NOT the dream I was planning on sharing.

Last night I went to bed at 8:30 and promptly passed the hell out.  I've gotten into the bad habit lately of banking sleep, and I guess my reserves had run out.  I did get a few things done before bed (3 kitchen drawers re-lined, the pantry cleaned out and divested of all expired items*, and a long, luxurious bubble bath) but I was just wiped out.  After I tried to catch a catnap at the kitchen table I decided that one of the perks of being a grownup is being able to act like an octogenarian sometimes. :)

So anywho- I crawl into bed, pass the hell out, and woke up at 10:00 PM in a hot, sweaty, confused ball of tears and angst.  I was all kinds of twisted in my bed.  My sheets and blankets were knotted up around me and both of my arms were out through one arm hole of my shirt.  I'd lost a sock.  My sleeping mask was around my neck and being pulled weirdly so that it did feel like I was choking a bit, and my right hand was cramping up to my shoulder from clenching a mouse that wasn't really there.  I got up and got myself some orange juice and in an effort to get it out of my head, went to the computer and wrote down what I'd dreamed about in a draft: 

I'm not letting myself edit this today, so you are hereby required to completely forgive anything that sounds like it was written by a panicked and half asleep person with a poor grasp on the English language.

Sabine called me and told me to check my email. She'd sent me a link to a Tumblr page where some anonymous somebody had set up a blog that was labeled "Beautiful Thing."

The "Beautiful Thing" blog had images of me. Some were from Facebook and some that looked like those unflattering back page of a fashion magazine pictures showing you what not to wear that are shot from a distance where you don't know your picture is being taken. And weapons- gory, rusty, unkept torture devices. Then all of a sudden a new post showed up with a picture of my house and my truck exactly where I park my truck, while I was looking at the page.  I reacted in a "not me" sort of fashion. I kept staring at the page and trying to call her back on my phone, which was "dead" even though it's a cell.  Real Me was trying to scream at Dream Me to step away from the computer and go grab a weapon- I have those, you know- and I woke up as my mouse's cord was being wrapped around my neck by some faceless intruder.

And no, you can't call me Sidney.

Let's investigate the things that SUCK about this dream, shall we?

1) Sabine wouldn't call me.  She'd call my roommate. Then she'd call Raymond, who lives 3 miles away and is scarier than Chuck Norris without coffee when he gets pissed off. Once those three had their plan, then I'd get clued in.  This is the way this scenario would work in real-time.  I'm perfectly fine with that. 

2) I absolutelyeffingHATE the word "beautiful" in that particular context (as in, being applied to me).  I don't like it and I am fairly infuriated with my psyche for planting it. 
 
3) Recently, I thought my home was being invaded when I was the only one home.  I wasn't- turned out, my roommate had a clock radio tuned to a talk station and the alarm was set for 5:00 AM, and the radio was on the back porch. Voices made me think I was being burglarized.  I grabbed my cell phone and a 5' spear specifically designed for boar hunting.  Yes, I could have grabbed a firearm but I had the presence of mind, even asleep, to think about what could be taken away from me and what I'd be more likely to be able to defend myself against and with.  I am apparently more comfortable stabbing than shooting... and that's ok. The point is, I had a plan that did not involve sitting there and waiting for the voices to make up their minds, so I'm a little bit angry about that, too.  Dream-Me had all the common sense of a blonde in a Nightmare on Elm Street movie.

4) I've spent hours and hours training for what to do if somebody sneaks up behind you to the degree that I think I could do ok in that scenario if it happened. Again, Dream-Me seemed to fail, even though I was telling her what to do... and then I woke up and didn't even get to kick any ass at all.  What a bummer.

--
As a general rule, I don't remember dreams. On the rare occasions, it is usually fun and whimsical, like the one I had where Samuel L. Jackson was accosting Daniel Radcliffe on an airplane screaming "Parseltongue, M*F'er, do you speak it?"  That was fun.  Or the stormtroopers and Golden Labradors on the gondola.  The only night terrors I can recall are years ago, and had things to trigger them- mostly horror movies.  As far as I know, there's nothing out there that seems likely to have set this one off. I don't think I have a stalker, and if I did, my psyche doesn't know about it any more than I do.  I've had a pretty calm week or so, and even if there has been some crazy it hasn't been MY crazy.  So even though this one definitely counts as a night terror, I'm choosing to believe that it was simply the result of an overactive imagination belonging to a girl who might spend a little more time than is healthy surfing the internet, and I'm lettin' it go.  I'm going to try to dedicate a little extra time tonight to calming my brain down rather than going from 60-to-zero in 3 minutes and hopefully if my subconscious decides to go explore it's dark side again, I can at least get a few licks in of my own.

*back to that pantry thing, which probably deserves an entire post to itself but won't get one now: I have no idea how this always happens to me. I swear, I have cleaned the pantry entirely within the last year and every year before that but I still managed to find a jar of Wheat Germ that expired in 2003. I didn't buy this house until 2005.  Who the hell is planting expired dry goods in my home?  It happens with medicines, too. Every winter I clean the medicine box and every winter I find shit that expired a full Congress term earlier. I liked it better when I was gonna get punked with garden gnomes. Just sayin'.