My old house.

(*In reality, I have recently moved and there is someone already living in my previous residence.)

I going inside my old duplex to get some of my stuff, apparently before anyone moves in. It's really dark and cold. The light switch in the front foyer doesn't work. I stumble around, my eyes gradually getting used to the dark, and I realize that the duplex has grown new rooms, and that my stuff isn't the only stuff that's there. There are children's toys and books, men's clothing, nasty hairbrushes, etc. Things that absolutely do not belong to me, and that I don't recognize. As I walk through the house, I'm more and more overcome by fear and sadness. The hallway is completely different; it's exposed brick and has dirty stained glass along the top, which of course lets in no light because it's solid wall behind the glass. There's only one bathroom instead of two, and I have a feeling that I need to avoid it. Every time I pass by it, I get scared. My mom shows up to help me gather my stuff, but as we look around, we decide not to take anything because it all seems so nasty and we think my things have been tainted. We look around for anything that hasn't been "tainted" and can't find anything. Along the way, we find a lot of clothes for a young (?) woman who must be a serious barfly. Short skirts, sequined belly-shirts, t-shirts with trashy sexual innuendo, etc. There are used condoms and empty alcohol bottles everywhere, strewn amid the Dr. Suess books and E-Z Bake oven and the tricycle. We keep going past the bathroom, which feels worse every time we pass it. The last time, I stop and look inside. There's an energy-feeling coming from it that's actually audible, like a buzzing. Directly through the doorway is the sink, the toilet is on the left, and the shower is on the right. I don't know this bathroom. I've never been in this bathroom, that I can recall. I start to step inside and my mom slaps my arm and tells me there's an absence of pressure and she doesn't like it. Apparently, this terrifies us and we run through the living room and out the front door. As I'm closing the door and pulling out my keys to lock it, a dark grey cat darts out and disappears into the bushes. That's all.

*This is the second time I've heard that buzzing-energy sound in a dream. Wonder what a recurring buzzing means.

Surely somehow this can be blamed on the media

I don't think I hung on to this dream in its entirety, so I'll have to pick up where my memory allows:

I am in the passenger seat of a car. We are sitting in a street and there are lots of people and cars around. It's either a parade or a mass gathering of some sort. It seems vaguely celebratory, but in a politically tense way. I don't know who had been driving the car — or whose car it was (I want to say I kept thinking that I was just trying to get to my grandmother's) — but the driver's side door was ajar and suddenly there's commotion outside and Vladimir Putin hops into the car, throws it into gear, and we take off to the back roads of rural Russia, presumably.

There is the constant cacophony of machine-gun fire behind our speeding car. I am hunched down and overtaken by both excitement — something is happening! — and fear — something horrible is happening!

I try to appeal to Putin — I am not a part of whatever is happening here, sir! — but he has morphed into a young Tom Cruise, very handsome and manic with an ever-spreading grin that glints with mischief. We are going so, so fact, and he's trying to talk to me and see what my story is. I'm only able to speak in broken sentences — the roads are winding and it's dark out and the machine guns, which way are they pointing, anyway? It's to my great relief that he tells me that they are on our side, keeping other cars and people away from us. It seems like we drive and have a stilted, stressful conversation for longer than I can bear. I am star-struck and quite confused. I ask him if I can take his picture, and then I realize all I have with me is my busted-ass point-and-shoot, so I don't even bother. A blurry pic of Tom Cruise is as useful as a half-obscured pic of Bigfoot. No one's gonna buy it. He finally decides to quickly pull over and let me out to stand with a police officer up on a hill, and the chase continues — car after car after car after car — without me.

I'm relieved, and kind of stupidly sad to see the action go on past.

Funny that my anxiety in that dream — about political intrigue, Tom Cruise, and machine guns — was so much lower than my anxiety in most of my other dreams, which tend to be mundane and much less violent. Hell, the tick dream stressed me out more.

Bugged

The other night, I dreamed that I was scratching the inside of my right ear and I felt a bump. I tried to pick at it and quickly realized it was not a bump that was native to my body. I yanked it out and saw that it was a tick. I dabbed my finger back on the place where it had been attached and saw that I was bleeding.

