Every now and then a person comes across an issue of such profound significance that it blows his mind. He finds himself faced with a concept so perplexing that it throws into turmoil everything he has ever accepted at face value.

Commonly held beliefs are brought into question. Conflicting ideas torment his basic understanding of life. In his confusion, he tumbles into a philosophical vortex that leaves him completely exhausted and without answers.

When that happens, the only thing left for him to do is to take it to the people.

Good morning people. I need your counsel.

My mental anguish all began in a conversation with Marion at 3:00, halfway through the night. I had gotten up to take care of a bladder condition. I was groggy as I made my way back to the bed. As I shuffled my feet over the carpet, I kept telling myself not to wake up.

“You’re asleep,” I kept repeating.

The struggle in any middle-of-the-night excursion is to maintain a state of sleep sufficient to the purpose of returning to bed without disrupting one’s slumber. My brain cells were numb, and I wanted to keep them that way.

Just as my head hit the pillow, Marion propped up on one elbow and said, “Good morning.”

As soon as she spoke, I knew that she was wide awake. Her tone was one that most people would reserve for a greeting over coffee and eggs; you know, after the sun is up. It was cheerful. Her voice was crisp and attentive.

I could tell that she was feeling conversational. At the very least, I knew that I owed her a response.

I cannot be exactly sure of what I said. I was completely disoriented. To the best of my recollection, I managed to mumble a few words that sounded like a response.

“Hey there. It’s not morning. It’s the middle of the night.”

In retrospect, I should have taken a less confrontational approach. A simple “good morning” might have allowed me to hunker down in my pillow without over-stimulating my brain.

“It is, too, morning,” she said.

Long pause.

I cannot possibly recreate the entirety of the conversation that grew out of this unassuming exchange. One of us wide-awake and the other desperate for sleep. But let me just say that for the next hour and a half we attempted to dissect the finer points of distinction between the concepts of morning and night.

I could be wrong, but I reckon that most of us have a pretty clear understanding of night and day. In my world, when the sun comes up, it’s morning. When the sun goes down, it’s night. Light and dark are the two metrics I use most often to determine in which sphere I am currently living.

But, alas, I discovered during this invigorating conversation that my simpleton’s mind had not taken into account the complexity of the issue. In order to determine whether it is morning or night, one must not only consider the astronomical movements of the heavenly bodies that divide the light from the dark, but he must also consider the age-old movements of his Timex.

“Anything after midnight is morning,” she says.

Technically, she is right, of course. But in my mind, it was still the middle of the night.

Let’s say that a man has a bad case of insomnia. He wakes up at 3am and is restless for the remainder of the local period of darkness. He finally gets up after 6am, grabs his coffee, and says to his wife, “Boy, I didn’t sleep very well last night.”

I know what he means. Personally, I think we all know what he means. But apparently, there is a flaw in his distinction between night and morning that needs some work.

First of all, I have a great deal of sympathy for this fella being awakened at 3am. But more importantly, I now know that his reference to “last night” is misleading. Last night he had a bowl of ice cream at 10pm. Last night he brushed his teeth at 11pm and went to bed. His trouble sleeping in the wee hours before sunrise did not, in fact, occur “last night” but rather “this morning.”

“When my alarm goes off at 5am, it’s still dark outside.”

Marion says this very matter-of-factly, like maybe I don’t know it’s dark at 5am. And though it’s pitch dark now, I can tell that her eyebrows are lifted, and she’s got the head-shimmy thing going on because she feels like she’s got me in a head lock.

“You tell me, if I get up at 5am, am I getting up last night or this morning?”

“Yes,” I answer.

This is not a satisfactory answer. I know that. Even so, by now I am wide awake and ready to defend my honor.

We dove deep into the chasm. There was much banter and ridiculous laughter in the middle of the night. Excuse me, in the middle of the morning.

She tried to rationalize her position. “It turned dark when Jesus died, and that was in the middle of the day. Just because it gets dark doesn’t mean it has to be night.”

“That was a miraculous interruption of the natural order, but under normal conditions, when it gets dark it is actually night for as long as it is dark.”

“No. As long as it’s dark, it’s nighttime,” she says. “The first part of yesterday’s nighttime was last night, and the other half of the nighttime belongs to today and we call it morning.”

“Look, if I got up at 1am to get a glass of water, I would say at breakfast the next morning that I got up last night for a drink of water.”

“And you’d be wrong.”

According to one theory, morning is the longest period of the day. Morning starts at midnight and prods along all the way to noon. Once the clock strikes 12pm, it is afternoon, followed by evening, and finally night comes. However, it seems that the lines between afternoon, evening, and night are somewhat blurred.

I’d say that the afternoon lasts up until supper, but then we call it the evening meal. If friends come over to the house to visit after supper and stay until it gets dark, did they visit last evening or last night? I guess it depends on whether they left right at dark or long after dark.

My point is this, most of our references to a general time of day are somewhat loose and are often understood in a variety of ways. I say, “last night” and you say, “this morning.” The latter may be more technically correct in the case of my 3am excursion, while the former is perfectly understood as an acceptable expression of time.

If something happens while I’m asleep in the dark, as far as I’m concerned, it happened last night. But since I was awake at 3am, I am willing to concede that we had our conversation this morning.

Our differences unsettled, I finally closed my eyes and said, “Goodnight.”

“It’s morning,” she said.

I slept well anyway.