The dreams

The worst part about insomnia, other than the fear that you'll go insane and start babbling and crying in front of your coworkers, or fall asleep at the wheel and hit a toddler being pushed along in its carriage by a nun, or that you'll really never never sleep again and thus will die of overtiredness and worse yet, look really old by the time that happens, because check out these eyebags ... Jesus. Where was I?



Okay. Let's start again. Last night I had insomnia. This happens to me quite a bit, especially when I'm getting lots of writing done, so I should have been expecting it. I wasn't though, cuz you never are. You always think it's over.



The worst part of last night's insomnia was that I slept a little. That sounds better, I know, than not sleeping at all, and there is something to be said for getting at least a little sleep. Your body doesn't feel quite so sore and sandy and alien the next morning, for sure. However, when you have insomnia and sleep a little, you have to contend with the dreams.



Last night, I dreamt that I was crawling along the driveway of a cottage my family used to rent on the Cape. Why was I crawling? I don't know. That's just what I was supposed to do in this particular dream. Unfortunately, I was being pursued by a rat. Pursued is not the right word. There was a rat crawling around on the driveway, where I was also crawling, and I kept trying to get away from him, even though he wasn't chasing me. Finally, he sort of looked at me like, oh wait, I'm supposed to chase you, and then he walked stiffly over to me like a kid rigorously adhering to the blocking his director has laid out for the school play, and bit me on the hand. And I thought, fer cry-sake, I can't even make characters behave naturally in a dream. And I was totally disgusted with myself. And also a little worried that I might have typhoid from the rat bite.



Fortunately, my dream Mom was still my actual Mom, i.e. a nurse, so when she told me not to worry about it, I just washed it off and left the cottage to go wander around the parking garage at Logan Airport, which was right next door. I wandered around barefoot for awhile until a fat lady in an actual mumu told me to put on some shoes or I'd hurt my feet. I sat on a big metal box that was part of some venting system in order to put on my flipflops, and the fat lady stood beside me and leaned her meaty arms on the box and smiled sweetly at me and said, "You know what your problem is, right?"



And I said, yeah, I did.



And she said, "Well, then, you better stop it, don't you think?"



I shrugged.



"It's not too hard," she said, patting my knee. "You just have to stop freaking yourself out so much. You can do it! You're a big brave girl!"I kind of love that fat lady. I don't care if I made her up.