I blame this dream on the fact that just before bed I had watched Brokedown Palace, and Darlene gets an ear infection when a roach crawls into her ear.

Horror Movie

A group of people and myself were at a party when Michael Myers attacked. The power was disconnected and people panicked and scattered. For a long time I found myself alone and sought out nooks and crannies in the old house in which to kneel, duck, and slip. I quivered with my inadequate weapon every time I heard someone coming. It kept turning out to be other party guests who found my hiding place to their liking. After a large gathering of them had populated my crevice we realized Michael was coming. Like a frightened herd we circled the room and somehow managed to lose him. We decided to move like a pack to decrease our chances of dying. I eventually came up with a meat cleaver and was instantaneously voted group leader. Trembling, I led the harried group through the creaky halls until someone pointed out that by crawling into the kitchen cabinets and shoving the napkins out of the way you could access a trap door that spit you into a shelf in the basement. They all awkwardly squeezed in while my heartbeat quickened and I suddenly felt very hot. I turned in quick circles as my group slowly disappeared and I waited to be the last one. I decided, instead, to run to the basement to meet them because I was afraid Michael would hear my heart beating in the trapdoor. Once I got down there they had disappeared and I was all alone. I'd say about ten minutes' worth of terrified sneaking ensued, and then, inevitably, I met up with Mikey. My meat cleaver had somehow turned into several pairs of pliers. I started stabbing him with them everywhere I could - stomach, heart, neck, temple - then I mashed two pairs into his eyes and pressed harder as white ooze and little blobs of eyeballs came running out. I backed away quickly but froze because he came out of that chair I pinned him down on like a bullet. I held my breath and silently freaked while he groped all around me, arms on both sides of me, trying to find me in his blindness. Somehow that skipped directly to his still body collapsed over the bathtub, his mask submerged. I walked, drained, back to the basement to ask the ominous-looking man who had somehow saved the day to stay til I got my friends to safety. He had been about to tote a big log upstairs to burn Michael, but he turned slowly to me - a black man with gray hair and gray eyes - and laughed in a foreboding way. The realization washed over me just before he spoke. "You will never be safe," he said, and a woman screamed from upstairs. I darted up a few steps to see a splatter of blood on the shower curtain. I ran back to the basement and screamed, "GUYS!" They all opened their cubby doors in unison like they were little elves in little elf tree-coffins. "We have to get out of here RIGHT NOW!!" Somehow that idea got interpreted as, "Let's get out of here right now - in two waves! You guys go second." So I found myself, holding an ax and the bathroom door shut, with a gang of terrified partygoers in my charge. We were waiting til the first group of people successfully escaped. Suddenly I looked down at my feet and thought, for a second, that I was Alicia, and had only 80's-style flats or ill-fitting slippers as footwear. Then it was time to move and I was me again. I came out of the bathroom swinging the ax, determined it was safe, and pointed toward the hall that led to the front door. "Let's go!" I screamed. Suddenly a party of two, the guys came out of the bathroom and looked at the hallway in terror. "What if that way's a trap?!" one guy plead, pointing to the balcony door that was less than five feet away from us. "OK, go, go, go!" I screamed, and the three of us bolted out the doors and up the grass embankment to a parking lot that was filled with cars. I spotted my Eclipse and, luckily, had my keys right in my palm. I frantically surveyed the area around the car as I got closer, silently praying that a butcher knife wouldn't sweep out from under the car next to me and slice my tendon. Then I awakened, terrified, in my darkened room.

No butts about it

A surefire sign that my television options should expand beyond the confines of The View and Oprah: I dreamt that Greg completed a monologue show and as the audience milled around outside, I spotted Whoopi Goldberg taking concentrated puffs off a cig.

"Aren't you filming the segment 'Kickin Butts with Whoopi' currently? I thought you were trying to quit smoking," I told Ms. Goldberg.

As a fellow smoker, I somehow felt cheated by Ms. Goldberg's refusal to nip the habit in the bud.

Going Down

I dreamt I was in Hell watching admissions. One guy stepped on an elevator and said, "I'm really excited this time around, because I was shooting for the second level!" Someone nearby said, "You lit two children on fire! You're going to level three!"

Apparently there are only three levels.

One of the weirdest.

