do coffee-laden sleepers dream of caffeinated sheep?

yesterday I made the mistake of having not one but two cups of coffee 'round abouts seven in the eve. I somehow managed to sleep at a normal hour, midnightish, but then awoke, heart-pounding mind-racing, at four in the a.m. I've been in this place before, the place where your mind goes round and round and sleep never comes or comes too late, just as the sun is creeping in. This time, instead of drowsily obsessing over nothing, I decided to make use of my sleeplessness and work out ideas for my short story.

Here's the thing: for at least a dozen years I denied all rumors that I liked sci-fi. In fact, I've tried to deny most things that would tie me more tightly to the realm of scientists and engineers, at least in my nonworkrelated life. (and yet I always loved Vonnegut, which is a dangerous sign of liking sci-fi, even though he's not really sci-fi, just like Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet were, in their own words, not a fucking surf band).

So there's my story idea, which ironically came to me in a dream, haha, and it's most definitely in the sci-fi realm and I fully admit and accept that. But it's really about questioning humanity and ethics and the persistence of memory, which is what a lot of stories are about, it's just that sci-fi includes robots or aliens. That's fine. Androids and aliens are a very obvious metaphor and proving ground for the human condition. Robots are the immediate foil for any character type, protagonist or antagonist.

Anyways, I wrote for a while last night and, while I still think the idea is really nice and I'm not just aping Philip K. Dick, I continually prove to myself a certain fact: good prose doth not flow from these fingers. We can't all and some of us don't. Less coffee, more sleeping and riding bikes instead of Isaac Asimov fantasies.