Woke up about twice an hour, starting around 5:30 AM. Each time, I woke from a dream about a different cafe, where I'd been drinking coffee and reading a newspaper, or talking with friends. Nothing odd at all, just little scenes from coffee shop hangouts. We'd drink coffee and read and chat and then I'd wake up and think, no wonder I'm having such a rough night's sleep, I'm drinking all this coffee! And then I'd toss and turn and doze back off and find myself at a different coffee house with different people and a different book or newspaper.
Then the alarm went off and I started snoozing it and the dream snippets switched from coffee house indolence to hard military life. I was in some sort of basic training and we started with a group of a couple dozen; but each time the alarm would go off there would be some kind of horrible test and I'd pass, but one or two more members of the group would have been dropped. Our numbers dwindled as we approached graduation. I don't remember what we were training to do but it was something horrible, and we were all getting crazier and crazier. I remember one of the guys in the group doing nitrous while the sarge was not around; he was using some sort of cracker that would somehow directly discharge into a balloon that he'd inhaled down into his lungs or something. Our training had made us so hardcore that we could pretty much inhale nitrous straight from the cannister, fuck the sub-zero temperature. We had knife marks on our bodies that we'd made ourselves to keep track of time; I could look at my arm and see how many times I'd snoozed the alarm. We slept, for a while, in a twenty foot square concrete room with one window in the roof that let daylight in; the whole place was dripping with algaed water. We were not in prison; this was our job. And occasionally the alarm would go off and there would be terror and gunfire and we'd have to do horrible things to demonstrate that we were learning our lessons well, and then the alarm would be snoozed and I'd settle back down and the sarge would come in and drag one or two of the other guys off and there was sometimes some screaming afterwards for a while but it always ended eventually and I was able to settle back down in my little dark niche in the wet concrete room. I almost got caught doing the nitrous; sarge was coming in and my head was full of nitrous and I was scrambling around trying to find a hiding place for it while everything rolled around wildly, but I managed to stash it under some burlap bags and get back to my niche and feign coherency when the sarge poked his head in.
The next time the alarm went off, I decided I was getting the hell out, so I woke up enough to flop out of bed, and then pweent called about carpooling so I had no choice but to be awake. No re-enlistment for me.