Strange Awakenings

I figured the day would be slightly odd when a nightmare woke me around 4AM. It wasn't anything like a giant spider or my son in harm's way or [insert standard terrible fears here]. No, my dream involved an unusually thin, ambulatory, life-size Santa Claus doll made out of cloth. And that bastard wanted to rassle.

Here's the context: I was in some old Victorian house with another person (he/she was only outlined hazily in the dream) playing Ghost Hunters essentially, waiting for something to happen. And lo, I look into a darkened hall and see the white fur on a Santa suit. We immediately investigate. The unknown partner mutters something about "orb activity" and "EMF" this or that, while I decide to provoke the Standing Santa Doll. (And it was standing all by itself, without strings or a stand or being a mannequin or whathaveyou.) Bad Santa grabs my thumbs unkindly. I somehow manage to gain control and hurl him up the stairs like the cloth doll he is. Then the sumbitch gets back up and comes back down the stairs, ready to really dish it out.

That's when I woke up. But I was so tired, that my body was trying to go right back to sleep, but I didn't want to back to sleep and risk finding out what Possessed Bad Santa had in mind for me. So I fought to stay awake and distract myself for about a half hour or so. The rest of my sleep was dream-free as far as I know.

In addition to the general WTF quality of this dream, I'm now struck by the ability I seem to have developed of easing the terror and fright of my nocturnal musings by either 1) recognizing it's a dream early on (not enough to lucid dream), and telling my dreaming self that I've already had this dream before, and I remember that X monster is going to jump out here or Y bad guy will get his in the end or 2) retconning my dreaming self into expecting the bad turn of events by being there specifically to study them (like being a Ghost Hunter). Thus it's been quite some time since I've had a truly terrifying, must turn on all the lights, whimper in hubby's arms nightmare. It's a fairly neat trick. No idea how I did it, of course.

So Tired

Ugh, it's going to be one of those Mondays. I slept on my shoulder wrong, I had a bad dream about my cat choking on pennies and needing CPR (I have never claimed to accept responsibility for what my subconcious spits out at night), and I'm ready for a four hour nap. So, ugh. I'm supposed to do some worldbuilding today, but coherent thought is difficult (I'm really surprised I can even write this). On the plus side, I have now gone through my entire music collection and ripped the songs I wanted for my Media Player Library. And I wrote 1800 words yesterday in Red Rocks. Next week, Mark will be out of town at a conference, and I plan to get a lot of writing and revising done then. Well, I won't have much of a choice, seeing as how I don't sleep well at all when Mark's not here. Better to get something done than stare at the ceiling until exhaustion kicks in. Damn, I'm really tired. I started salivating at the idea of just laying in bed.

Dreams

OK, how about another trip into Kellie's subconscious. It's a dark, dangerous place, but together we can navigate it. So my brain decided to kick up some dreams this weekend. Friday night (or maybe it was Saturday night), I had a dream that I was back teaching high school. Of course, the school itself was really sweet, nice big windows, huge classrooms, tons of supplies, great students. You name it. The funny thing is I was still working at IBM. And after a really good day of teaching, Dream Kellie was trying to figure out how she could teach and be a secretary at the same time. Very odd. But it was a nice dream. It's actually the second dream I've had about teaching in the past couple months. I really don't want to think about what my subconscious might be telling me with this. I'm not ready to rock my boat with thoughts like that.

The other dream? At some point this morning, in between snoozes I'm pretty sure, I had a dream that I was in some nice big house with all sorts of people I didn't know (including Tim McGraw - whose picture I saw on the cover of a magazine while grocery shopping last night) and we were getting ready to have some kind of party. Well, Tim McGraw decides to take an active interest in me (not to worry, I was still single in this dream) and I, of course, had absolutely no problems with this. So while things get, shall we say, interesting, at this nice big house, everyone else goes to the party. And gets mowed down by mobsters with machine guns. But Tim and I are fine. In fact, we're more than fine. And just when I'm coherent enough to realize that continuing this dream might be odd, but I wouldn't really mind it all that much, the alarm wakes me up fully.

So what important life lessons should I take from these things? That I shouldn't have quit teaching? That I should be trying to off Faith Hill so I can get with Tim? And what the heck do mobsters killing a bunch of housemates as I have a merrily old time with a studly country singer mean?

But here's the biggest question: Do I really want to know?