Well, that was a neat, if frustrating, dream

Last night I dreamed I was meeting a bunch of friends for some sort of high tech convention and movie premiere at this (fictional) amazing exhibition center in Cincinnati. Mom was there, and so was Brooke and her mom (and a saber-toothed tiger that was apparently the family pet), and Brooke's sister-in-law Dorothy and her daughter Allison were there, and my friend Dawn from Malaysia and my friend Roderick from Singapore, and then my friend Hai from California was going to meet us.

The event was huge. We passed through a long hallway lined with high tech toys and geeky crafts we could buy. There were lots of paper art products that were packaged flat but you could unfold and put together into mathematical shapes and pop culture designs. And of course there were plenty of gadgets.

Once we were in the center proper, we saw that a giant cylindrical core ran the length of the building. It was extremely big, such that it was large enough to house several whales, who entertained us with their song as they swam up and down from floor to floor.

We walked around for a long time looking for our seats. I'd bought very good tickets. Finally we found the VIP check-in. It was a white table manned by a few guides and equipped with several videoconference machines, allowing the conference hosts to interact with us as we checked in. Koji Kondo was the one to take my ticket. "It's an honor to meet you, sir!" I told the little screen above the ticket scanner, and he smiled and bowed.

Brooke and her mom got distracted at one point trying to get the saber-toothed tiger to cooperate. It was fixated on an area near the top of the building that looked like a gas station. Meanwhile, Mom and I tried to go to the bathroom, but despite the sheer size of the place, the line was really long.

Finally we made it to a table. I'm not sure if it was the spot I'd reserved for the show or if it was just a waiting area. Regardless, we set all our stuff down, including my expensive camera and a bunch of goodies we'd purchased as we wandered through the exhibition. Then I got a message through the fancy PDA I'd been given at check-in. There was a picture of Hai and a message from one of the hosts that read, "I want to ban him for life!" Apparently Hai had tried to get through to us but there was something wrong with his ticket, and the hosts were contacting me to let me know and ask if I did actually know him.

I couldn't figure out how to send a message back through the PDA. "I'd better go get Hai," I announced to the table. I started to gather up my things...but the others just got up and left without taking theirs! I was suddenly all alone at a table filled with belongings and rare items.

And then a huge family of panhandlers came up and surrounded the table.

"I'm sorry, I can't help you," I told them.

"Come on, we're starving." They were not starving; they looked well-fed and clothed. They may actually have lived inside the ginormous convention center.

"Good, good, but no," I said. When they kept it up, leaning in and gazing hungrily at all the stuff on the table, I shrieked, "SECURITY!"

They seemed to frighten off, but they only moved away about five feet to make sure security wasn't actually coming, and then came right back to hover over the table again.

"SECURITY!" I kept yelling. "Help, security, please!" But no one ever came. I knew that if I could just figure out how to use the stupid PDA, I could send a message that would get someone here to help...but if I looked down at the PDA, one of these people would make off with something from the table.

It was at this moment of crisis that I abruptly woke up.

Dream

I had a dream last night that my boss and our two main anchors got swine flu. I was the one who noticed and I told them to go home. They refused, even to the point of working really late and then all sleeping in the same bed together.

Because I stayed around them trying to convince them to take care of themselves and stop risking others' health, I ended up getting sick--though I'm not sure it was swine flu, because my face was covered in boils.

I also dreamed last night that Tom Welling guest-starred as Superman in a musical episode of a sitcom. When he started to sing, Neil Patrick Harris' voice came out.

I always have the best dreams when I'm off the CPAP. Or at least, I remember them...

Ben Franklin's perversion

This is a dream I had just before waking up this morning, but I thought I'd write it as a narrative and give the characters names.

Cherry was mumbling something as we stepped into the room. She always seemed to say something when we did a time slip. I never could make it out. The first part sounded like random letters and numbers. The last part was definitely a phrase. It sounded like the last word was "day".

I could ask her about it later. The most important thing was the box.

The room was a comfortable study. Brass chair rail ringed the richly stained wood walls, ending at an expansive stone fireplace. On the right of the entryway was a cluster of small plants done up in red bows and Christmas lights. I made for the rolltop desk just beyond that. The object I was after sat innocently atop a mess of papers, as if it were being used as an oversized paperweight. I picked up the box gingerly and sat down on the floor near the fireplace to examine it.

