Don't let the bed bugs bite

I had a waterbed and in the dream, I had it in my mind that I set it up at 2am. I was sleeping and saw ants crawling on me. I got up and saw some blue frogs and another weird thing like a centipede but fatter. It was making screeching noises at me. I tried to get a picture of the frogs and they turned into kittens. I got up and pulled the mattress back, there was dirt and grass, leaves and all sorts of crap under the mattress. I was trying to figure out where the ants were coming from to get a trap set up. I had a broom and was sweeping up all the junk, blaming myself for setting the bed up in the dark not seeing all the dirt. My co-workers went by, stopped and asked why I was working so hard. Then I woke up.

a dream about a dream about a dream

I've been having a terrible time remembering my dreams lately. I keep waking up, noting something, thinking "there's no way I'll forget this", and then forgetting it. Last night's dream, though, I could have done with forgetting.

To start with, I had a terrible time going to sleep, which is unusual for me. My fingers kept falling asleep while I was still awake, which prompted me to fidget, which woke up my grumpy sleep companion, who was also apparently not sleeping as deeply as usual.

That was the real-life part. I realized that I was fidgeting a lot and disturbing the sleep of the bed's other occupant, and this started blending into my dream: I started to dream that we were sleeping, in our usual bed, and that I was moving around a lot. He (in the dream, and possibly also in real life) kept waking up and making progressively more irritated growling noises. Of course the more I tried to stay still, the harder I found it. This dream went on and on, punctuated by short periods of waking that mirrored what was going on in the dream. At one point, I woke up and realized that I had been dreaming that I was dreaming about a bad night's sleep. To add insult to injury, our dogs kept barking (in real life), which is something they don't normally do at night.

I finally woke up not long before it was time to get up, realized I was cold, and added some covers to my side of the bed. After that I must have slept better, because I then dreamed that, twenty minutes before we were due to get up, my husband woke up, looked at me, and said, "well, then, let's just order some breakfast from IHOP" (which is an odd choice, because neither of us likes IHOP). We started discussing menu options, and I was relieved that he had decided not to blame his sleepless night on me.

The real-life post-script is that, on actually getting up, I realized that the whole horrible night of sleeplessness wasn't really my fault. For the next hour, both dogs continued to have barking fits indicating that there was some kind of animal nearby (the neighbor dogs were doing it when ours weren't), and I realized that they had been doing it for most of the night. Of course that didn't give me back my lost sleep.

a dream? or an encounter with the devil? hmm...

last night i had a series of off-the-wall, intense dreams. but the only one i can vividly remember was a dream (?) where i was lying in bed, half asleep, in the hotel room where i was staying at in real life. suddenly i felt someone crawl over me in bed and then wrap himself around me. i could feel the weight and warmth of his body. his hands were positioned on my head and neck. i was so panicked that i couldn't move or scream. my body ached from the fear and shock. i knew he was there to do something awful to me and i wondered if this is how my life would end.

and then i woke up.

Teaching

For some reason, Ellen and I were sleeping by the side of the road in a city. There were beds there, and even a toilet in the middle of nowhere--which I used, right out in the open, with a sense of something being slightly out of place, but hardly even of shyness.

Later, I was in the TA office at school, where I saw one of my friends with huge dark rings under her eyes. Instead of asking her if she was okay, I asked her if there was anything I could do to help her. She brightened up, and said that actually I could help cut out all of these little figures out of colored paper. But as I was about to help her, I got a call from one of my students. In real life, this student's name is Evin, and I think she's a girl, but in the dream it was a boy. Partly due to the connection, and partly due to his circuitousness, I couldn't figure out what he wanted from me. I kept giving him generic tips about being a better student and trying to reassure him, but I wasn't sure it was working.

