"It's not really about the dishwasher"

You know the dishwasher isn't the point. Something underneath is, and getting to it takes time, and the sofa at midnight is where the two of you finally get past the surface to the real thing. Stopping at half past ten leaves you on the surface.

I agree that it isn't about the dishwasher. The question is whether midnight is where the real thing gets found, and I don't think it is. Look at what happens on the sofa. The dishwasher becomes the listening, and the listening becomes the mother, and the mother becomes the thing from March. That feels like going deeper. It's going wider. Each new subject arrives because the late brain can't hold the last one, and by one in the morning you've got five subjects and no depth on any of them, and the real thing, the one under the dishwasher, has been buried under four other rows.

The real thing is the fourth point from chapter 11, the "I think I was cross because I felt like I'd done everything else that day too", and it's a quiet sentence. It needs the flexible, self-observing part of thinking that Killgore's review said goes first when sleep is short. It's a sentence people say at eight, over coffee, after the reprocessing in chapter 4 has had a night with it. At midnight the same person says "and another thing", because that's the sentence the late brain has.

There's a test you can run on your own list from chapter 1. For each row, what was it about at the start, and what was it about at the end? If the end is a different and larger subject than the start, the row didn't go deep. It drifted, and drifting is what the circuit does when it runs out of the first subject. A row that finds the real thing gets narrower, not wider. It ends on one sentence that both of you recognise, and that ending is available at eight and almost never at one.

The note from chapter 21 does some of this work for you. Writing "dishwasher, and feeling like I do everything" at half past ten, before bed, is often the moment the real thing gets named, because writing one line forces a subject, and the subject is usually nearer the truth than anything said in the two hours the sofa would have taken. You'll wake to the real thing on the side by the kettle. Midnight would have given you the mother.