It was about the size of a cigar box, but it was heavy and made of cherry wood and brass. The box was plain, unmarked save for some small brass tacking. I flipped open the lid and let it fall back and hang on the thin chains that secured it.

Cherry had been surveying the room, but now came to crouch beside me and peer over my shoulder.

"Tools and surgical implements," I pointed out, running my forefinger along the row of silver screwdrivers and scalpels. "But what are they for?"

"Seems weird to have them together like that," Cherry agreed. After a moment of staring into the velvet-lined case, she straightened and stepped further into Franklin's office. "Maybe there's something else here we can learn from."

As she started rummaging through a bookshelf, I decided to disassemble the carefully-arranged box to see if that would help. I'd started gathering up the tools when I noticed the odd way the velvet gathered at the edges of the box. "Hmm," I said aloud, cocking my head to one side and frowning. "I wonder..."

I picked up one of the flathead screwdriver tips and wedged it between the velvet and the box. A little leverage, and the fabric started to rise. It was apparently tacked to cardboard. "Look, this is a tray," I said excitedly. "It lifts out."

I felt Cherry step back in my direction, but I was intent on the box as I pulled the tray of tools up and out and set it aside.

"Whoa."

Jackpot.

"Here's a bag of transistors," I said. "There's some wiring. But what's this?"

I picked something out of the box that was about the size of a coin, with a yellow, rusty looking wedge jutting from a silver root. "A root?" I asked aloud. "This is..."

"A tooth," Cherry breathed.

We both knew the implications of what we'd found. But there was no time to discuss them. Our window was closing.

I quickly reassembled the box and set it back on the desk. Moments later, we felt time slip away...

I blinked and looked around. We had time-slipped, hadn't we? But we were back in the study.

Cherry looked at me curiously. "Why are we back here?"

"I don't know," I was saying, when suddenly we arrived. Or rather, the us who had been there before. We were standing by the fireplace; Us' abruptly appeared in the doorway.

"Roman!" Cherry hissed, grabbing my arm.

"Why are we here again?" I whispered frantically.

Me' came striding in, intent on the box. I gaped at him for a moment as he turned his back to us, giving me a rare view of the back of my own head. I considered idly that my auburn hair was getting a little shaggy, and boy was it ever curly in the back.

"Everything's the same," Me' informed Cherry', glancing around at her. "...wait. Where's the wallscreen?"

In my shock at reappearing where we'd just left I hadn't noticed. I glanced over my shoulder. "He's right," I told Cherry. When we'd first arrived there had been a flat panel screen above the fireplace. "It's gone."

Turning back towards our dopplegangers, I saw that Cherry' was looking at the Christmas decorations. I abruptly noticed they were different as well. This time there were no bows, and the plants were much smaller.

"What's going on?" both Cherrys said at once.

"Oh, wait, I forgot to say my stuff," Cherry' cried, and then she was rattling off a long list of nonsensical letters and numbers. I was hearing the code, the thing she was always muttering, clearly for the first time. Not that it made any sense. "And let the other guys be gay," she finished.

I blinked. "What the heck does that mean?"

"Oh," Cherry' said, "that's just so I don't fall in love with anyone while I'm traveling and neglect to do my duty."

I wheeled on Cherry, who had turned bright pink. "They shouldn't be able to see us, should they?"

"Why wouldn't we be able to see you?" asked Me' calmly, lifting the tray of tools from the box and examining the cyborg oddments beneath.

"Because," I spluttered, "Paradox Theory..."

They weren't us.

They looked like us. They were even wearing the same clothes. Cherry' had on that dress Cherry loves, the one that comes to just above the knee, with the marbled red and black pattern. And she was wearing Cherry's trademark knee-high leather boots, with the platforms and five-inch heels. And Me' was in the same suit I was wearing, tuxedo-style but dark purple, with copper buttons and a pocket watch chain visible upon one breast.

I had assumed because they looked like us, they sounded like us, and they were here just as we had been, that they were us. But...

"That's ridiculous," Me' responded. "Paradox Theory doesn't have anything to do with dimensional slips."

