I so cannot sleep. Which is shocking, since I barely slept at all last night. I kept waking up, but whenever I did manage to sleep I had the craziest dreams. The first one was short and rather stupid – my brother Kevin and I were for some strange reason trapped in Mexico. What’s the first thing you do when you’re stuck in a foreign country and have no way to get back home? Why, you sample the local cuisine of course! We got all excited cause we saw a Filiberto’s restaurant and immediately started chowing down on as many chimichangas as we could eat. Needless to say, I woke up with a huge craving for Mexican food.

After my quick trip to Mexico, my dreams lept ahead several years and this particular one kept recurring, no matter how many times I woke up and went back to sleep. The dream involved me, several years from now; I was married, and I had two kids. There was a daughter around 12-years-old or so, and then an incredibly cute 8-year-old boy with hair that was just the perfect shade of auburn. We were all going on a roadtrip when we run into a major storm and we’re right in the middle of some forest (no clue how that could happen, since after my Mom’s famous Petrified Forest Trip through Arizona, I’m never forcing my kids to go through “nature” vacations like that). Of course, we’re in the family’s black BMW 330i, which honestly is the only slightly realistic detail of this story. 🙂 (Well, apart from the premise that I’m married and have kids. I like to think that’s possible.)

Anyway, back to the crazy dream. So my husband – who’s driving (again, completely improbable!) – decides to stop at this huge B&B hidden in a clearing in this dense forest. We park in a gravel-coated car-park then trudge up to the house through mud, pine needles, and sheets of rain. And, naturally, the house is very large, victorian in style, and looks eerie enough as it is. You’d think we’d be smart enough to stay away, what with the lightning and how nasty the house looked. But noooOooo.

The next several hours of the dream are like some kind of bad sci-fi horror movie. Basically, this little demon keeps showing up who’s trying to kill my 8-year-old son. The catch is, of course, that no one else can see this demon thingie except for the 8-year-old boy. In several rooms throughout the house, the boy’s attacked. Sometimes there are other people present in the room, but he’s always hurt when no one’s looking. The B&B owners are constantly accusing me and my husband of putting the boy up to harming himself so we can sue them, trying to claim the place is unsafe. Somehow, that always distracts us from keeping eyes on the boy at all times, so he keeps getting hurt. Just small stuff at first – minor scrapes, bruises – all because he’ll shout out whenever he gets hurt, we jump around, and the villain disappears somehow. The boy always says, “He’s gone under there!” or “He jumped behind that thing!” But no matter how many times we look, it’s just darkness.

There’s only one thing that’s constant throughout all of these scenes that I didn’t even notice until the ending. Whenever we were in a room where my son got hurt, there was always this small, 4×6 picture on the wall in a simple, roughly-painted wooden frame. It was red, but the paint was peeling back, so there were only slight hints of it. The picture itself was some kind of pencil and ink sketch. There was a kind of circular shape in the upper left-hand corner, with very strange little dots inside of it. Off to the right and underneath this circle, there were lines and various other odd shapes. It’s kind of hard to describe, but I’m crap at drawing, so there’s no point in trying that. Suffice it to say, it was Edward Gorey-style in the sense of the harsh, solid, jagged lines, all of which just formed this odd image of a circle and some random lines to the side of it.

Anyway. So no one else had seen this demon that was after the kid. The only clue we had was that the 12-year-old girl had heard it once, when they were sitting in the breakfast nook and the demon came up and stabbed the boy in the thigh with a fork (this dream got very violent). Finally, at the big climactic ending, my husband and I are arguing once again with the B&B owners downstairs in the lobby, and we’re trying to just get our money back and just leave. Suddenly, I can hear my son screaming from upstairs. I race up to the room, where I’m standing in the doorway and I see him propped up on a bed on the opposite side of the room, his shirt all soaked with blood. He’s pointing at one of those old horrific gun cabinets that’s far too huge and has a dozen or so too many rifles inside. The thing is absolutely massive. It also just happens to be along the same wall as where I’m standing in the doorway. My eyes dart to my left, looking into the darkness between the wall and the cabinet, and I see two little glints stare back up at me. I run into the room, grab my son, and try to get back out, but the creature steps out from behind the cabinet and blocks the door.

Remarkably, the demon thing just looked like some shrunken man. (Charming, isn’t it?) No aliens, no weird-colored eyes, no fangs, just this nasty little man. Somehow, he used this freakish little sticks to attack the boy repeatedly. No clue what that was about. At first I kind of thought he was just a midget or a dwarf, but he wasn’t proportioned that way. He literally just looked like a teeny man.

