When the alarm goes off at 3:30 am I groan in disbelief.  I am not someone who voluntarily wakes up at this hour, and while mid-life changes in body and brain sometimes startle me into half- or three-quarter consciousness in the pre-dawn hours, I can normally will myself back to sleep, at least until the sun cracks the horizon.  In our house on this particular morning, the reason for the blaring alarm and confused dog is a school music trip.  In less than an hour, a couple hundred thirteen-year-old musicians, along with some intrepid teachers and chaperones, will set off into the sunrise for a jam-packed middle school adventure.  My husband and I wisely (we believe) wish to give our budding adolescents an experience of independence – and also avoid a three-day trip to Cleveland with five busloads of pubescent seventh- and eighth-graders.  While grateful for my situation (pending weekend getaway with the hubby while the kids have their own fun), the alarm at this primordial hour still feels unreasonable.  I try to make my voice perky yet soothing as I jolt my squinting, blinking children into the artificial light of day, but my bleary eyes and foggy brain surely give me away. 

Rosie the Dog stares curiously after the flurry of activity has passed.  We’re up, aren’t we?  How about a walk?  Our quiet neighborhood glows with 4 am porchlight and streetlight, and faint periwinkle streaks have begun to paint the eastern sky.  A few homes glow with the lamps of early risers, and a neighbor whose name I do not know walks down his front porch steps to catch an early train.  The treetops are raining down birdsong, and I am a little disconcerted to hear the warbling chatter of day emerging from the shadows of the night. As we trace our familiar route, which somehow seems new in this moment of half-light and birdsong, I breathe a little deeper and wander into the unquiet stillness of a breaking dawn.

This is the witching hour, sometimes described as the time between three and four in the morning when the supernatural takes hold. I have long been a professional witness and participant in this hour, perhaps not to witchcraft or ghosts, but to the outer boundaries of our human existence.  Babies like to arrive at this hour; so do souls trying to escape earthly life, through means both natural and unnatural.  As a medical student it is a badge of honor to be roaming hospital hallways at four in the morning;  by residency you are considered to be a good luck charm if you somehow manage to ward that off.  Full-fledged doctoring in the middle of the night may mean deciphering the murky details of fever or chest pain; talking a student or resident through a complicated hospital admission; or shuffling down a long hallway or empty highway to attend to a laboring mother.   Sometimes a starkly exquisite moment shines through the foggy resignation of those pre-dawn awakenings, like Orion hanging over the hospital like the star of Bethlehem on a bitter winter night. Or seeing the familiar faces of the night nurses, whose superpowers include the ability to avert catastrophe and create community in the cavernous third-shift space of a hospital.  And post-call sunrise is always sublime, best viewed from the upper floors of any given healthcare institution and accompanied by strong coffee and day-old pastries. 

Then there are simply life moments that are best experienced at an unholy hour, unbounded by the norms of sleeping schedules and reason. Big questions are cleared up in the neon glow of a middle-of-the-night truck stop; heavy loads and unsolved  problems feel lighter with the night breeze in our hair.  We end up finding ourselves while lost in midnight conversation with an old friend or a new love.  Something nascent is revealed as an overnight train sighs into the dim platform of a small town station; pettiness drops away from the jet airplane careening over an inky, vast ocean.  We startle from dreams, flirt with monsters, ache with grief, stir with desire. Minds roam and shadows dance; all is formless and forming.

I may not have cheerfully chosen to wander the gray-blue streets of my sleeping city or greet the heathered wisps of this dawning day, but something has cracked open and widened to mystery and possibility and light.  I share this waking hour with meditating monks and anxious insomniacs, street cleaners and day laborers, people keeping vigil with the dying, and others feeding newborns and dreams.  The circles and cycles of our precious humanity are unbroken here.  The earth is spinning a thousand miles an hour on its axis and I am one of an unwitting cast of characters glimpsing the fleeting evidence.  We are witnesses and participants in the witching hour, and it feels supernatural indeed.