Land of a Thousand Nightmares

The nightmares are back, and this time it's personal.

These are the nightmares I remember from the past 3 nights. (I'm sure that I don't remember most of my dreams. If this is just a sample of what I go through at night, no wonder I'm a twitching bag of nerves).

Saturday's recipe for disaster mixed together:

- the earliest episodes of "Dexter" (I've read the books, but wasn't prepared for the explicitness of the cable series)
- too many hours playing an addicting match-3 game, "Cradle of Rome"
- too much beer

Resulting dough was baked in the subconscious, and voila! Hypercolorful scenes of an after-hours bar, a growing sense of menace, and dreadful suspense as a group of innocents was simultaneously directed to an office downtown *and* stalked by a mob family down mean streets laid out on a near-grid.

Sunday night, I think my subconscious refused to let anything trickle up to my conscious mind so that I wouldn't go stark raving mad. Maybe that effort is why I barely slept.

Monday night, I dreamed about an urban legend that I think I made up for the purpose of dreaming about it.

You may have heard of some cockamamie date that is designated as the day you start working for yourself instead of the government. (Never mind that taxes primarily pay for services for us. I like having public education, clean streets, a civil service with fairly low corruption [if we ignore the higher levels of the Bush Administration], a concerned police presence, and NOAA.) My brain came up with a day that marked when you stop paying for the financial damages awarded victims (and families of victims) of a lawsuit against the government, stemming from a horrific air travel disaster.

I had to listen to a Robert Stack/Stacy Keach-ish voiceover that began, "There was no Charlie Baumer on the passenger list of Flight 103." I thought it was going to be a "ghost on the flight of DOOM" story, but it turned out that Charlie was an alias of a known passenger who spent hours (hours!) calming the fears of his increasingly worried fellow-passengers until the inevitable crash.

Now, I don't really operate in 3D, but I know that you don't fly a crippled airplane for hours, or fly in dangerous weather for hours, unless there is NOWHERE TO FUCKING LAND. It's not like the situation in a boat ship, in which you may try to make it back to land even if the engine is tottering on the brink. In a plane, you try to reach the ground in a controlled manner ASAP, otherwise you may reach the ground in an uncontrolled manner at a high rate of speed. (It's not the fall that kills, it's the sudden stop at the end.)

Woke up from that one in a total body clench.

Achieved only half-sleep from that moment on, punctuated by a dream about work, of course. I transferred between departments to a situation where I knew some of the people slightly, and they didn't realize that I needed orientation and training. I was immediately given assignments above my head and couldn't even get the necessary supplies. I was scheduled to give a presentation with just a few minutes' notice and told that I had to distribute tiny pens with the project or department logo on them. (Gods forbid that the attendees should have to use their own pens, or be given normal-sized pens that wouldn't cause hand cramp.) No one could give me any of the pens or tell me how to find any. I stumbled on a lobby display by a support department and found a partially filled package of the tiny pens. The pens disappeared (of course) and I asked desperately if I could get more. I was told that the next batch still had to be autoclaved.

What the fuck is my brain doing to me? Am I in Hell?