Dream Attitude

Just nine hours earlier, Simmy had been reading 'Americans in Paris...', before bedtime.
She heard a skirmish outside with the neighborhood dogs... lots of barking. She had ignored it and kept reading. It was the outdoor doggie doo-doo ritual that each neighbour performs before nightfall to ensure that doggie don't do anything nasty in the house at night.
Barely twenty minutes after falling asleep... Simmy awakened from a bad dream... she got up and went to look out the front window. The wind had picked up and there was a van paused at the end of the street... that didn't need to be there.
Moving the drapes, deliberately, Simmy made sure said van would know that the neighborhood watch was on duty. Not five seconds later, the van drove away... 'Hmm, don't think they belong in the neighborhood,' Simmy mumbled.
The dream had been a bad weather one and she looked to see if their tree was still standing upright on the front yard. It was! She went back to bed but it took a while to get back to sleep.
At 5 a.m. Sam got up and half an hour later, so did Simmy.
"I woke up at 3 a.m. with very unsettled feelings," Sam said.
"I guess that was your watch. I was up shortly after we went to bed. Bad weather dream."
After Sam went to work, Simmy tried to set up the photo op for the day. One of the julep cups full of roses got bumped off the fireplace mantel spraying water droplets all over the micro fiber sofa.
The 'attitude sign,' she was taking a picture of, arched its eyebrow as if to say, 'How are you going to handle it?'

With unhurried aplomb she gathered the roses and plopped them on the mantel without the vase. Then she dotted the 'i' by balancing the polyhedron star in between the mocking eyebrows... 'C'est la guerre,' as Bullard says on page 59.
The war to master self gets up early and stays up late... all in the battle to develop a dream attitude.