authors were and what their interests were.