Last night, my husband was working and I spent the night at my parents' house.
In reality, I am an only child of two historians/park rangers, and they live in an antebellum house that was fomerly a B&B, in the heart of the historic district in our city. I say this because:

In this dream, I have a younger sister and am still living at home with my parents, who are not my reality parents at all, and we live in a one story brick house in a suburb. In what I'm guessing is the early 70's.

Now please bear with me, because this is gonna get cheesy. But while I was actually having the dream, it seemed very real and I was absolutely terrified.

Anyhoo, (in my dream), I'm asleep and having a bad dream about ghosts. I wake up and there are black shadowy things moving around in the corners of my room. There's a nightlight beside my bed and one of the shadows passes it and completely blocks out the light for a moment. I hear whispers and a low humming that's kind of electrical. I start to scream, and am thrown out of bed and am knocked unconscious. When I awake (still in the dream), the lights are on, I'm lying on my back in bed, and my family is sitting on the bed. They tell me that when they heard me scream they ran in and I was on the floor. They lift my shirt and show me that I have human-looking bite marks all over my torso. At that moment, things start flying all over my room by themselves. The nightlight comes out of the wall and is "thrown" to the floor, where it shatters. I run to my closet and close the door and sit down. Now, I don't know who the hell this dream self is, but I/She has to quit with the dolls. In this closet, there are shelves up to the ceiling lined with dolls and stuffed animals. I'm sitting there, crying and hearing all the noise on the other side of the door, and one of the dolls falls off the shelf. One by one, they start falling. I start screaming again and try to open the door, and it won't open. All of the dolls fall on me at once. So I'm, like, siwimming in all these dolls and stuffed animals, and the whispering and humming is really loud but I can't make out any words. The door opens. My sister is levitating. I run to my parents' room (why did they leave us??) and jump into bed between them. I'm crying, lying face down and wondering why they won't comfort me. I feel a tapping on my lower right shoulder blade. Instinctively, I know it's not my mom or dad, that it's whatever this evil thing is. I burrow my face more into the pillow and try to think about happy, ordinary things and the tapping gets more insistent. The "finger" starts pressing really hard into my muscles, and it really hurts. I'm crying and writhing and trying to think about some birthday party that's coming up.
In reality, the phone rang and I woke up at that point.

This was almost four a.m. when I woke up the first time. I was shaken enough to turn on the lamp and glance around the room. Then I turned out the light and went back to sleep and had another dream.

Part two: I'm myself, with my real family, and at my parents' real house. In the guest room I stay in, there are these big, old windows that go from ceiling to about two feet from the floor (the house has 15 ft ceilings). It's Christmastime and I'm lounging about. It's getting dark and snowing heavily outside. I walk over to the window and am enjoying watching the snow falling in the beam from the lamp-post. Suddenly there's a huge, shaggy, brown bear on the other side of the window, and he means business. He raises back on his hind legs and does the standard bear growl-roar thing, but to me it sounds like the T-Rex roar from Jurassic Park. He starts pawing and clawing at the window. He can't get in, so he walks over to a nearby tree and swings at it and it falls over. I don't know if he 's just displaying his prowess or what, but I'm really scared. I duck down, thinking maybe if he can't see me, he'll go away. I hear a snuflling on the other side of the window, sit up, and peep through. And down. He's digging his way under the house, really fast. A big paw bursts up through the floor beside me, and I wake up. My dad's dog has jumped up on my bed and is pawing at me to take her outside.


So there it is. The first sounds like a "scary" Lifetime movie and the second ended up kinda funny.

*The phone call was a wrong number.

Back to England

I'm in a rickety cottage in the English countryside, marveling at how small the rooms are and how they have such different knick-knacks from those you'd find in an American house. The bedrooms contain no people (people seem to be gathered in the common areas of the house), but I sneak through them quietly, opening cabinets and peering at souvenirs on shelves. I note that everyone has a tiny black and white television in his bedroom (I seem to be in the house inhabited by a group of males), and one guy even has a collection of these weird small discs that play music in these tiny plastic music players. I kind of remember something like this back in the states several years ago, but it never really caught on.

A truck rumbles by on the dusty road just outside the window and I think to myself, I wonder if I lived here, if the thin walls would drive me crazy.

