When the cat starts gas-lighting you

I’ve been having time issues lately. Little slipknots in an otherwise linear day, tiny burps that are just enough to make me question my consciousness if not my actual sanity.

I do wonder if sometimes the butter is slipping off the old noodle, but I can usually find an explanation I can live with.

When the clocks went back in the fall, Christopher had already moved out. He is the only one tall enough to reach the giant clock in the kitchen, so it has defiantly been declaring the wrong time ever since. At Christmas, his Aunt Roz grabbed him and made him change it. I was not aware of this and continued to add an hour to the time when I saw it. This produced some problems.

I have owned many cats, but the current crop includes a pair of kittens so boisterous and badly behaved we call them instead something that rhymes with kittens. Just a year old, they show no signs of slowing down. Cairo, the girl, likes to sit on my bedside table. She also likes to hit the buttons on my clock radio.

One morning my alarm didn’t go off. She had changed the time on the alarm. Other days I’ve heard music wailing away from my room midday; she’s hit the but- ton that plays music for an hour before you sleep. She has turned the volume button way up. She has turned it way down. I know it is her because she sits beside it staring at me, wondering when she will get her reward for mastering electronics at such a young age.

I already have sleep issues that would rival the greats, like Van Gogh, Abraham Lincoln, and my Dad. If you’re a normal person and you miss a night of sleep, you’ll be a groggy bear. If you’re bipolar and you mess with sleep patterns, it’s like jumping into a volcano.

I balance the beast with a predictable life and a tiny white pill every night. Sometimes that doesn’t work, especially since the arrival of the rhymes-with-kittens. Where my father would roam around the house at 3 a.m. and peer out the blinds looking for loiterers and foul play, I burrow into my bed and read while the cats determine if I can be tricked into feeding them.

The other day I thought lying down for an hour with a book would help offset back-to-back bad nights. I never, ever fall asleep in the day so I figured it couldn’t hurt. I promptly fell asleep, but didn’t know it. I dreamt that I’d broken my bedside lamp and had gone online to find a new one; I dreamt I’d made dinner; I dreamt I folded laundry.

I’m not half that industrious when I’m awake. I also dreamt I’d managed to get eight winter tires into the trunk of an Elantra, which tells you right there I should have known I was dreaming.

When I woke up and figured out I’d been asleep, I spent the rest of the day being grateful my lamp wasn’t broken, making the dinner that hadn’t magically appeared, and folding laundry. No tires were required to be crammed into any trunks.

I went up to bed that night determined to sleep through. I made the bed so I could get in it (don’t ask), and hauled open my laptop. Then I looked at my clock and realized it was already after 11. Cursing a day that had managed to get away from me, I popped a sleeping pill, catching a glance of the computer screen as I shut it down: 9 p.m.

There’s nothing wrong with my noodle; my cat just plays roulette with my clock.