It’s long. Deal.

Maya woke me at 4:30 in the morning with the characteristic sounds of a dog getting ready to heave up something delightful. Mark and I have both become amazingly adept at leaping from bed and maneuvering the offending animal onto the tile floor to ease in clean-up. I’ve been known to fling the cat while still half asleep if she even thinks about depositing a hairball on top of my sleeping form. Maya, at about 65 pounds, isn’t flingable, but I was able to spin her upper body around in time. She threw something up that was not the dog food we give her, so I guess our little lab is a great and mighty huntress now. I climbed back in bed and had this bizarre moment where I looked down at my belly and thought for a moment, in my half-awake fog, that I wasn’t pregnant and had to grab at my belly and feel around for the baby in a slight panic. I read for a bit, just in case she decided to go a second round and then turned out the lights to settle back to sleep.

To sleep.

Perchance to dream.

Uh, no. I lay there for about three hours trying to sleep but never really getting there. I heard my MIL get up and so, sent the dog upstairs for her breakfast. I heard Lily chattering herself awake and the sounds of Heidi getting her up and changed. I watched the light creep into the room and the kitty race around like a freak; all from a haze of half sleep. At about 7:30, when I should have been getting up for work, I feel into a deep sleep and had the most bizarre dream.

I often dream of my teeth breaking and fishing piece after piece out of my mouth while sobbing. This, I believe, has to do with a horrid car accident I was in as a teen on a trip down to Mexico. My best friend at the time was sitting in the back seat with just a lap belt and the impact of the crash swung her head forward, smashing her chin into the back of my seat and breaking her jaw. While we were being tended to by the nuns from the mission nearby, Misty was in shock and kept asking me over and over again, “Where am I? What happened? Why are you crying?” Then she stopped and told me there was something in her mouth. I held up a shaking hand and asked her to spit it into my palm. She deposited several of her teeth into my hand, all in fragments. This has, understandably, been showing up in various scenarios throughout my dream world ever since… although it is always my teeth and never again has it been hers.

In any event, the dream started with my teeth breaking and me trying to get to my mom, who lived in this ratty apartment in a very urban area. And my mom wasn’t my mom, but this skinny shrew who chain-smoked in the bathtub and thought I was a whiney little bitch (my mom is NONE of these things, just for the record). My brother was living in this dank, dark apartment as well and was a total freeloader jerk without his wife or son. It was like the nightmare version of my family. My mom flushed my teeth down the toilet and for some reason I had wanted to keep them. So I left, returning to work, I think and started walking through the city – which was very San Francisco-ish with steep streets and row homes. I ran into this middle aged Japanese guy in a business suit who I apparently knew and he was telling me how he wanted a photo next to a street sign that read: “Assassin Street.” He wanted this photo because he had just assassinated Pavarotti the night before and was very proud. I cannot remember who his next “target” was, but I remember wondering if I should tell anyone.

I continued along Assassin Street and at the top of the hill this makeshift temple had been erected in the middle of the street. There were all these homeless, hippie types at the temple, building it up out of boxes and scrap lumber and a Buddhist monk sitting on a platform in the middle of it all. “Is the path clear?” I asked as I tried to pass. He nodded and I climbed the stairs and tried to pass through. This is when I was tackled by a dwarf who claimed he was “just a slave” but wanted me to sit on the futon and stay for the talk. Next door was an abandoned building and I knew that lots of homeless people lived there. I remembered someone telling me about this one guy who lived there who had really screwed up eyes. One was puffy and half closed all the time and both were cross-eyed. I had been told that he was a photographer of some brilliance, but his true passion was to become the captain of his own boat and sail the Caribbean. This very same man sat down next to me and we started to talk. Just before I woke up I was thinking how incredibly pompous he was and was trying to figure out how to get myself out of talking to this guy.

Apparently waking up didn’t quite get me out of the dream. I pushed myself awake, noting that it was 8:30 and I’m usually at work by nine. On the sheet next to me, I noticed a crumpled little speck, which on closer inspection I discovered was a small crushed spider. A look in the mirror showed me that he probably bit me on the face. Gahh! In stack contrast to waking at 4:30 and thinking I wasn’t pregnant, this morning I woke feeling insanely pregnant. I rolled into the shower, stumbled up the stairs to feed myself and cuddle my happy toddler and then got myself into the car for work. I spent the next couple of hours in a surreal fog and am just now getting myself together. I feel like writing this all out is pulling me from that odd half space and I am starting to be able to function like a normal human being. Was this from last nights purple cow perchance? Or did the spider have mystic powers? If my face swells up and falls off, I say you can all blame it on the spider.