I couldn’t sleep last night. I stayed in bed tossing and turning until about 3 a.m., then I gave up and got out of bed. By about 7:30 a.m. I was feeling surreal, after nearly 24 hours without sleep. The sleepiness hit me like a bag of bricks, so I went back to bed. I was almost asleep, when I smelled something burning. More specifically, I smelled a house burning. If you’ve ever been around a burning house, or even one that burned down a year ago, you’ll know that it doesn’t smell like anything else that may be burned. It has a very distinctive smell, just like rubber burning has a distinctive smell. If you’ve ever lost an entire house due to fire, like I have, it’s a smell you’ll never forget. So when I smelled it, I wasn’t sure if I was having some sort of strange dream-state smell-memory, or if someones house was really burning. Then I heard the sirens. Man. Such a sense of dread came over me! I had to fight back the tears after being forced to remember. I looked out the window but didn’t see anything except a haze in the distance. I learned later today that the building that was burning was a small apartment building a few blocks away. Thank God it was old and abandoned and nobody was in it. I went back to sleep eventually, and woke up about 11:30 a.m., but I had a bad feeling, and the rest of my day has been shit.