Dream

Last night I dreamed I had two sons, who looked almost exactly like Connor and Logan. The first part of the dream involved me trying to spend time with each of them individually, and also teaching them how to share with each other.

Later, I realized that I kept calling the older one "Connor". I tried and tried, but I could not remember his actual name. "What's your name?" I asked him, but of course he wouldn't tell me--either he thought I was joking or he was shocked that his own mother didn't know his name. Eventually I discovered that his name was Sandy. (I would never name my son "Sandy", but whatever.) The name just didn't suit him, and I was sure I would forget it again. "Now that you're grown and I know your personality better, how about we pick a name that fits you?" I asked him, but he was too busy playing with his video game to answer.

The crazy dreams are back! For one night, at least

I thought all my dreams had been banished by the CPAP, but last night I had a doozy.

I was going over to the house of the family of a friend of Sean's for some reason, and I knew there was an item worth $80,000 there. The temptation was too great; I decided to steal it.

For a time I acted normally. Then, finally, I took my first step towards stealing the item. I don't even remember what it was, but it ultimately didn't matter because cops immediately popped out from nowhere and arrested me. Somehow, everyone had known my plan all along, and they'd been waiting to see if I would actually go through with it.

The police kept me in the house for a long time. I latched onto a female cop and kept trying to give her my statement. I wanted to cooperate as much as possible, because I knew I was guilty. But she kept brushing me off. Finally I was crying, saying, "I always thought that even if there was a lot of money involved, I'd still choose to do the right thing. But I guess not!" But the cop just looked at me, and didn't ask any questions.

At some point the house changed into a huge, castle-like house where the highest towers broke through the cloud cover. Someone was there with me--the character was a lot like Ben, but somehow wasn't him, and he was asking if the house continued down beneath the clouds, and whether he might use the place as the setting for a film. Later, there was a man who may have been wearing a white lab coat trying to perfect a bicycle-like floating vehicle in the home's dungeon. He started riding it around the room, but then another man was yelling that it was his idea and started trying to make the guy crash. I used our PS3 remote control to make the vehicle slow down and avoid obstacles. "There you go," I said.

After that I was for some reason in a long dirt tunnel with my bicycle, watching through the exit as the police discussed things, and trying to figure out a way to deal with them.

I was very relieved to wake up and realize I hadn't tried to steal anything.

Bad dream

I guess it was only a matter of time until constantly reading about grotesque murders in Detective Conan comics brought some horror into my dreams.

Last night I dreamed I was watching some TV show where the people who owned a particular bar pretty much owned the town they lived in. In the particular scene I was watching, they were trying to hire a media producer to create videos.

"I want to do ballads," he said, but he was informed that he would not be doing ballads. I think he decided that he could handle doing whatever they wanted, as the pay was something like $450,000 a year.

The place was apparently called Hyde Bar (so said the menu board over the bar) and you could get a newspaper there for $1.75.

The trouble started when the sheriff showed up and started interfering with whatever it was the owner wanted to do. He got beaten up and shoved into this room where a band was playing really loud rock music. Later someone else pissed the owners off too.

The final scene involved seeing three purple, decaying bodies--which I knew belonged to the people who'd tried to interfere, the two I'd seen and someone else--strapped to the wall of a dungeon, with a spooky harpsichord melody that I think came from Prisoner of Azkaban. One of the bodies was missing a leg, which was attached to its own horizontal pole. The way the bodies were strung up in various positions made them look like trophies.

That's when I woke up.

Yuck.

Wacky dreams

Last night I had a funny dream and a very vivid one.

In the first dream, I dreamed that a guy I deal with a lot in the Chicago corporate office, Mike, had sent me an email to tell me that I was annoying. Then, in the dream, I "woke up", and I told Mike about that dream. And he said, "Well, that's kind of true."

(I emailed Mike to tell him about the dream today and he thought it was hilarious. And, for the record, he said it wasn't true at all ;>)

In the other dream, Sean and I were with my family and some other people outside when all of a sudden a big cloud of gray and yellow dust started moving towards us. As we looked at it, we saw what appeared to be little birds riding on top of things three times their size, but as they drew closer we realized they were actually large bees carrying huge white and yellow flowers.

I ran for my camera, but couldn't find it.

