vegetable knives and marine mushrooms

Well, apparently I've taken a really long sabbatical from dreaming. Aside from a couple of celebrity dreams (I'm saving them for later), I've only remembered snippets since Christmas. Last night I had a melodramatic and alarming dream*.

I was walking through a wooded park in an unspecified foreign country (Latin America?). There was a young guy walking toward me who suddenly pulled out one of those cheapo plastic vegetable-cutting knives and threatened me with it. He elucidated some reason for why he was threatening me but I can't remember what it was, only that it was a non-sequitur. He didn't seem all that serious about it, but I was alarmed and grabbed the knife from him, and stuck it into his chest a couple of inches. He didn't seem to be in pain, pointing out that it would be pretty hard to kill someone with that type of knife, and that in any case it wasn't positioned right. I realized that he had something there, and although I was horrified by what I was doing, I felt like it was too late and there was no turning back, so I pushed it in the rest of the way (he had magically produced a second similar knife and was now brandishing it at me, although not very convincingly). When I stuck the knife in all the way, it became obvious that he was really injured. At this point I realized that I had fallen madly in love with him and was desperate to get him medical attention. I started dragging him in the direction where I thought a hospital should be, until I realized that I wasn't making fast enough progress; so I got a little boy to pick up the other end of him so we could carry him faster. Soon after this we ran into a woman who expressed mild surprise and disapproval and asked why I didn't just call an ambulance. I replied, distraught, that I couldn't do that because then I wouldn't be sure that he had made it to the hospital all right. I was also worried about showing up with him at the emergency room (having been the one that stabbed him), but I was ready to risk being caught in order to make sure that he had at least survived the trip.

After that my alarm went off, and after pushing the snooze button I started dreaming about eating "sea mushrooms". I was at the beach with my husband and there were massive amounts of marine mushrooms (?!) that had washed up on the beach in a recent storm. I didn't like them very much, but I kept picking them up and eating them.

*This is not the first dream I've had involving stabbing someone, and I highly recommend *not* dreaming about stabbing. It's extremely alarming and unpleasant.