So a fight ensued, my husband shows up on the landing, holding onto the 12-year-old (he hadn’t followed me upstairs immediately because he wanted to make sure where the girl was). So the demon guy is surrounded. That’s when my eyes look up and I see, just above the doorway, that same picture frame. I recognize it immediately, and so does my son, who apparently noticed the exact same thing at the exact same time (convenient, eh?) My eyes look back down and I realize my husband’s not standing in the doorway anymore, but the 12-year-old girl is, who’s just smiling at me. The demon’s still in the middle, his eyes staring hungrily at the 8-year-old boy. He whispers something across the room at him, but I honestly can’t remember what it was exactly. Something to do with some old mythological rivalry, yadda yadda. You know, that cheesy stuff they add to movies like this.

All of a sudden, my husband appears quietly in the doorway again, and he’s smiling in the same manner as my daughter. He holds up his right hand, which is holding a recently loaded pistol he had grabbed from a smaller gun case out on the landing. He had disappeared to grab it, throw in some bullets, etc. He tossed it across the room at me, and of course I catch it perfectly, prep it (I know what the proper term is, I’m just not going to say it, for fear of the search queries I’ll get), and ready, aim, fire! I blast the creepy sketch to smithereens. In a scene worthy of Industrial Light & Magic, the demon melts, but not before whispering something else to the boy that no one else hears but him.

That’s when I pick up the boy, run out of the room, and the whole family runs down the stairs, heading straight for the door. We rush past the B&B owners, who are standing very still and just staring blankly at us. They never say a word, they’re just still in that creepy, melodramatic sort of way. We run out into the rain, me still holding the boy, and we race out into the car-park. We find the BMW, turn on the engine, and race away. At the very end, when we’re in the car, I turn around and ask the boy what that demon guy whispered to him. He said he wasn’t allowed to tell.

And that’s when I wake up. I like movie dreams and all, but I really don’t like the creepy ones. Sure, it was stupidly creepy, but I didn’t like the suspense involved. Until the ending, all I could feel was the fear of having my child attacked constantly. I felt like a Mommy, and I didn’t like that bit of having everything hurt just as much for me as it did for my kid, you know? I mean, I’m sure I’ll appreciate it and not mind it at all when I actually have my own kid, but come on, I’m 18, I’m just trying to sleep! I don’t need that kind of stress right now. 🙂 And great, now every time I turn around I’m afraid to see those two stupid glinty eyes… ergh. I’m too old to sleep with the lights on, people. Hehe, just kidding.

The one nice thing about that dream is I had a seriously cute family. My husband was tall, dark, and handsome – supportive, good with the kids, and obviously making enough money to buy us a top-of-the-line, decked-out 330i (my man!); my 12-year-old daughter was still kind of in that awkward stage, but she was still very beautiful, inherited my curves (although, obviously, not all the way yet) – she also inherited my husband’s dark hair, while getting a slight wave from my hair genes; the boy was small and springy, still very short, but had my hair color and strange green eyes. We were just so dang cute. I think I might have even been slightly pregnant, since my belly had that cute little rounded effect that pregnant women get during the first few stages of pregnancy. I also, for some reason, was sporting a short, straight hair-do. Go figure. What happened to the curls?

You know, my dreams are *way* too detailed. At least it makes things interesting, right? Well, for me anyway, ya’ll are probably dead bored by now. But I don’t care. It’s four in the morning, there’s nobody online to talk to, and I’m bored. So I’m sitting here in my PJs, downloading songs by Seal (which takes *forever* on dial-up), listening to the Wallflowers, and blogging.

You know, I really do want that chimichanga. It was so good in my dream, I could actually taste it. I also vaguely remember ordering a fantastic steak from Filiberto’s, which again doesn’t make sense, but I don’t care, I got to eat a steak!

Okay, about five paragraphs ago I swallowed a sleeping pill, so maybe that will help. I don’t feel tired at all, which is very bad. I think I even have to wake up at a semi-decent hour tomorrow and actually do stuff. Unlike today, when I got to hang out in my PJs and watch stupid movies cause I felt all miserable.

To end on a happy note, I’m proud to say that I have been very good over the past three weeks. I have been exercising a lot every day, trying to trim down my thighs and hips. And, I’m even more proud to say that it’s working! I actually had to go buy new unmentionables today because I’ve slimmed down so much the old unmentionables didn’t fit. I’m so proud of myself. I only did exercises that didn’t hurt too much because I’ve been having problems with my joints popping repeatedly, which is very bad, can lead to scar tissue developing around new muscle, etc. So instead I’m back to my old routine of about 200 leg-lifts on each side while watching television, and trying to ride my exercise bike for at least an hour a day. Completely low stress, no popping joints, and fast results. I’m happy. Of course, it does hurt, I can feel the burn and when doing sets of 50 leg-lifts at a time, it can really become painful. But it’s worth it.

I think it’s time to go lay down now. Alas, I have run out of things to blog about. Good night! Or rather, good morning!