The bees didn't seem to care about us at first, but for some reason as time went on they became hostile, and at that point I noticed their five inch stingers. One of them stabbed Mom in the behind as she was fleeing indoors, the long, thin, needle-like stinger going all the way in.

"Did it hurt?" I asked her.

"Not really," she grimaced.

I thought we should just leave the bees alone, but many people started to go for the bug spray. Four-year-old Logan grabbed some and started spraying it around, then lost his balance and almost fell off the table he was standing on. I and someone else grabbed him and sat him down.

"Do you know why we're mad at you?" I asked him, because I wanted him to understand that there might not always be someone to catch him when he fell, and he needed to be more careful.

"Yes," said someone else, answering for him, which was annoying. I'm not sure who it was...it didn't seem like Mom or Faye, so maybe it was just a character interjected into the dream to represent bad parents, even though Logan actually has very good parents.

Later I was headed off somewhere and I was a little paranoid that the bees would sting me, so I hurried, and then I heard Mom behind me saying "They're going after Faye--er, Heather." (She will sometimes go through a whole list of names before finding the person she's talking about ;> I've been called Bev, Carol, Sally, Faye, and Amanda many times.) Regardless, somehow, I managed not to get stung.

This dream, of course, partially reflects my experience every day when I leave the apartment and have to walk through a horde of wasps and hornets. Occasionally I think about calling management to have pest control come out, but they've never stung me, and it's only nerve-wracking for those few seconds while I walk to my car, so usually I decide not to worry about it.

(This morning they were even crazier than usual, actually running into walls. Is it mating season? Still didn't get stung, though.)

At some point during the dream about the bees, I remember meeting a nice older couple who were talking with Sean about his wedding ring. He apparently needed to have it fixed (although I have no idea what could possibly go wrong with a plain white gold band), but due to various tax and political family issues, he didn't want to have it done in Augusta. The couple was recommending he send it to Kentucky and then we could pick it up at Christmas.

"Oh, and while you're there, you should meet the so-and-sos," the woman said. "I know you'll like them!"

To my great surprise, Sean was not only thoroughly enjoying the conversation with the couple we barely knew, but also seemed eager to meet their friends in Kentucky.

And that's about it for last night's dreams :>

Dreams

I've had a few dreams lately that I haven't written about for whatever reason. One of them involved my cousin dying, so maybe I didn't want to dwell on it. I remember that in the dream I blogged about it, which annoyed me when I woke up.

Last night I dreamed I was at Cumberland Falls. Connor and Logan were standing at the edge of the falls playing in the water, and I was taking pictures. I had just discovered that my cell phone did have a camera after all, so I didn't have to buy a new phone! (Ah, the power of wishful thinking.)

Jeff Laitila from Sushicam was there, too, and he was taking pictures of the falls. I remember seeing him setting up a tripod, and as I looked out on the beautiful vista I asked, "Are you going to take a panorama?" He said yes, and I asked if I should move, but he said I wasn't in the way. That made no sense so I moved anyway.

I remember setting up a really cool shot with Connor and Logan in one corner and some awesome clouds in the other, and imagining how I would crop it to make it a wide shot, and wishing I had a camera that would shoot in RAW format so I could blow it up to a huge poster.

It was really beautiful, and I was getting angles and scenes in the dream that don't actually exist at the real Cumberland Falls. (Also, there's no way Connor and Logan could play at the top of the falls, obviously.)

Wasting my 3000th post

Last night, I dreamed that spiders were mutating into much larger creatures and taking over human spaces. They could move freakishly fast, but they also died quickly and their corpses were everywhere. There were two characters in the dream, a detective-ish guy and a beautiful female journalist who both seemed to have stepped out of a black and white movie, and they were trying to figure out how to reclaim the world. The woman was apparently in trouble for doing a story about the spiders. The man started discussing the economic impact of spiders forcing people out of their homes and workplaces.

"Migration was pretty stable," he said, "until the teapot went into mass production in the 1930's." And then I visualized a line of giant, colorful teapots that stretched across the horizon, kicking up dust as they advanced.

"The Dust Bowl," I said knowingly.

As the two tried to figure out what to do about the spiders and their own issues, they of course fell in love. At some point Brooke was there, and we were both trying to take photos of a girl posing for some reason, and I was complaining that I needed a camera with a faster shutter.

