not again!

I'm cursed! All I wanted was an innocent little nap! And I didn't even get under the covers this time. I lay like a medieval saint on the living room sofa, broad daylight, hands folded on my chest. And then I had the scariest dream, all the more scary because it was so lifelike! This time I was taking a nap, in my dream, on the living room sofa, when I began to feel a sensation of heat on the side of my head. I reached up, and a whole section of my hair had burned off from having one of the ceiling light fixtures descend on me. (Yet another reason to banish overhead lighting, as if the unflattering light weren't reason enough.)

So I lay there taking the burned hair off my head, when I realized I was lying on wood, not the sofa. I sat up and I was on the teak dining room table. Then I got up fully and none of the furniture was in the right place. I remembered I was having lunch with Becky and looked at my watch to make sure I wasn't late, and my watch was upside down. I leaped up and looked frantically around the room, thinking as I did so, "I'm dreaming, I'm dreaming, so I'll just walk into the kitchen and everything will be normal." I walked toward where the kitchen should be, passing a basket of laundry I hadn't done (and I don't have a basket), and in the kitchen was all my living room furniture.

Then I told myself for REAL that I HAD to wake up! And I did. Any dream analysis I have ever done tells me nothing this time. I have had crazy dreams in the past, back when I owned the gallery, of having a mouthful of unending oatmeal; no matter how much I tried to get rid of it, more appeared. And even I (with a perfectly good PhD but not in psychology) knew that that dream was about my then-life of always having to say the perfect thing to everyone, never being able to say what I really thought. Artists to placate, employees to soothe, clients to suck up to, landlords to pay. But furniture in the wrong place? Hair burning? I'm stumped. So anybody who knows anything about this is welcome to come forth.

Meanwhile, in my little anxiety-wracked household, Keechie is showing signs of my attempts to wean her off her twice-daily doses of Valium. There is just no doubt that she is a happier cat on the stuff. I skipped this morning, really trying to get her down to the nightly dose the vet thinks is sufficient (of course the ramifications are not on his duvet, they're on mine). And just now my neighbors Janet and John stopped in to borrow a few chairs for a meeting they're having and... poor Keechie must have flashed back to moving day, because she flattened herself like a ferret and slithered as fast as she could to the safety of downstairs. I myself flashed back to Avery's birthday and the extremely expensive dry cleaning bill that ensued, and followed her down. But she had just hidden under a chair, and now she's back up here in my study at my feet, looking a bit nutty.

Ah well, the other three of my feline children and my actual human child seem stalwart enough. So far.