Back in the living room, Phil is there with a group of guys I don't know — presumably the people who live in the house. They don't seem British, but perhaps like American ex-pats. I say something to one of them and he insults me and laughs. I defend myself weakly.

Then we're in Phil's crappy car driving on a grassy hillside. The boys are talking about a car sale coming up, and how they're going to check it out. It finally sinks in that I am living in a whole new country now, and not just a whole new country, but a whole new universe.

The operation

I am in a hospital, alone but surrounded by familiar people, and I am there to have an operation to fix ... something. I keep wondering why my parents or friends or someone isn't there with me. I'm called back but leave my bag in the front room, and have to request it once I get to the back waiting area. The nurses are skeptical that the bag is mine. They request ID with my name on it to match with any ID in the bag. They go to retrieve the bag but take so long that I suspect something bigger is happening.

I amuse myself by farting around in the back waiting area, where it's seemingly empty. On a counter nearby is a giant tub of multi-colored pills of all shapes and sizes, some as big as those nasty orange marshmallow peanut-shaped things my grandmother used to eat all the time. I chuckle to myself that I will be taking the bucket home with me after the surgery. In an instant I am trying to take a photo of the pill bucket for my daily picture. I'm worried that I'll get in trouble for photographing the giant, unprotected bucket of painkillers.

The the paparazzi show up. There are maybe eight of them, including a blonde reporter with a microphone and a dude with a giant light he sticks in my face. And big cameras they shove toward me. I sit down, sure that they're trying to humiliate me, and put my head down as far as possible, taking care to not speak at all. If I don't say anything, they can't use but the most brief clip on the news or whatever they're planning to use the footage for.

It takes a while and some creative footwork, but I finally evade them with the help of some burly dancing men who are apparently starring in an impromptu musical all around me. They gather in droves around the back entrance to the clinic and, with coordinated creative flourishes, erect a big sign over the door that says "Blogger Entrance" to distract the media into thinking that's where I'll be heading. I am grateful for their assistance, but still wondering what the fuck is taking so long with my upcoming surgery. I just want to get it over with.

There's a bit more, but it would be unwise to post it here.

Hungry Like New York

I'm in a huge house with several women, including New York/Tiffany from Flavor of Love. We're being filmed and it's obviously for a reality show but I don't know if it is indeed FoL or not. It's very stormy, early morning. New York comes in, wearing a Gucci-logo printed raincoat and swearing a lot about how we'd better not tell anyone that she's coming home drunk in the wee hours. She shoves me on her way to her bedroom. There are injured animals everywhere. I'm trying to follow a cat whose right front paw is bleeding, and I get distracted by Brandon and Luke, who are in the kitchen trying to make me breakfast. I start helping them. We're gathering ingredients, and we hear a low growl. An enormous, slinking black wolf is in the kitchen with us. We all jump up on the counters. The wolf is trying to jump up (why can't he?) and has his front paws on the counter in front of me. I try to punch his face but I'm afraid I'll fall, so I have Brandon hold on to one of my hands while I try to punch with the other, which doesn't work. Luke jumps off the counter and onto the wolf. He grasps the wolf's head and pulls its jaw all the way back, breaking it. Suddenly Luke has a gun and he shoots the suffering wolf as I wake up. I'm so disturbed by the jaw-breaking scene that I wake up crying.

Ummm, yeah

I'm walking through a biodome ruled by penguins. I have to make water, so I find a restroom. I'm comfortably snug in my little stall until a penguin attempts to stick its head under the divider and spy on me while I pee.

Across the pond

We are in England, probably London to be specific, and it's my first time there and things are just weird. Tamara is there, as well as some other people I can't quite place. We are marveling at how the streets of London are covered entirely in cobblestone and brick. We're in some kind of covered outdoor mall that seems almost to be underground. It's huge and there's no sign of grass or anything living — besides incredibly sophisticated Brits — anywhere.

Somehow we get out to the countryside to an apartment building, and I make my way through the rooms — an empty living room, a bright-colored bedroom, a crisply appointed nursery — and wonder who lives there.

We (me and a dude, maybe Phil? not sure) are on a bed in a room that is not ours. We have decided to pass some time by doing what people do... And things are going unremarkably until someone — a youngish blonde Brit — walks into the room, spies us, and walks directly into the bathroom. In our embarrassment, we try to cover ourselves, but end up feeling sheepish. Was this her bed?

