So you wake up from a bad dream that you're in a bad Fred Thompson movie (or as I like to call it - a Fred Thompson movie) where he's playing Vice President Cheney.

You're the pimply kid who just got Vonage and intercepts a message that was supposed to have been double mega-super secret. The veep has a little problem. Congress is on the verge of evicting him from his residence slash lair and finding out what all that dynamiting was about.

Cheney has to come up with an evil plan (or as he calls it: a plan) quickly. "Hello, Adnan? Can you find me three or four Central Casting Manchurian Candidate types with flight training? That's right. Right into Naval Observatory Hill  Just give me a heads-up so I can take the important stuff to the undisclosed location we've code named 'regard as secret-land.' Give my regards to Perle, Wolfowitz and the prince."

So you wake up from that with an intense "whew" you never knew until you got on the melatonin to help with the insomnia that staying abreast of actual current events has produced. You make a pot of shade-grown Nicaraguan, and go to the Washington Post website.

On day one of a four-parter about said veep (band name alert), you read "His general counsel has asserted that 'the vice presidency is a unique office that is neither a part of the executive branch nor a part of the legislative branch,' and is therefore exempt from rules governing either. Cheney is refusing to observe an executive order on the handling of national security secrets, and he proposed to abolish a federal office that insisted on auditing his compliance."

On day two, referring to as yet unproposed torture (er, technique) legislation, you read "...the vice president stands by the view that Bush need not honor any of the new judicial and legislative restrictions. His lawyer, they said, has recently restated Cheney's argument that when courts and Congress 'purport to' limit the commander in chief's warmaking authority, he has the constitutional prerogative to disregard them."

Monday night, it all makes the lead story on the Daily Show. Man-sized safes and all.

The next installment shows Cheney's role as gatekeeper to the president.

Do you recall how candidate Bush's shortcomings on policy and issues were to be ameliorated by a crack cabinet surrounding him? True, if by cabinet you meant Dick Cheney and if by advice you meant Machiavellian and biased, as Tuesday's installment more than intimates.

"So Greenspan sent Cheney a study by one of the central bank's senior economists showing that big deficits lead to higher long-term interest rates, according to a person with firsthand knowledge. Higher rates, Greenspan believed, would wipe out any short-term benefit from a tax cut. In subsequent meetings with the Fed chief, Cheney never took issue with the study.

"What Greenspan did not know was that, behind the scenes, the vice president took steps to undermine an argument that could threaten the big tax cut he favored. (Cesar) Conda, the vice president's aide, said Cheney asked him to critique the study. Conda attached his own memo arguing that the Fed's analytical model was flawed. He said 'it wasn't my job to know' what Cheney did with the paperwork, but noted that Greenspan's study did not gain traction inside the White House."

Wednesday morning, there's one more face full of buckshot:  the invisible hand of Cheney "leaving no tracks" while circumventing endangered species laws and pollution equipment mandates for plant upgrades.

One Cheney workaround, the one which Christine Todd Whitman now claims was the real reason for her departure, redefined obvious major improvements as routine maintenance so companies could squeak by without spending extra millions. "A federal appeals court has since found that the rule change violated the Clean Air Act. In their ruling, the judges said that the administration had redefined the law in a way that could be valid 'only in a Humpty-Dumpty world.'"

That should make one bloody happy.

So Wednesday night you contemplate sleep, knowing that public awareness has been greatly served by Jo Becker, Barton Gellman and those other reporters. Only the ideologue could fault the work. Perhaps it and more like it could keep the insomnia at bay.

But to melatonin or not to melatonin: that is the question. Surely melatonin dreams are better than a slim chance to sleep, perchance to dream. Anyway, what is there to worry about? You already know Fred Thompson's range. He couldn't do this administration justice.

"...the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes...
Did you fart Ellie-Sue?"

Sweet dreams.