Wednesday, July 15, 2009

To sleep: perchance to nightmare

I had one heck of a strange nightmare last night.

I was part of a large group of people at an older house, the kind whose interior door have windows. That seems like a small detail now, but it comes into play.

I forget how but we learned that a UFO had landed on the expansive front lawn overnight. We went to see it. It wasn't your average UFO, but was a golden disk a few inches across with a surface patterned in squares. It looked almost like a fantastically reduced circuit board. The disk would "flip pages" - that's what it looked like. Thin golden sheets would rise from the surface and fall back to it like you would flip pages in a book, sort of. There was no spin and the pages would not fold under the disk - they would just melt back down.

We also found a wedge of grey-white hair on the grass. the hair was thick at the "heel" end and fanned out thinner until it disappeared, although a few small columns of this hair stood up like marshmallows. I interpreted it to be some sort of footprint, and the columns as negative casts of suckers on the bottom of the foot that made it. No one could explain why an alien foot would leave a single footprint made of hair. I suggested that maybe the foot had scraped the hair off.

(One look at the real home we share with Crash the Shedding Samoyed would tell you where the hair in my dream came from.)

I discovered more of this hair elsewhere on the lawn, but this was no footprint. Here, the hair had woven itself, anchored itself in the lawn. Polyps of hair budded on long stalks that rose from the mat-like foundation. It was freaky, like a hair colony.

We assumed we were seeing remnants of an extraterrestrial visit but that the actual UFO was long gone. The gold disk was a forgotten tool, and not a tiny spacecraft.

We retired to the house, and my dream took on a third-person perspective, like a movie. One friend was looking out the window at night when a ghastly white head flashed across the window and disappeared in milliseconds. It was so scary, the sight of it killed my friend. A second friend succumbed the same way. This head was long and thin with black soulless eyes and a gaping mouth. With my perspective I would see it malevolently and instantaneously flash across the window. It was scaring us to death.

We stayed away from exterior windows, but a third friend choked and died when he saw this head on one of the interior windows in a door.

I was scared. I don't know what happened in the rest of the dream because Elvi poked me awake. I was making noises and she thought I was having a nightmare. She was right and it ended there.

Bonus sleep talk:

I haven't blogged much lately because although healthy, I'm exhausted. I keep waking up before 6:00 a.m. and I'm unable to get back to sleep. It's leaving me in a daze during my most productive hours and I'm struggling to keep up with work. The mono forced me to drop authorship of what would have been my next airplane book (although I will edit it) but I now have a backlog of some 120 class assignments to grade. I'm in school all day Monday and Thursday teaching, and with all the creative procrastinating I'm doing, and some computer consulting work, and time I'm making sure I spend with Elvi, and coaching baseball, I'm not getting as much done as I should. And I end up writing paragraphs like this that don't make sense.