Dream a little dream for me

     Just sitting here eating a little dinner and debating whether or not I want to go to sleep tonight.  Chances are I will at some point, it is still quite early yet, being only 8:30pm and all.  But still, anymore while my sleeping schedule has been a little more regular of late, I have been going to bed most nights before 1am after all, I find myself still waking up multiple times on any give night.  The thing is, when I do go to sleep my dreams have been more vivid and in a word, weird, then I am used to.

     I had one dream a few nights ago where I was babysitting someone.  The odd thing is this person that I was babysitting was a female who, in my dream anyway, was 20 years old, though I know in real life she is actually closer to 22.  So obviously there was no need for me to be a babysitter, yet there I was doing that very thing, and I remember us going out of a house that I do not recognize, though I believe it was a house that was made into apartments, broken down in part on floors.  I say this only because we went some place and then came back and the apartment she was staying in, which was on the top floor of this house, was on fire and I remember thinking to myself that this will be the last babysitting gig I ever get.  Not that I am worried about such a thing normally, but in my dream it was a big deal.

     A night or two later I am again enjoying what should be a peaceful slumber, when I find myself standing in a toppled cornfield alongside a highway back in my hometown.  I am not the only one standing there though, there are maybe 15-20 other people standing there as well, we are watching a spectacle of sorts, cars are drag racing on the highway.  The thing is, in my mind I put a tunnel there, where there never would be one, so we would see the cars start, then enter a long tunnel and then come out at the other end, where the finish line was so we are standing there watching races that we can't see because all of the actual racing is taking place in the tunnel.  During the last race that I watched one of the cars that was involved come out of the tunnel and ran off of the road into the cornfield and rolled over next to the people that were watching the races.  Rather than do anything helpful, I just say to myself that this is incredibly boring, and I walk back to my grandmother's house (which isn't her house anymore, my cousin owns it, but in my dream it was still hers) and go inside and fall asleep on the loveseat in the living room.  When I wake up in the dream, I think to myself that I am late for work, my job is 50 some odd miles away and I have no way to get there.

     The weirdest of the dreams was last night however.  I should begin the description of it with a disclaimer, to my knowledge I have never had what I would call a violent dream, or at least one where anything that I did that was violent amounted to anything positive for me.  In those dreams usually one of a few things happen; I am in a car and I either wreck the car or the breaks either refuse to work and the car just accelerates uncontrollably; I am in some type of war scene or battle scene and I either get stabbed or shot at some point; and lastly I am in a fight with someone and even if I punch the other person involved or fight back in any way, it is like I am the 98 lb. weakling who always gets sand kicked in his face, any punch I throw lands weakly or has absolutely no effect.  All of which makes last night's dream so odd.

     I am walking with someone who can best be described as an amalgam of the three worst relationships I ever had.  It is a little bit of a stretch to be sure, but they all were dark haired and while their body types aren't all the same, they would not be considered grossly different either, so this person wasn't necessarily any single one of them, but almost like all three of them at the same time.  We are walking along something that turns into a boat dock of some sort, and while we are walking the impression is that this person is going to be moving into my residence with me.  We get to the end of the dock and she climbs down a ladder of about 5 to 6 rungs and gets into a boat below, where she begins to start grabbing things from the boat that she wants to move into my place, including a stack of 45 records.  I am standing on the pier thinking how much I don't want to be there, when I reach into my pocket to grab my cigarettes, thinking I might as well smoke while I wait.  Except my cigarettes are missing, I remember that while we were walking I left them on the window sill of a building we passed and I decide I should go back and get them, so I kick the ladder into the boat so she can't follow me, then proceed back the way we came to get my cigarettes.  Just as I am getting to the window sill where I left them, another guy is also approaching them.  I yell that those are my cigarettes, but he doesn't care, he picks up the pack, takes one out and lights it for himself.  I ask again for my cigarettes and he just laughs at me, so I punch him in the face twice and his face swells up almost instantly.  Literally a third of his face is swollen when he lifts his head and looks at me.   He reaches into his pocket and pulls out something halfway between a switchblade and a knife and is holding it in front of me, but before he can do anything with it I grab him by the wrist that is holding the knife and bend it back until I hear the snapping of the bones in his hand and he drops the knife, then I reach into his shirt pocket and grab my cigarettes, light one up and walk away.

     So as I am sitting here writing I am wondering just what awaits me when I close my eyes for the evening.