Meanwhile, I was so distraught over what in the world to do about the spider problem that I started a blog post about it, with the title you see above.

Obviously I haven't been blogging in a few days, and now you know why--it's number 3000, and I wanted it to be awesome.

This has happened before, where I haven't posted because I wanted to write something "important", and each time I wound up unhappy because I wasn't posting. You know what? I like spouting my drivel. I wish I didn't care that I will never have a huge audience, but despite my desire for fame and glory I'm unwilling to stop doing what I'm doing...which is chronicling my life in a way that is fun for me.

So here, internet: here's a 3000th post typical of Heather Aubrey Meadows, with a dream and some indulgent self-analysis.

3000 posts is a big milestone. This blog has been around for awhile. It's obviously not the oldest blog in existence, but I am proud that I've kept it up. So many other blogs die out, with their authors either disappearing or starting a brand new blog, essentially denying everything they've previously written. I'm happy to have left my 3000 posts right where they are, on the same server, my faults and foibles and naive opinions of the past (and present!) archived forever for all to see, for so many years. And I intend to keep it up. I'm the main character of my life, after all. This is character development!

So, sorry to everyone who I told about this post and how I wanted it to be awesome. It is what it is: an affirmation of what has come before, and not a digression.

I likes me some teenage daredevils

Last night I dreamed that Kaitou Kid was my little brother, and he kept all his magic tricks in our basement. Our basement looked more like a cave than a basement.

When I found out that he was Kaitou Kid it was because he wanted to talk about his latest escapade. This made me very mad. I told him, "You're making us accomplices." He didn't seem to care, and was completely unafraid of being ratted out...which was naive of him because all my instincts were screaming at me to call 911.

It happened that the police figured it out and he had to leave to escape capture. They came to search our basement and couldn't find anything. I remember being relieved that I hadn't had to call the cops on him directly.

Later, our mom, who was not my real-life mom but someone closer to Brooke's mom, was out at a Kenny Rogers concert when she got a phone call. It was from my brother. She was on stage and everyone in the audience could hear her through the microphone, so when she slipped up and called him "Terry" everyone heard her.

"I mean Bruce," she corrected herself.

After that I was simply observing as Kaitou Kid, who of course was now Terry McGinnis, dodged some crazy tentacle-like spears underwater with his bat suit, and the thought occurred to me that my dream-mom had totally outed Bruce Wayne.

Too many kids

I had another weird dream the other night. In this one, AJ and Faye had six or seven children. They were living in this tenement-style apartment building, and the kids were distributed throughout various floors. We used the fire escape to go between them.

I was trying to play with all of the kids and get to know them, and it struck me as odd that some of them had the last name "Mills". "Why aren't they Aubreys?" I asked AJ.

"You're the one who came up with Shelly Mills," AJ retorted. Shelly Mills is the fictional deceased girlfriend of a character of mine from the AMRN who was loosely based on AJ.

"Oh," I said, because this was somehow logical.

"I think we have too many kids," AJ said later. "Do you want one?"

He's said this to me before in real life, as a joke, but in the dream he was absolutely serious. And I seriously considered it for awhile in the dream.

Frog legs

I dreamed last night that I went to visit an old friend. In the dream she was married but had no kids, which is weird because I think the opposite is true now. Anyway, she lived in a small silver houseboat that was docked at the edge of a crystal lake surrounded by trees that you had to hike up a mountain to get to. It was very beautiful.

At the beginning of the hike was a city with elegant suspension bridges and towers rising to the sky. And of course, since I'm obsessed, all of this was in Japan.

I remember having to take the train to get to the city, and then hiking to the houseboat, but that's really it.

At some point I was hanging out with the Ninja Turtles (natch), and one of them--I think it may have been Donatello--said to someone else, "Can you cut this leg off for me? It's getting to be a nuisance."

The other person came out with a large hand saw and rested it over Donatello's leg. I turned to whoever it was I was with (maybe it was still my old friend) and smiled that they were taking the joke that far.

Then the guy started sawing Donatello's leg off!

Okay, I thought, he's not actually cutting off his leg, just some outer padding thing he's wearing that happens to look just like his leg.