When I hung up with him, another student wanted to talk to me. She had very curly hair and skin that actually looked like porcelain. I couldn't remember her name, but I glanced at her paper, and said, "Do you go by Lyligia?" She did. I had apparently given her a C+ on this paper, and she couldn't figure out why, because she'd worked so hard and "shared some really meaningful things." So I looked at the paper, and remembered that although she had presented some very personal details, the essay overall was fragmented and non-cohesive. "And how long is it?" I asked. "Seven pages, single spaced," she answered. "The assignment was for three pages, double-spaced," I responded, "so this doesn't fulfill the assignment requirements."

I guess I was dreaming about grading since I've so far managed to do so little in my waking life. Sigh.

Shooting/bazaar/party/reunion

I was at some sort of shooting range; there were tall towers that apparently launched clay pigeons or something of the sort. I met a friend from school there, but we didn't get to do any shooting, because he was going to start setting up for some sort of event. He's Persian in real life, and was apparently setting up a bazaar of sorts, I guess so he could sell things he'd imported--things like textiles. He was very excited about it.

As several of us were talking about it, he threw an arm around me and another friend. I really didn't like it, and squirmed and tried to move it, but he didn't notice. Finally, I shouted, "You are making me very uncomfortable and I don't like it! Please remove your arm!" Then he did, but I felt kind of bad that I'd had to be so overt.

Eventually, the bazaar turned into a party with a bunch of people, and we were in a big room. I was sleeping in a large bed in the corner of the room, and when I woke up, a woman was cuddling with me. At first I thought it was Demi Moore, but then I realized it was someone else's wife, though I could never quite place exactly who. She was beautiful and had extremely soft, smooth skin.

Then I was back at my high school, maybe for my sister's 10-year reunion (which will be in 2010). I went into the high school gym, only it was dark and tiny. Two sporting events were going on at opposite ends of the gym, and I saw a bunch of people I knew, including the English teacher for whom I worked all four years. She wanted a picture with me. There were actually lots of digital cameras in the dream; at one point I reached into my bag, and found not my camera, but two cameras belonging to other people.

Mice

I just remembered another dream I had last night! I was in my bedroom in the last house I lived in with my parents. I was in bed, and I saw mice running across the floor. I screamed, but it was that weird, muted, dream-scream, where you're trying to scream loudly and it comes out as sort of a stifled groan. I got out of bed and walked around until I realized that it was still the middle of the night (I saw a clock, but I don't remember the time) and that I should go back to bed. I think at that point my parents were up, and I asked my mom if they had heard me scream, and she said they had but figured I was just dreaming. Then I wondered if I had just dreamed about the mice.

I'm still not sure.

Lindsay Lohan

I don't think I could pick Lindsay Lohan out of a line-up, but I know that the GFY Girls don't like her leggings, and that yesterday I saw a guy wearing a T-shirt bearing her mug shot. Actually, I just looked at GFY's Lohan archives, and she looks nothing like she did in my dream.

In my dream she was gorgeous: very tall, and glowingly tan, with very long, honey blonde hair with straight bangs. Her hair came down to about her elbows, and I think she may have been wearing it instead of a shirt, for some acting role, and that the boys loved that.

And then somehow we ended up sharing the same bed. I'm still not sure why, except that I think we were sleeping over at a mutual friend's house.

Anyway, the next day, her security was back in force and we couldn't be seen next to each other. I was trying to take a picture of a display of teddy bears, and had my camera up and waiting. She and her man-friend came by to look, and security made me put my camera down in case I might take a picture of her.

I was telling my family about it later, how ironic it was that we could sleep in the same bed but then I couldn't take pictures of her. I was thinking about blogging about it, but then realized that I could be found out, and that maybe that wasn't a good idea.

Later I tried to buy tickets to a double-feature at the movie theater. They were $9, and I got a bill back from my 10, but the counter person took forever trying to explain to me how the double-feature tickets worked, and I don't think I ever actually got it. I went to another counter, where somehow we ended up looking at pictures on my laptop. There was one shot of tall trees in the snow, with the sun shining through a few falling flakes, and it was beautiful and made me want to cry, missing that scene.