Often, in the moments between sleeping and waking, ideas become visceral, almost literally. This can include things like 'oh my God, Sarah Palin might be one heartbeat away from leader of the free world' or 'oh my Christ, we really are managing the fuck the one planet we have.' That last one is often accompanied by the 93 million miles between the Earth and sun shrinking so that the heavenly bodies are almost within mental grasp, almost in the same room. There really is a star blasting at us, churning our water and atmosphere.

More recently, there's been a few occasions when it's been more corporeal: yanked back from sleep and plopped into a vast dark room of consciousness, so I can have some stark fact about my physical form klaxoned at me. For some reason, my spine got that treatment (probably because of a bad back); a keen sense of bone and gristle holding my centre line together. More recently (probably after some film or other) my brain decided to get all 'aaargh' at the idea of a bullet going through it. Quite reasonable thing for it to do, one might think. The fact that usually it doesn't says something about our ability to just get on with what the world presents us with. But right then, my brain wasn't having any of it: so, here's a bullet, right? It goes through and me, this person - suddenly I'm goo, I'm all over the place.