Was It A Dream, Or Did I See It Plain

The season and the weather collaborated this morning on a very nice ride to school. When I made the big turn to the left and started pedaling toward the east, the sky was trying to commit to the new day. The very deep purple started to give way to reds and then orange, with spikes of light shooting up into the darkness, prying the lid off of the night.
When I woke up, it was dark. That's often the case around my house. It is also often the case that the first person up in my house is me. It is also quite often the case that that person is wandering around in the dark. This is about morning breaking, and I'm often the one responsible for it.
It's odd to me that this comes with the territory of being the one in the house who sleeps the least. When I miss sleep, I don't tend to make it up. The clock that tells me that it's time to roll out of bed is very insistent. As if I were worried about missing something. Even on the weekends, I feel the pull of dawn and my eyes squint out into what awaits me: that sunrise, another day at work, rain-soaked streets, neighborhood cats crawling back from a night's adventure, the occasional rooster crowing. Sights and sounds available to me because I put myself out in the glorious transition that is the beginning of the day.
This is endlessly fascinating to me, since I seem to run into this collision of night and day all the time. It makes me think of the aboriginal concept of "dream time." Maybe all this time I've been bumping into things by the dawn's early light, I've actually been asleep. This might explain the magnificent display I saw the other day in the eastern sky. Asleep or awake, it was totally worth it.