To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

 The nice part about my daughters having a two week break from school is that we all get to sleep a little later. Granted, we are all also staying up later, but it still feels like catching up on missed sleep. It might be that I don’t have to wake up at 6:30 every morning, or maybe the lack of rushing around all day, but I definitely seem to be getting more rest. For me, more rest means more dreams, and the more rest I get, the more vivid and bizarre the dreams.

Seriously, these aren’t your run of the mill dreams. Every night is a new indie film, not the good story kind, but the ones full of weird shit that is weird just to be weird. I attribute it to the tremendous deficit of sleep on which I normally function, so it is nice, really nice, when I can aim for more than six hours a night for a couple of weeks. The downside to the weird ass dreams is that I wake up exhausted from a busy night of mind fucking, so I question how much rest I am actually banking.

A few nights ago, I had a dream that I was babysitting a friend’s child. This was no particular friend or child, just sort of a generic one my mind created. Really, it wasn’t a dream about your kid. I had to watch the child in a hotel room, but for some reason I still had to go back to my friend’s house in order to take care of her pets. The child had a mass of curly hair on its head, more mop-like than bowl cut, but the style was so gender neutral that I had no idea if I was sitting a boy or a girl. Whatever it was, it was a real brat, whining and abusing the hotel fixtures and such. I threatened to tell on it if it didn’t go to sleep, and I left it alone at the hotel room to go check on the pets.

I don’t remember what one of the pets was, but the other one was a kangaroo. If you aren’t up on your Australian marsupials, then you might not realize how big kangaroos can be. This one was fucking huge, yet my friend kept her indoors and expected her to use a litter box, which are designed for cats that normally weigh less than fifteen or twenty pounds.

The kangaroo could not fit in the box. She sort of turned around and aimed for the litter box, but urinated all over the floor instead. I don’t know the output of the average kangaroo, but this one pissed so much it left about an inch and a half of urine flooding the floor of the laundry room. Which, incidentally, was the laundry room of my childhood home. I grabbed a couple of old towels from a pile on a shelf above the dryer and threw them on the ground to try to sop up the kangaroo piss, but they just floated on the surface until they were saturated. And as I was swishing the old towels around to absorb the urine, I thought, I am only getting paid ten dollars an hour to watch this kid and the kangaroo, which is not nearly enough to deal with this shit.

That’s all I remember.

The next night, I had a dream my husband decided to go back to school. He left the girls and me to go live near college, but was living off campus in an odd townhome. It had multi levels with stairs that required you go up and then down to enter a room, then a separate stair case that also made you go up and then down to get to the next level. It was the dream version of an Escher drawing, except for his bedroom. it was in a separate building, but only the top level, like a garage apartment. In order to access it, you had to climb a rope with a small plastic disc on the bottom.

E, my older daughter, tried to get into the room, but she didn’t have the upper body strength to climb the rope. I tried and was able to climb the rope all the way to the hole in the floor that was the portal to the bedroom. In the real world, I couldn’t do one pull up, but in this dream I was a bad ass.

When I got to the top of the rope, I had to move the petal-life covering over the entryway. They felt like some firm plastic or aluminum siding, but they were covered in silver duct tape, and you had to lift each one out in order to uncover the opening. The floor of the room was wall to wall mattress, with pillows thrown everywhere. A small lamp was attached to one wall, and the rest of the walls had windows with small blinds and long cords. I looked around and thought, what if he had to go to the bathroom? My husband would have to climb down the rope in the middle of the night and then go up and down all those stairs to get to a bathroom. What was he thinking, renting this stupid townhouse?

The next night, I had a dream that I corrected everyone’s grammar throughout an entire conversation. I don’t recall the conversation itself, to whom I was talking, the setting, any other details. Just that the grammar was atrocious, and I couldn’t stop myself. I am sure somewhere in the dream was a bathroom or someone going to the bathroom, because if it doesn’t involve a bathroom trip, it isn’t one of my dreams. I just don’t remember that part, unless the conversation was about going to the bathroom.

Now that the school break is over, I can go back to being sleep deprived. Sometimes it’s just more restful to be too tired to dream.