Yesterday evening, I couldn’t seem to stay awake. I couldn’t concentrate on one thing for more than about five to ten minutes at a time, and all I wanted to do was sleep. I resisted the temptation because I’ve been feeling lazy enough lately as it is, but going to sleep at eight seemed more than excessively early to me. Drowsiness won over, however, and I conked out around nine, only to wake up multiple times all night long–sometimes for a few minutes, often for about a half hour or more.

Every time I woke up, it was from some strange and bizarre dream. I don’t like dreaming. More often than not, my dreams are scattered, freakish, disturbing, phobia-inducing, or just plain busy to the point where I feel I’ve been running around for an extra couple hours rather than getting any rest. Last night was one of those nights. Thankfully I don’t remember much about most of them, but a couple of them stand out in my mind as particularly vibrant.

The first one I remember (not that I’m sure of this order at all, mind you, but it’s the first to come to mind just now) involved Ian, Damien, Miller, and me. I guess that somewhere in my dream self’s past, I’d slept with Damien, and it pissed Ian off (understandably so–Damien’s his best friend, not that sleeping with other people would be any better or worse). So what did Ian do? He made a slide show about it. Yeah, crazy, but that’s what the dream Ian did. It was a bunch of slides of a black brick wall. He started at the upper left hand corner and started zooming in on random bricks where he’d written things with a gold pen, but the writing was so small, I couldn’t read it. Nor could Miller who was the only other person watching this presentation. So Ian would zoom in to a particular brick, then zoom back out to the wall, scroll across to the right until zooming in on another brick, glare at me without saying anything, then move on to the next brick with gold letters. Hell, even the dream me was confused as heck as to why this was his retaliation at my having slept with Damien. Insane.

The second dream I remember with much clarity involved the school bus my family used to ride when we were little (and which Simon still rides, I believe), bus #3 with Richard Summers as the driver. And yeah, that’s the bus Katie ran a red and white, full-sized van into as well, just for your information. For some odd reason, there were only about four or five of us on the bus, and they were all family members: Jennifer, Eric, Maria, me, and I keep thinking there was someone else but I’m not sure who. Sarah, maybe. So we’re on the bus riding it from Terre Haute to Loogootee (on roads I’d never seen before, naturally), and I point out the left windows at the darkened clouds and say, “Hey, that looks like a funnel cloud.” Richard looked at it and said, “That’s no funnel cloud; that’s a tornado!” Because it had, in fact, just touched to the ground and was headed our way. For the next half hour or more of my dream, we were beset upon on all sides by black tornados, ripping up trees to throw in our path or even just sliding alongside the right side of the bus sending a shower of glass onto everyone as it broke every single window. Somehow, Rich drove the bus into a building which had been torn in half, and we all jumped out and scrambled for the basement. Once there, I realized it looked a lot like my parents’ basement, except not the real one–the one I always use to represent their basement in my dreams. About the only thing it has in common with the real basement is the placement of the stairs, the washer and dryer, the bathroom and the two farthest bedrooms. I directed everyone to the bathroom because it has no windows and because someone could sit in the tub. We hunkered down and decided to wait out the storm huddled on the concret floor together. I don’t remember how that dream ended.

The last dream I had was about Sarah’s wedding, sort of. All the bride’s maids were out shopping for the make-up we were going to wear to the wedding. Caroline was along even though she’s not a bride’s maid, and I ended up spending most of my time walking around with her because she seemed to know this mall better than me. The mall was gigantic, and the department store where we were shopping was huge as well. It had an entire section for make-up which was about the size most department stores have for the women’s clothing section. Seriously, it was that huge. So, naturally, I was lost as heck because other than nail polish and nail polish remover, I spend no time whatsoever in the make-up sections of stores. I think I might actually be allergic to the stuff. Regardless, in the dream, Carrie helped me pick out blush, eye shadow and mascara. I asked her where the compacts were, and she brought me to the foundation section. I told her that that wasn’t what I was looking for, and she just started running off looking at all the make-up so she could buy some for herself. I ended up just following along behind her, occasionally seeing the other bride’s maids and asking them where the compacts were, but Katie, Sarah, Jessica, Beth and Jolene were far too busy shopping to notice. I ran into Mom and Aunt Paula at one point, but they were talking and didn’t answer me when I asked them where the compacts were. So I just started wandering around on my own and ended up just staying in the section with nail polish and lipstick. I rummaged through nail polish for a while, looking at all the colors and looking at some strange metallic ones which were multicolored when Carrie found me again. She grabbed my arm to drag me off somewhere, and so I asked her where the compacts were. I woke up never having gotten the answer.

There were a lot of other dreams in there as well. I think one of them had to do with eating out in a restaurant which was a cross between Dairy Queen and Garfield’s or something, but I don’t remember it well. What I do know is that I slept roughly from nine last night until six this morning and barely feel like I’ve gotten any rest. I’m going to try and occupy my brain today with cross stitching, DnD, and sudoku. Maybe I’ll sketch too, or something. I feel like I need to keep my brain going, but after all the chaotic gymnastics it ran through last night, do I really want to encourage it?