Paging Dr. Freud...Dr. Freud to the Psychiatric Ward, stat!

Disturbing dreams last night...but that's nothing unusual.

In the first dream, I woke up the morning after a dinner party at my house and one of the guests had left behind a bunch of strange kinds of fish, including an eel, which had been partially cut up, and left out all night on the counter top.  There were flies buzzing around, a really foul smell, and the scene looked like a collaboration between Rembrandt and David Lynch. I got a really eerie, sinister feeling, as if it were some sort of omen.  As it turns out, it was.

In the next scene, I was sitting at my desk when a grey cat jumped up in my lap.  I don't own a cat.  Never have.  I wasn't particularly alarmed, although I did wonder how it got into the house. But then I noticed at my feet the Yorkshire terrier we used to have as a family pet when I was a kid.  He was much smaller than in real life...smaller than the cat...and his tail was matted with blood and had a long incision which had been sutured shut.  Then the cat leapt through an invisible hole in the wall, followed by the dog.

On closer examination, I discovered not just one, but dozens of small and large holes in the sheet rock, and from each of these were crawling tiny, slimy larvae which were then turning into flying bugs that looked kinda like sickly dragonflies.  From some of the holes, the tips of tails were protruding...like rats' tails or some other kind of rodent.  Creepy.

It was at this point that I realized that what I had previously thought was a smooth wall in my house was actually the face of a cliff, and that because of the holes, when you stood back a few feet, the overall impression was that of many skulls, large and small, stacked haphazardly on top of one another.

When the alarm went off, I pulled the pillow over my head to block out the sound and try to clear my mind of this macabre image.  But instead, I fell back to sleep and dreamed that somebody was on top of me trying to suffocate me.  My attacker was straddling me, forcing the pillow down on my head, so I felt like my entire body was being crushed.  When I finally got loose, it was a Chinese guy I had taught kung fu to.  For the record, I've never taught kung fu, although I did used to live in Hong Kong, and was once an extra in a Jackie Chan film.

For most people, what I've described above would be considered a nightmare.  For me, a chronic insomniac, sleep is such a rare commodity that when I do occasionally fall asleep, this kind of stuff bubbles up from my cerebral cesspool more often that not.  It's rare that I have dreams of butterflies and puppy dogs, unless they have some hideous deformity or are trying to kill me.