What a nightmare...

...literally. Woke up crying from a dream in which this little boy appeared in my house, and I knew it was actually Satan in disguise. (The boy was in a disguise, too--a Superman one, for some reason.) He was soooo cute, like, 4 years old or so, with curly blond hair and perfect little white teeth and a great big 4 year old grin, and just being a little boy by wrestling around and being goofy. But then he got hold of some wooden thing off our mantel (that we don't have in real life) and swung it at me, and when it hit me it nearly killed me. So I started defending myself, and this little boy just thought I was playing; he didn't realize Satan was using him to try to kill me. And I realized, I have to either kill this little boy and thus destroy the vessel Satan is using in order to save myself, or I have to let myself be killed. And I couldn't do it, I couldn't kill this little boy. I kept trying to defend myself and hit him as gently as I could, but then he just got mad and started hitting me more. And then I thought I'd woken up, because I fainted and when my eyes opened my mom was there. But she looked all weird, all pale and undead-like (thanks to the five minutes of "Resident Evil" that I saw Dan watch while I was making dinner last night) and I realized I wasn't dreaming, this was reality. And then the little boy came tearing around the corner and I thought, "This is it. I'm going to die." And my mom just sat there watching while the boy acme up to me with this wooden thing and prepared to take a swing. And then I woke up sobbing and couldn't stop.

It's been a really long time since I had a serious nightmare. Every once in a while I have one of those kinds that jerks you awake and you think, "Whoa, that was scary," then take a deep breath and go back to sleep. But when I was in high school I used to have night terrors almost every week: wars, bombs, attacks, people trying to kill me or kidnap me or worse, watching people I knew die or be taken hostage. And I never read scary books or watch scary movies, because I know how impressionable my subconscious is (hello, FIVE MINUTES of "Resident Evil!"), and quite frankly my imagination doesn't need any help thinking up scary things, so I don't know where all these dreams came from. The worst is when the bad people were people I knew; because I'd see them, like a school the next day, and my gut reaction would be to run, because those dreams were so darned real.

Dan can dream lucidly, most of the time, anyway, and I'm so jealous of that. Every time I think, "This is just a dream" while I'm dreaming I'll end up "waking up" in my dream and finding it's all still there. But he can know it's a dream and play around with it for a while, and then wake himself up if it gets out of his control. And he rarely remembers his dreams, whereas mine are always so detailed and vivid that they become like a set of memories from another life or something. I actually had a dream in college that was a full-on movie, complete with dissolves from one scene to another, cameras that panned across as view and zoomed in or out on certain subjects, and a musical soundtrack! And it was an almost complete story, just missing the very beginning to explain how exactly I got into Thailand, but it had a complete plot and a twist ending and everything. I started writing it as a book my sophomore year, back when I used to actually keep things on disks instead of my hard drive, and I left the disk down in the computer lab where I'd gone to print something for class and it got stolen. I still remember the entire thing, though, and one of these days, if I can muster the energy to do some serious research on Thailand and prostitution rings (piqued your curiosity yet?) I'll write it.

But right now it's time for breakfast and some mindless morning TV to purge that nasty dream from my day, lest it cast a pall over the rest of my Monday. Hope you had a better night than I did!