The sawing stopped, and the guy started peeling something back. At first I thought my wild explanation had been correct, but then I saw that he was just peeling Don's Street Frogs-esque jean shorts out of the way.

"What the hell is going on here?" yelled my companion as the sawing resumed.

"I don't know," I said.

Don's leg finally fell off, and he leaned back and we could see up into his shell, and his body wasn't there. He grunted and shifted, and then another leg came out of another hole!

"There, that's better," he said, and another leg came out, so that he had four leg holes and three legs altogether.

In a later dream I was trying to go to the bathroom, and there was a really inconvenient stall at the end beyond the sink, but when I tried to go in there the toilet was a low circle with no seat, and there were telltale signs of men having used it. I wondered (in the dream) if this was what urinals looked like. (I know what urinals look like!)

As I was waiting for one of the other stalls to become available, my phone rang. I picked it up and it said "Joe (Brimstone)" on my caller ID. Joe's an old AMRN friend who, as far as I know, has never had my phone number.

"Hello!" I said brightly.

"Hi there! Are calls always this clear?" Joe said.

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe it has to do with where I'm standing? But anyway, how are you doing?"

"Oh, I'm great! How's my best friend though?"

"Best friend?" I repeated. "We haven't spoken in, like, two years!" (I couldn't remember the exact figure in my dream. Still can't, really, though I believe Joe's popped up on the boards within the last six months.)

My old friend from the first dream (and perhaps the second) was standing at the entry to the bathroom, and she gave me a surprised look when I said that.

Joe was quiet; this seemed to offend him. So I pushed on. "I'm doing pretty well," I said as I gave up on the bathroom and walked outside. It was dark out, but there were streetlights. "Wow, there's a big frog out here that looks like a piece of wood," I said, circling it. "Or maybe it's a piece of wood that looks like a frog..."

He still wasn't answering. I didn't know what else to say. (This was all very out of character for Joe!)

I woke up with some blanket under my ear, and at first I thought I had fallen asleep while on the phone :>

I don't even really know what lacrosse is

I had another weird dream last night.

This time, Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue had passed away unexpectedly, and this was bad for Augusta because he supported the local lacrosse team, which practiced in an historic building downtown that was so old it had to be protected by an outer building whose upper half was glass. Let me tell you, that was one cool-looking building--old-style green domes inside a dome made of triangles of glass held together by a metal frame.

(Apparently lacrosse was played on a racquetball court, in my dream.)

I started across a suspension bridge behind some guy I was working the story with. The bridge looked like the Augusta Canal in that there was grass and water on one side. "It's bad for Augusta that we lose the support for lacrosse, but what really gets me is Sonny being gone," I started to say...but the guy abruptly started sprinting across the bridge. I started sprinting too, and held a good pace for awhile, but then I couldn't keep up no matter how hard I tried.

Ahead of me, the guy raised an American flag and kept pounding away at the same speed.

It was around this point I woke up and ran to the bathroom to throw up. It was 4 am.

(I think I've figured out the nausea. Allergies! Mucus! TMI!)

Bleh

I'm feeling depressed and tired. I don't know if the depression is fed by the tiredness or vice versa or if they're just coexisting phenomena.

Regardless, bleh.

I had some strange dreams last night. In the first one, I was really upset about how much weight I've gained, and I was thinking that I would never be able to lose it without surgery. But I didn't know if I would ever be able to afford it. When I said this aloud, my mother immediately sliced open my belly and started cutting away parts of my organs. At this point I could see inside there, and it looked like how it looks when you cut fat away from chicken with kitchen scissors.

I was thinking, I know you were a nurse, and I know you witnessed this sort of procedure before, but do you really know what you're doing? But I didn't say it.

Then she was done, and I said, "This wasn't an official surgery, so I won't be covered if something goes wrong." I must have been so traumatized by the thought that I could die that that part of the dream became a dream, and I was telling Mom about it.

"And so I thought to myself that I would never be able to lose the weight without that surgery," I said.

"Well, duh," Mom responded, and pulled out my flat metal spatula. She promptly split me open with it and did the surgery, and I watched it happen the exact same way.

This last bothered me so much that I woke up for real.

Somewhere in there I also dreamed that my workplace was on fire. It wasn't my office as it is now; it was a narrower room. I ran into the smoke and started grabbing stuff.