Outside there's a rolling field and some children playing. I'm walking down a gravel road with Phil when I remember I wanted to get a picture of something, so I grab my camera and sprint back to the direction we came from. I'm standing atop a hill and looking over some trees across the countryside, when I notice that the sky is darkening and churning at one point. And there it is, a huge, wide, Kansas-tastic tornado on the horizon, twisting and bubbling its way toward me. I snap several pictures and curl my lip in disappointment that the majesty and enormity of such a spectacle can't be captured by my little digital camera.

My feet are always dirty, so I'd never look there

I love dreams like the one I had last night; dreams in which I simply wander around a significant place from my past. My grandmother's house in Nashville is quite possibly the most important setting from my most formative, pleasant, and angsty childhood memories. Last night I wandered from room to room taking in the exaggerated green carpet, the doorways from room to room, the dark wood beams over the den where I wasn't allowed to watch Family Matters if my grandpa was in the room. It was like a ghost town. No one was around and I was slightly aware that the place as I knew it doesn't exist anymore, yet I was as there as I am here right now. I felt the sad sensation of knowing I'll have to leave a place way before I'm ready.

I wonder, was I there? Is there some dimension of memory open to spiritual traveling, as long as I'm asleep? I loved Stephen King's Bag of Bones for several reasons, but the dreams his character described were finished off with the most terrific descriptions of waking up with cuts on his knuckles and dirt on his feet from whipping through the woods in the middle of the night. Or whatever time it gets dark in the Dreamiverse.

I'd like that. I'd like to wake up with sore fingers from whammying the organ in the living room proper or the smell of that green lye soap wafting up from my armpits.

Painkillers

It's weird what taking a Vicodin before bed will do to your brain as it tries to shift from full consciousness to sleep mode. I can't speak for everyone, but for me, it's like it turns off some kind of focus filter in my head, so that every fleeting thought — no matter how random or scary or funny or weird — just goes ahead and voices itself in my mind instead of being stifled by whatever mechanism usually keeps my thoughts fairly consistent and targeted, even just before sleep.

I just wish I could remember some of these fleeting thoughts. They are like bits of fiction I've not yet created. Names and locations and actions and scenarios that aren't from my life or any other life I recall observing. They are almost like pieces of collective consciousness. And maybe they really are, floating in the ether.

So, last night I dreamt a long and epic dream about running from something ... in the dark ... in a car ... though it didn't feel like I was me. I was just there.

And then later I had to choose from a shelf of archetypal outfits to be judged by who, I'm not really sure. Each outfit was contained in a small themed jar of sorts, and each was labeled with a name that was as much a hint as to its contents as it was a confusing bit of extraneous information.

One greenish outfit (that had a lot of weird camouflage-colored plaid) was labeled reporter, while another outfit that was more glammy yet stark white was labeled Interpol (I assume this one and not this one). There were lots of others, and matching handbags to go with each outfit.

I picked the reporter jar and then had to run back to get the right size. Not sure what the hurry was, but I felt I was being timed and would be judged on my choice of outfit. I don't remember actually getting the outfit on or how I looked in it. I just remember frantically thumbing through jars and boxes of the outfit's component, looking for my size.

Baby bump

[from Friday night]

I look down, and there's this thing on me -- this distended, somewhat lumpy belly -- that feels not entirely of me and yet mine all the same. I have no idea where it came from, but I observe it for long enough to hazard a guess that, if I am indeed pregnant, I must be seven months along.

Instantly, panic sets in. I didn't plan for a pregnancy. What am I going to do about my job? (For some reason, I start feeling guilty because I am yet another woman on the design desk who has recently gotten knocked up, which means they'll have to find a temporary replacement for me.) What am I going to do about my life? The fear grows as I realize that I probably would not be okay with getting an abortion this late in the term. I tell myself that it will be fine; lots of women have unplanned pregnancies and it ends up being a great thing for them.

Then I try to figure out how exactly I got pregnant. I try to recall the last time I got laid and quickly do the math. No ... it doesn't add up. I have no idea how long my tummy has been growing, and I don't know when any of this could have happened. So I wonder if I'm even pregnant at all.

