Generally speaking, I am a fairly light sleeper, and I wake up frequently throughout the night. Part of this is because for some reason I am not a very well made human being, and if I stay in one position too long, those muscles start to hurt. This means I wake up pretty frequently during the night, although usually just to roll over or curl up or something. Another reason I wake up a lot is that I have very vivid, intense dreams with complicated but very clear plot lines.
You may remember me writing about the dream where I invented Birth Control Cookies. (I still think that would be a good idea.)
Last night I had a very involved dream about how I was trying to stage my own death. Naturally, SpongeBob Squarepants made an appearance.
The dream started with me living at home with my parents again because I am out of a job and can no longer afford my apartment. The house is the same, except it is much bigger and the trees around the house are less like Minnesotan foliage and more like an enormous, wild jungle complete with vines and noisy birds squawking all the time. My bedroom is crammed full of kitchen items, my piano, cat toys, etc. and there are even things hanging from the ceiling and clinking together in the breeze.
For whatever reason, it became apparent to me that my life and the lives of all the people I love were in eminent danger. The bad guys wanted me dead, and they were going to stop at nothing to make it happen. They're plan was clear to me. They were going to start torturing and killing off my loved ones in an effort to get to me, then they were going to kill me by slicing me up into little pieces.
Naturally, I did not want this to happen. In an attempt to save my life and everyone else's lives, I started building a super-secret-can't-even-be-found-by-someone-with-Hollywood-movie-versions-of-government-equipment home out in the jungle. Things were going quite well, although I was grief stricken that I would have to leave everyone and my entire life behind in order to live a life of solitude in my jungle apartment that I had built in about two days. Again, naturally, I would also stage my own death by spreading blood all over a knife and a wall in my bedroom so that loved ones would think I was dead, peg me as a lost cause, mourn, maybe have a funeral, but ultimately be safe from harm.
I began making trips from my bedroom at my parents' house out to my luxury jungle apartment, bringing things little by little. Naturally, I had to be very sneaky about it, and only move things in the dead of night or when everyone was at work. If my friends or family got wise of my plan, they might try to stop me and stand up to the bad guys, or if they knew where I was, the bad guys would get it out of them and then kill them. For some reason, as long as everyone I knew stayed ignorant of my whereabouts, these particular bad guys were just going to leave them alone.
Anyway, so I am bringing my belongings out to my apartment little by little, and on my way back to my parents' house to get the last batch of supplies, I tripped on a rock, got tangled in a vine, and fell head-first onto another rock. When my head hit the second rock, it sliced off a huge piece of the skin on the right side of my head. The pain was excruciating. The skin was still attached, but barely, and blood was oozing out at an alarming rate.
Irregardless of this devastating wound, I had a job to do. I began to wobble around and try to make my way out of the jungle. Eventually, I made it to the driveway, but I was so disoriented from pain and blood loss that I forgot where I was going and started wandering down the driveway towards the street.
Once I reached the end of the driveway, I met a group of children waiting for the school bus. They smiled and waved at me until I got closer, then they all started screaming at me to get away. This was probably due to the massive head wound and the expression on my face. To make matters worse, some hawks and crows started screeching and diving down towards me in an attempt to pick off the flesh hanging from my skull. This upset the children even more, and when the bus driver arrived to pick them up, he frowned and chastised me for scaring the children.
Confused and a little lost, I still knew I had some sort of important deadline to meet. Hoping to jog my memory, I began walking down the bike path. I met some of my neighbors riding horses, but all they could tell me was that maybe I was supposed to be helping another neighbor build a gate to prevent intruders from going up their driveway. This meant nothing to me, so I kept walking. Eventually I came to the unfinished gate at the neighbor's house, and everything came flooding back to me.
I began hobbling back through the jungle, trying desperately to take the most efficient route back to my parents' house to get some food and get back to my jungle apartment before my friends showed up. At this point, I am also limping because I got tangled up in another vine, and I've broken my glasses from walking into a tree trunk, so I'm looking pretty forlorn. I manage to make it back to the house, grab the bag of food, and head out to the jungle.
Unfortunately, the bad guys have arrived. They are not happy, and they shoot me in the right arm, so now I'm gushing blood from my arm and have lost the ability to use it in any way. I dropped the bag of groceries and ran as fast as I could towards the jungle. I knew if I could make it in, I would have a bit of an advantage since I was familiar with the turf, and the bad guys weren't.
Luckily, I made it into the jungle without getting shot again. Unfortunately, my friends are sitting at a table made out of a giant tree stump sitting on stools made out of smaller tree stumps. They invite me to come play a game with them. I knew I couldn't refuse. If I refused, they'd instantly know what was happening, and all of my work would have been for naught and the bad guys would come and kill us all. So, I did what any person in my shoes would do, which is sit down on a tree stump to play SpongeBob Squarepants war.
Completely oblivious to my many severe injuries, my friends dealt the cards. The cards had pictures of SpongeBob characters on them, but the characters were dressed in renaissance clothing. Each card had only one character on it, but the image could be repeated so there were varying numbers of images on each card. Also, in each card, the color of the clothing on the character was different.
Try as I might, I could not figure out the game. I kept losing, and the blood from my head wound kept getting in my eyes and making it difficult for me to react to some plays. Unfortunately, I would not be able to safely leave this stump table until I won a round. Not knowing the rules of the game, and having all my friends refuse to explain them to me, I was at a serious disadvantage. The panic set in as I could hear the bad guys making their way towards us through the think jungle plant life. A monkey jumped on the table and stole my card that had three Patricks wearing purple renaissance outfits.
And then I woke up. I don't think I have ever had a dream involving so much blood before. I think if I had slept another couple of minutes, one of my legs would have been lopped off or something, and I would have been hopping through the jungle with a bleeding stump-of-a-leg.
I'm sure a dream analyst or psychoanalyst or someone would have a hayday with my dreams. It is probably all about my current professional insecurities and uncertainties, but it is more interesting to not think about it that way too much and to approach the dream as a completely separate thing unto itself. It is like its own little story.
It probably means I am insane. Remember how I said I'm getting weirder all the time? Remember when I finally came to the conclusion that I am definitely an acquired taste? Maybe this is the crazy just getting crazier.
And this dream really wasn't as amusing or useful as the Birth Control Cookie dream.
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