Don't drink and dream

I went out for dinner last night. I had 2 glasses of white and 1 of red. Bad move.

I dreamt I was walking down a dirt track between 2 big muddy lakes with a friend from 15 years ago, talking about how our friendship had lapsed and changed. As we were walking, the track had ripples going through it. People were dropping from one lake to the other through the track, walruses were undulating through the track, and we had paused to look at one of the swimmers when a massive, mud coloured croocodile came up through the path and lunged for me. I managed to fend it off with my foot, but it kept coming back. The worst of it was that it was recurring - I had to keep getting up to go to the toilet, and whenever I went back to bed, the crocodile headed for my foot again. Weird. I've never dreamt of crocodiles or walruses before.

Not very helpful

My subconscious mind is sacked. All it could give me last night was that the guy I used to work with who is now at the new company was going to ask me to marry him, and George W Bush is going to do an ad for a new small Nissan using the song Flathead by The Fratellis.

Not very helpful at all. Confused? Yes.

Snakes, why did it have to be snakes?

Last night I was staying in a caravan in a caravan park. Torrential rain started, and the water started rising around my caravan. Luckily, my neighbour in the next caravan knew what to do to deal with the flood.

First, you have to take an empty peanut butter jar, and then put a teaspoon of coffee into the base. Then you have to catch one of the snakes from underneath the flooded caravan and put it into the jar. Then put the yellow lid on tightly. If the lid isn't on tightly enough, or the lid isn't yellow it won't work. Then look closely at the snake. Check that it has small, round black eyes, and that the scales under the jawline (are they called jaws in snakes?) are the very white, almost translucent ones. Check that they poke their tongue out often and it is forked. Then throw the jar into the water.

If you fill enough of the jars with snakes and coffee, the floods will recede and everything will return to normal.

No wonder I've been so drained today. It wasn't a very restful night.

I should have turned left at Alberqueque

I've spent tonight at a trivia night run by one of my girlfriends as a fundraiser for her son's school. I went solo as the boy was having a geeky boy bonding night. He isn't a big trivia night fan either, and I'm not a massive fan of watching him sitting around bored getting cranky. The school is about a 20 minute drive from my house, but it was a little like going to another country. Set way back in a green pocket of suburbia, the roads go up and down like petrol prices, and everything is quite bucolic.

When the night was finally over, we all headed back to our cars to head home. I cleared the frost off my windows, and waited for the heat to kick in before I drove off. I decided that rather than leave the way I came, I would take the shortcut back to the main road. Some shortcut. It took me 2o minutes to get back to where I came from.

I found myself driving up hill and down dale, on roads without streetlights, with soft edges and speedhumps. The roads were dark and overhung with trees, and I had no idea what was around each corner. At the same time, the mist was getting heavier, and there were places I couldn't see more than 10 metres in front of me. Pretty scary.

I drove down a hill, with yellow signs all the way along the edges telling me that the road was narrowing. At the bottom of the hill was a give way sign, but no driveways or intersecting roads. I couldn't work out what was going on, so I turned on my high beams. It was the skinniest bridge I've ever seen. I told the car to breathe in (don't laugh - it was dark, and 12.15 and I'm a bit tired) and started driving across it. About halfway across I had the most overwhelming sensation of déja vu. I know I've crossed that bridge sometime in my life, but I've got no idea when or why. It is going to bug me for days.

I wonder what I will dream about tonight....

Oh, and in case you were wondering - our table came second, and I won a bottle of red wine in the lucky envelope and a dvd player in the raffle. Goodness knows what I'll do with it.

I hear the secrets that you keep...

We had a lovely weekend away - photos to follow soon when I get my act together enough to download them. Again, it was one of those weekends with the odd dreaming and the bizarre talking in my sleep made the first conscious conversations each morning pretty peculiar.

Just after midnight Saturday night, I felt the need to tell the boy what I thought was wrong with Lindsay Lohan, and how he needed to stop being a bad influence on her. Apparently I wasn't very helpful explaining who she was or what was wrong with her. He still doesn't understand what I was talking about. Not sure that I do either.