I'm in some kind of big, bustling room. There are lots of people around. I'm searching for a doctor of sorts. I finally find one. Seems like I recall him being a middle-aged man with wiry reddish hair and a copper-colored beard and mustache. He seems frazzled enough without having to diagnose whether or not I'm pregnant or carrying around a giant tumor in my stomach.

As he takes notes, I can tell that, yes, even if I can't remember how it happened, the reality is I'm going to be having a kid in two months. And the fear, it grows.

I Don't Speak Jazz

I was playing in my old high school band at a carnival at night. Lindsey Turner was sitting beside me with her trombone. Mr. Haffly was directing, and he kept telling Lindsey to be quiet and behave. But she was comical and agitated - like she had just slammed twelve shots of espresso. Lindsey kept pushing her luck and sniping under her breath. He finally ordered her out of the ensemble and to the equivalent of the carnival's "principal's office." She sat there a second and then said, "Really?" but he was serious. I grabbed her sleeve as she passed and whispered, "Meet me outside and I'll drive you home!" Then Haffly told me to be quiet.

Then I was slogging through the carnival looking for Lindsey. The ground was muddy and wet and the cuffs of my jeans were being dragged through the muck. My feet felt wet. I walked all over the carnival grounds, inside and outside the fence. I had a companion, but I don't know who it was. "Where the hell is Lindsey?!" I kept saying. My companion said, "She's with Phil - way over there. Look!" I looked across a great big field and there was Phil, walking through waist-high weeds at night. "Hey, Phil, is Lindsey with you?!" I yelled. "No!" He hollered back and kept trucking. "Why the hell is Phil in that field?" I asked my companion. "Because he's a hiker," Companion replied.

Suddenly I was walking with my sax, so I started improvving while I was looking for Lindsey. I walked past a fence gate, noodling around the "All I Know Is Tonight" tune by Jaga Jazzist, and I walked right past Mrs. Haffly. I didn't realize it was her til I passed her and she said, "Hel-LO?!" I turned and she was glaring at me like, "What the hell?!" I turned and said, "Hey! How are you!" but then I remembered that she was mad at me because I skipped my lesson that day. Steve Haffly sidled up and asked, "Cindy, how did Tamara do at her audition?" and she replied, "She did awful. She informed the judge that jazz is another language and she doesn't speak it." I was appalled. "HEY!" I started to yell, but she walked away. "I did not!" I called after her, and Companion led me away to find Lindsey. My sax was suddenly gone. We rounded a warehouse and I found Lindsey and Mrs. Haffly with their arms around each other heading into the warehouse to hang out with everyone else. "There she is!" I said to Companion, and headed in. "Hey!" I said to Lindsey, and she gave Mrs. Haffly a funny look. Mrs. Haffly said, "Egotistical bitch!" I asked Lindsey who she meant and Lindsey shrugged. "Where were you?" I asked. "Around. Cindy is mad because all three of her female sax players skipped their lessons today." I felt awful. Then Mrs. Haffly walked back by and she said, "Tamara, if you want to do your lesson tomorrow I will drive you home." I smiled, "Okay, sounds good!' I felt relieved.

Then the dream segued into a long storyline about electricity and muddy trails that I can't recall now.

Then Alicia came running in to a doorway, crying hysterically. I asked her what the matter was, and she replied, "A lot is the matter!" And I followed her outside and the wheel to her father's maroon Buick that she's using while her car is in the shop has turned sideways and been pushed out from under the car like the axle had snapped into.

If you'd ever ridden in this car, you'd know why I dreamt that.

Huh?

