To Sleep Perchance To Dream*

For those of you that know me well, I am sure you know that I have really whacked out dreams from time to time. It seems I have a lot of crazy dreams in relation to the one or two a year that everyone else seems to have. So, you all think I am really f-ed in the head and now all of the readers and passers-by will, too!

Saturday night I had a few people over to sit around the fire pit in my backyard and talk about random topics. The last fire-goer left around 2:30am. I didn't fall asleep until about 6am. Here is dream 1:

I am standing in front of a long table on the the other side of it is my ex - he has just won a cooking contest in which he made a strange meat-like item that was breaded with red sauce on it that had very colorful chunks in it. He also made mashed potatoes - which would normally be fine with me in my dreams, but he apparently didn't make my recipe for mashed potatoes and boy was I PISSED. I was going off on him and crying about the fact that he knows I make the best mashed potatoes while he kept telling me he still won without them and that I was causing a scene on TV. He had me escorted out of the contest.

I woke up at about 10am.

Then I fell asleep again at 1pm and here is dream 2:

I am sitting at a table in a very nice restaurant and a waiter comes up to me and hits me in the face. I get up and follow him to his next table where he is telling them the specials. I start asking him why he would do that to me and when he turns around, I realize that he is a waiter from a different restaurant that I had been terribly insulting to a few week's earlier. So, I walk back to my seat - but, before I can get there, the waiter starts attacking me from behind and telling me in a very eerie voice that he is going to kill me. I start trying to get away from him and screaming for people in the restaurant to help me, the exit is up at the top of a tiered dining room and the staircase splits the place in half. I am begging diners for help as I am trying to get away from him. He is jumping on my back and trying to choke me. He keeps telling the patrons that I am just joking - that we are actually a couple and he and I are playing around. I keep telling them to please believe me and help me, but they just look at us and smile and nod.

I make it out of the restaurant and it must be attached to an office building with pink-colored walls. i am running through a maze of hallways away from him as I am screaming for someone to call 911 and also trying to use every pay phone I see. They don't work because the waiter is now in front of me and disconnecting the phones before I can get to them. He disappears from my sight, but for some reason I can sense that he is hiding around a corner ahead of me and I karate chop him as I hit the corner. I then bolt to to the office reception desk and beg them to call 911. They say they can't because they didn't register their number with the government. I run out of the door.

My cousin is waiting for me and we start running like crazy. Somehow I now know that there are these drive-by gang shootings that are going on in the neighborhood. They are targeting people wearing darker rinsed jeans. Both my cousin and I are wearing dark jeans, so we are really scared and on the look-out. We get about 5 buildings away from our destination when it happens - a red cutlass or some long old car like that creeps up to the street we are crossing. My cousin says, "here it goes, let's just run any way." so we start running in slow motion across the street and towards the alley. I was concentrating on the sounds of the guns being cocked and the fact that they were going to shoot us in the back soon.

We are transported to a building where my parents, sister (but a young version), my uncle, aunt and cousins are. It is a combo train station, weekend cabin with a fireplace, bowling alley cafe and science lab. I can tell that I am obviously in trouble. Most of the people here are mad at me and acting very mean. I am trying to wash my hands and throw away the gloves you have to wear when you wash your hand here, but I don't do it the way the old ladies in bras and hair nets want me to. My cousin tries to show me how, but I just don't get it. There are push pins like the ones you would use to pin a hem before you sew it - they were scattered on the sink area and I kept poking myself with them. I was getting really upset. I tried to go sit down and calm myself down, but my sister kept being a snotty brat and antagonizing me. Someone handed me a big piece of paper with hundreds of those little pins on it. They were lined up in perfect little rows, all standing on end so that the flat pinheads were resting on the surface of the paper and the sharp points wobbling in the air. When the paper was handed to me, the pins started to fall into my bare thighs and they were sticking into my skin. I tried to stop them from falling and when I did, half of the rows fell over and directly into my thighs in their perfect rows. They were pushed into my skin all the way down to the flat pin head and so far in that I couldn't pull them out because I couldn't get a grip on them. I tried to stand up, but I could feel the pins ripping into my muscles inside my legs when I moved even slightly. I started asking my dad for help and my sister kept telling me that I was faking it to try to get out of working. My dad was agreeing with her and telling me to get up. I kept trying to convince them to help me or call 911 because I was in a lot of pain and couldn't move. They insisted that I was just scheming to get out of what I had to do and that they weren't going to help me. My sister kept prancing around and laughing like one of the step-sisters from Cinderella. I started crying - begging and pleading with them to help and believe me at the top of my lungs.

I woke up in mid-yell saying "please, that's not what I am trying to do! Please help me!". I had tears all over my cheeks and down my neck. It took me about 20 minutes to fully recover from the horrible feeling the visual in my head of the hundreds of pins pushed deep into my skin gave me.

No clue what it means, but I bet a dream analyst would have a field day with these.

*This is not a copy-cat post based on Em's. These dreams really happened yesterday.