Sunday morning we were doing that doze, read, doze thing that makes Sunday morning so lovely when you don't have to get up if you don't want to. I admit that I was doing more sleeping than reading. I got quite agitated at one point, and told him that we had to go to church. He tried to calm me down, and told me that church was over for the day. That's when I told him God was mad with him. Every church we drove past after that, he offered to stop for me. Helpful.

Sunday night in my dream I got stuck in my gmail inbox. It didn't matter what I did but whenever I spoke to someone they got a star next to them, and it was like the simpsons episode when homer disappears into the third dimension. I could move my arms and the inbox moved with them. Freaky. At least I wasn't the only one having odd dreams - he dreamt that I was yelling at him because he hadn't cleaned up his bedroom. The funniest part is that I've never met anyone with a tidier bedroom than him (and we won't talk about my messy bedroom!)

Monday morning he was trying to convince me that waking up for breakfast in bed was a good idea. Nah, wasn't interested. I did ask him to promise that we wouldn't call our children Sapphire and Kevin though. He thinks I'm nuts.

These dreams go on ....

Last night I dreamt that I slept in and when I went outside to get the paper I discovered that my brother had dug up the front lawn and put in a swampy marshy area which was full of reeds and lilies. It was absolutely stunning, and the lilies were all in bloom, with just about every colour, various shades of pink, white, a rich deep red, yellows and a very pale purple, so pale it was almost blue. It reminded me a little of a photo I took in Ballina when we were on holidays last year.

He said that he had changed the garden so that we had a better supply of water so that I could have the roses I wanted, as well as the camellias. I can understand the roses, because I have been coveting the blood red roses, so dark they are nearly black, with their rich scent. Camellia's have never registered on my radar though.

I woke up after this and had a bit of a prowl around the house. When I went back to bed I managed to get back to sleep, and found myself back in the dream. Unfortunately, my next door neighbour burst my bubble, although why he looked like Rupert Murdoch I've got no idea. He peered over the fence the way Wilson used to in Home Improvement and told me that it was an illegal water feature, and we would need to get it fenced off or fill it in because we were breaking the law. Then he told me that it was attracting mosquitoes and would continue to do so unless we could guarantee that the water would be constantly moving. Damn reality intruding on my dreams.

I've got no idea how the hell I came up with that one, but it is definitely bizarre. I've just worked out where the lilies and camellia's came from. I've been rereading Kerry Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series (I do like a romp through Melbourne in the 1920's) and there is a character called Camellia who designs Phryne's garden for her and includes lilies in one. There was a whole section about a Chinese custom of putting tea leaves into a lotus flower overnight creates an exotic tea. That is a relief.

Dreamin'

I'm having one of my semi regular bouts of insomnia at the moment. I'm seeing way more of the middle of the night than I want to, and I have to admit that much as I love my bed, I would love it more if I was sleeping in it, not lying in it wanting to be asleep.

When I have managed to sleep, I've been having some very bizarre dreams. While I napped this afternoon (yes, I'm having a couple of days off work all germy), I dreamt that I was travelling first class on Atlantic Airlines designing their mini golf course. I don't know why no one has thought of this earlier, I'm sure it would make long haul flights so much better. All of a sudden the cabin filled with smoke, and I was escorted to the emergency exit and got to use the slide. Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee!! When I got to the bottom of the slide I found myself in a cupboard. I opened the cupboard door and found myself in my company's Sydney office.

Over the weekend, I dreamt that the boy and I had a pretty spectacular fight, and he managed to say all of the things that hurt me the most. And the look of scorn on his face. I woke up really upset, and it took him a bit of convincing for me to believe that he hadn't actually done all of those things.

One night last week, I woke my brother up with my screaming. I had been dreaming that gangland murderers Carl Williams and Tony Mokbel were chasing me around the inner city of Melbourne, just constantly trying to kill me and shooting at me. Whenever I found refuge from one of them, and tried to catch my breath, the other one would pop his head around something and start shooting again. Pretty bloody terrifying.

I really wish I knew what the hell was going on in my head. Roll on the sleep study.