My sleeping habits have been all but regular lately. This morning, I woke at an unnecessary hour to the blaring of a hungry cat, so I stumbled downstairs and spooned some mash into his bowl. Crawling back into bed, I found I couldn’t go back to sleep right away. Through the fuzzy lens of my near-sightedness, I noticed a strange shape of light on my ceiling. The light from the street lamps, or possibly the moon, streamed in between my blinds in such a way as to project a kitchen-knife above my head. When I finally did get back to the business of sleeping, the knife of light had managed to work its way into my subconscious.
I dreamt that I was standing in a strange bedroom, chatting with two other people. One was one of my girl friends (though I don’t remember which one); the other was Max, a friend-of-a-friend. I was tidying up the dresser space, sorting gaudy jewelry and other items in front of a huge oval mirror trimmed in oak. The topic of conversation I don’t recall either. I did grow increasingly uncomfortable as the two continued to chat.
At one point, Max laughed at something I said; probably something naive or hopelessly dumb, as I am wont to do in waking life. Then he came up to me and, almost gently, held my face with his hands. “Hold still for a sec,” and he had the knife in his hands. He didn’t so much as slash my face, per se, but rather, swiftly traced quick lines up and down my cheeks.
As you can imagine, I was quite put off by this. I looked in the mirror and saw two deep, vertical red trenches cut into my face. Raised pinkling bumps surrounded the trenches on either side. I screamed, and he and the other companion laughed. “God, calm down a bit,” he said nonchalantly, as if I had been screaming about a paper cut.
“But my face!” I protested.
“It’ll heal,” he said. And, by the end of the dream, it did.
(Can you tell I have been wanting to use that line forever? I didn’t call my blog “bad metaphor” for nothin’.)
Had a dream that I was at a fancy-ish dinner party last night. A bunch of hot shot professors in tweedy leather-patches-at the elbows jackets, dress suits and scowls on their faces. The first course was che, a usually very tasty Vietnamese dessert drink with beans and jelly (trust me, it’s better than it sounds). The che was oddly swampy like, yet edible enough and a big hit.
After that was mostly finished, we sat around and chatted, and began eating our wine glasses. People would casually snap some glass off with their fingers, pop it into their mouths, and crunch it like candy. I ate quite a bit of my glass, and when I was just about to the stem, I looked up and saw the host glaring at me. Oh, dear! I had committed a social gaffe, eating all of his good expensive stemware.
My English advisor walked in at that point, looked at my glass and looked at me; I had crystal crumblets stuck to my lips. She shook her head, as if to say, “why did you just eat glass you idiot,” and I wanted to point out that everyone else at the table had been eating theirs - yet, when I turned back to look at the others, their glasses were in pristine condition, except for a few shards broken off here and there. At this point I realized that I would commit another social gaffe if I couldn’t eat any more actual food because my stomach was full of glass. I excused myself to the powder room and tried, as gently as possible, to coax all of the glass back out. I vomited a constant stream of diamonds, and occasionally, rubies.
I must have slept very poorly last night, because I had another dream, this time involving tarantulas that had taken over my house. The first one I noticed as I was standing in my living room with a bunch of people. It dangled over our heads, like the Sword of Damacles (I guess it had eight of its own little swords). It was LARGE, bulky like a tarantula, but without the fur, pale brown with a dull sheen. It had markings like a fiddleback, only larger and more pronounced. Its cluster of eyes blinked at us.
“We have to get rid of that thing,” I said, and suddenly everybody remembered they had pressing business elsewhere, and vanished. The boy, who was there, looked askance at the spider, then shrugged: “I ain’t touching that thing.” I called my management in a desperate bid to see if the maintenance people took care of grotesque arachnid removal. Luckily, they did, and they came over wielding those grabby-stick things that people use to pick up litter. The spider hissed as it was relocated.
More and more spiders popped up after the maintenance people left. The boy and I were canoodling on the couch, when I happened to touch the back of my head and find a slimy, squirmy mass. Screeching, I pulled whatever it was out - in my hand was a blackened, curled up tarantula, smeared with blood (the tarantula’s or mine, I wasn’t sure), and matted hair (mine). I stared at it, horrified, for minutes, until I had the presence of mind to fling it away from me across the room, where it landed with a sickly splat.
“Where are all of these coming from?!” I yelled. “Tarantulas aren’t native to Kansas!” *
Sheepishly, the boy informed me that he had, unbeknownst to me, released them into the house as part of a science experiment. He proceeded to explain that these spiders were harmless, that they were beneficial to the ecosystem (of my apartment!), and that I would just have to get used to them.
I woke up before I had a chance to throttle the dream-him! My hair was spider-free, though I did have a bit of a sore throat.
* - As it turns out, there are tarantulas running around Southwest Kansas. Another region on my list of places NEVER TO VISIT, EVER.