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.

Whistleblower

A long holiday break is the perfect time to go to the movies. Normally, we are too busy on the weekends throughout the year with activities and impromptu trips and birthday parties to go see movies on any kind of regular basis. When we do find time, we can’t seem to find anything worth seeing, as the good movies are released only in summer or over the holidays. The movie industry is fully aware that no one goes to the movies the rest of the year, so it saves the good stuff for those four months, emptying our pockets at the exact time when any extra dough has already been earmarked for travel or gifts.

A few days after Christmas, my sister, LM, was in town for a quick holiday visit.  We decided to see “Saving Mr. Banks,” a movie about Walt Disney acquiring the rights to the story of “Mary Poppins” from the story’s creator, Mrs. P. Travers, a woman who was apparently a bit of a bitch. We took my younger daughter, S, along with us, as she too appreciates a darkened theater and a bucket of popcorn. We all three wanted to see the movie even though none of us particularly likes “Mary Poppins,” what with all the singing and the odd British references and the hour too long part. We do like Tom Hanks, though, and Walt Disney and period pieces, and LM had dumped a box of Raisinets on top of the popcorn, so things were already looking to be swell.

Now, spoiler alert: this is not an action movie. S didn’t really get most of what was going on, as she tends to be a concrete, literal thinker, but LM and I were having a splendid time, followed by some tears, us, not S, followed by the need for a wad of tissues and digging in the bucket for the last chocolate covered raisin. In addition to some fairly emotional moments, the movie was also chock full of musical tidbits, the kinds of scenes that leave you humming on your way out of the theater. We enjoyed ourselves tremendously.

After the over two hour movie ended, S made a beeline for the restroom while LM and I continued to gingerly dab at our eyes. We decided to drown our sorrows in a quick romp to the after Christmas insanity that is Target. I do believe Target is more crowded after Christmas than it is before. I understand the joy that comes with seventy percent off wrapping paper, but seriously, folks, is it worth fighting for a parking space? We had an actual purpose for going there, seeing as S has blown her nose in every Kleenex in my house and has worked her way through the entire box of Mucinex. Also, I needed more gift tags for next year.

When we finally got inside, LM and I both realized that we also needed to use the restroom. She got the last empty stall, so I waited patiently for my turn. I could hear my sister humming in the bathroom stall. It didn’t sound like any of the “Mary Poppins” songs, but what did I know? It didn’t make any sense to me that my sister would be humming a nursery rhyme, but there she was, humming away as she peed, and it sure as shit sounded like something straight from Mother Goose.

After she left the stall, I entered and then had a twenty second debate with myself: to paper or not to paper? Normally, in public, the answer is always “yes, to paper,” but my sister just used this particular toilet, and I knew she would have put down paper before me. So was it necessary? There would still be the germs present from the thousands of restroom goers before her, so yes, paper it was. I am not one of those inconsiderate squatters who think they are all that, you know, the ones who end up pissing all over the seat for us paperers to discover. That forces you to mop up someone else’s pee with a giant wad of toilet paper, then flush it, leaving those in line waiting on you to think you are doing the courtesy pre flush before you blow it up in there, when in actuality, you are cleaning up a perfect stranger’s piss so you can start the papering process all over again.

Anyway, I peed, I flushed, I washed my hands, and I left the bathroom. My sister and daughter waited right outside the door, and when they saw me, they burst into song. The song was “Knick, Knack, Paddy Whack,” the nursery rhyme my sister was just humming in the bathroom. Also, they didn’t burst into song; just my sister did. My daughter looked at the floor waiting for the hole to appear, the one she was praying for to swallow her up.

“So that’s what you were whistling!” I said to her. “I couldn’t recognize that song from the movie we just saw, but it did sound familiar.”

“I wasn’t whistling,” she said. “It was that other lady in there.”

“That wasn’t you just whistling in the bathroom? Seriously? That wasn’t you? I totally thought that was you!” I laughed.

“Hell no!  What, do you think I’m crazy? That was some other weirdo whistling ‘Knick Knack Paddy Whack.’”

“She’s just the weirdo singing it,” S said under her breath.

“Yeah, I tried to get this one to join me,” my sister pointed in my daughter’s direction, “but she wouldn’t do it.”

“I don’t know why you wanted me to sing in public outside of the bathroom, that’s why,” S said to her.

“I wanted you to do it because it was going to be funny,” she said.

“Trust me, it was,” I told them both.