I was in downtown Corinth, and thre was some kind of event going that everyone was flocking to. I was uninterested, and really just wanted to go home and make some ramen. As I walked toward my house, a bigass storm blew up out of nowhere and hovered right on the edge of the historic area, threatening to wreak havoc. Big, bruise-colored clouds, eerie wind, etc. And since I'm terrified of that kind of storm, I started hauling ass. But there was a big swimming pool in the middle of the street. And since I guess it made more sense to me at the time to swim it instead of simply running around it, I jumped in. While madly doing the butterfly stroke across the pool (the butterfly being my least strongest stroke), my pants and underwear came off. I looked behind me, and the pool had become ridiculously huge and the clothes were floating too far away for me to go after them. I reached the end of the pool, jumped out, and ran toward my house. The storm disappeared. People walking by gave me dirty looks and mumbled under their breath, obviously disapproving of my lack of skivvies. *weird dreamy lapse in time* I'm fully clothed and driving toward Savannah. I get a call on my cell phone, and it's a woman at the TennTucky wanting me to approve a $200 purchase on my debit card. I tell her I'm not even at the station, and she tells me that my husband is. Then she asks me to verify that my name is Jessica Barrier Brown, at which point I start screaming to call the cops because someone has stolen my cousin's debit card and is attempting a $200 fraud. I'm suddenly at TennTucky, and this really fat, unattractive redneck is the one with the card but he's threatening to beat me up if I call Jessie and tell her her card's been stolen. Tamara's working behind the counter and saying she can't do anything about it but maybe we should go cruise around in Pickwick. I decide this is a good idea and we go to Freddy T's for sushi and then bump into that Keenan girl we knew in high school. She's turned black. Like, she has literally become a black woman. We chat for a few minutes and she walks away. Tamara sighs and says she always loved Keenan's car.

That's all I remember.

Youza a Big Fine Woman When You Back that Ass Up!

I like sleeping in the nude.

It isn't a mere dalliance in exhibitionism, but a confirmation of my laziness.

It's hotter than Clay Aiken's balls in a bathhouse parking lot outdoors. So I plunge into the crevices of my couch because I'm too damned pooped to hazily unfold my Serta pullout and scrounge around in a stupor for my pajamas.

So in my dream last night, I find Lindsey Turner sitting on my couch jabberjawing about her childhood in rural Tennessee.

My mind is racked with paranoia. Did I remember to turn over the seat cushions and vigorously Febreeze away the possible asshole-and-balls stench?

Lindsey continues to talk, beaming in her Lindsey Turner way.

I get down on all-fours and frantically begin sniffing the couch cushions.

"Continue recalling your childhood," I say.

"What are you doing?"

I sniff a line of couch, convinced that I smell ass.

"I think I dropped some change or something," I say, continuing to snort line after line.

I can't remember much else.

Changing channels

I am at my parents', my dad's in the recliner watching a sporting event of some sort, and he calls me into the den because Phil is part of the teeming crowd, and the camera has zoomed in on him. My dad shushes everyone in the room as the announcer says, "And now we have a very special message from someone in the crowd," and the camera zooms in on the Jumbotron image of Phil, who starts to say something about a very special woman in his life...

I lean in to the television and try to turn the volume up, but the channel changes. I panic. Everyone in the room is all, "TURN IT BACK!!" I try going back to the channel, but I can't find it anywhere.

Highway (Back) to Hell

I've accepted a new job at Satan's Journal. This time, the powers-that-be wisely divvied up the workload. So instead of filling four different positions, my new title is simply "editorial assistant."

For the first time in a long while, I'm literally twiddling my thumbs and watching YouTube clips of The 700 Club.

I look over to see the new intern Kevid smacking his lips to my friend Ryan about my penchant for Pat Robertson. Of course, I decide to mosey over to the cubicle and proceed to chew his ass out.

Kevid cowers in the corner, shielding his face like I'm some goddamned wife beater. "If you have a problem with my watching Pat Robertson, you should come over and tell me like a fucking adult. Grow some goddamned balls," I tell him.

And I pivot smoothly and decide to clean up the office restroom. What else am I gonna do? I'm watching episodes of The 700 Club for chrissakes.

While scrubbing the toilet, the CEO chums up beside me with a glint in his eye. They've hired yet another intern.

"Be nicer to this one, too," he goes. "I've been talking to Kevid again."

"Well, Kevid is a fucking idiot, so of course, you'd side with him," I tell him, looking up from scrubbing the toilet. "It's the one trait you've managed to a tee: hiring fucking idiots."

The CEO steps back and throws his hands up in mock resignation.

"Bye bye," I say sweetly as he ambles out the door. The acid in my voice could burn the enamels off your molars.

As I look down at the doodoo-encrusted rim, I think to myself, "honestly, didn't I quit this job weeks ago?"