"I don't want to lose everything again," I explained, coughing. I managed to save several toys--all toys that I used to have at the old apartment, that were of course lost in the fire. One was my Darkwing Duck bank, and one was my Sailor Moon figure.

It's kind of funny; I have never obsessed about losing those toys.

I need to stop having such gruesome dreams

Just before getting up this morning, I dreamed that Sean had me order him a comic book in which all superheroes from all worlds and dimensions, both DC and Marvel, came together in a climactic battle against a brilliant villain who turned out to be a famous science fiction writer, and each died violently. I didn't want to read it, but of course somehow I ended up doing so. Except when I did, it played out like a TV show rather than a comic.

I remember Wonder Woman was crushed in the hands of a giant, a Clark Kent from another dimension who'd taken another superhero name and costume was tricked into drowning himself, and an unknown superhero was caught in a wire that twisted around him and sawed him in two.

When my snooze alarm went off, I was glad to force myself awake to escape the deaths.

Something similar happened the other day when I slept in, except the dream I had then was far more vivid and disturbing. A crazed man with a baby strapped to his stomach--was the baby alive?--was hijacking a bus, and anytime people responded in ways he didn't like, he'd freak out and wave a huge knife around and pull bloody body parts from children he'd dismembered out of a big burlap sack.

Conscience, conscience, conscience

This morning, as sleep and the fact that I couldn't breathe warred in my stuffy head, I dreamed a House episode.

He was operating on someone and made one of his comments, but what he didn't realize was that the guy could hear him. This guy had a habit of getting treatment from doctors and then taking revenge on them for perceived slights. Later, after he was discharged, the patient saw three letters on the huge glass pane of a store front: USE.

"You'll pay for what you did in surgery, Dr. House," he muttered.

House was on his way home when gunshots rang out. But they were nowhere near him. He stepped into his darkened apartment. "3...2...1," he said, and immediately the phone began to ring. "'Oh, did you hear those gunshots? What happened?'" he said, mocking his neighbors. But the crazy patient was hiding in the shadows.

Of course, since this is the most exciting part, I have no idea what happened. I think it was at this point that I became aware that I was trying to wake up, and was unable to do so. I hate that feeling. Especially since I really wanted to sleep some more--my alarm hadn't even gone off!--but my body didn't seem to want to let me.

The nature of the dream changed. House was in my parents' backyard, talking to a friend of his through the big bay window in the basement (which has been boarded up and is now hidden behind layers of soundproofing, so opening it is impossible). You'd think the friend would be Wilson, but it wasn't. It wasn't an actual House character. I'm not sure who it was.

The friend was talking about how "Tsukushi" was relieved that House was okay after the incident with the crazy patient, and how she'd given him an admonition to be more careful. I'm not sure, but this part of the dream may actually have been in Japanese.

Tsukushi, of course, is the main character of Hana Yori Dango, and in this dream she used to live with House.

"If Tsukushi came back, how would that be?" House mused. (I think the last part of that sentence actually came out "wa dou da?") I vividly recall the friend leaning on the windowsill as House said this, looking out into the green grass of the yard.

I think my labored breathing must have interrupted dream continuity again, because the next thing I remember was House snarkily debating his life with a fellow doctor--a psychiatrist. House was arguing that he had no redeeming qualities.

"I'm the pinnacle of what everyone aspires to be," said the psychiatrist. "A specialist." Then he started pulling FedEx mailers out of his briefcase. "Conscience, conscience, conscience," he said, each time smacking a parcel on the table in front of House. Somehow I knew that all his notes were in those mailers, and that he meant he had ample documentation of House showing he had a conscience.

Then my alarm did go off. I strained out of sleep like I was drowning and fighting my way back to the surface.

Bizarre dreams

parents getting a divorce--happy for mom, ending up with a fairly wealthy guy, moving away, possibly investing in his company--later chose not to invest, but still leaving dad. I moved into house with Dad to take care of him, even though it would be a "longer commute" to work.

also in the dream I was driving through a construction site where apartments and shops were going up right across the way from something--dad's house?--and I was drinking a beer, and when I saw a cop I realized I was drinking and driving and freaked out. hid the bottle between my body and the car door. cops didn't stop me and I was relieved. the beer was tasty.