Alligators!!!

So Monday I woke up from a terrifying dream. Abby and I were watching a movie on a couch together. The couch for some reason was mostly submerged in a swamp. Abby was slouched on the couch in a sleeping bag. The movie was some weird movie with Mel Gibson as the dad of a family and he was always getting angry at his kids.

Now that we have all the facts lets move onto the content.

Think Jurassic Park meets Grumpy Old Men

While we were sitting on the couch watching the movie an alligator kept trying to bite Abby's legs and every time he would try Abby would bring her feet up on the couch and I would shoo the gator away. This happened a couple times and Abby always let her feet hang down in the swamp again. The last time the gator made a pass for Abby's legs he got the sleeping bag and started to pull her into the swamp. I reached down for her like it wasn't really a big deal and then he got hold of her legs! She started screaming and he pulled her under and I freaked out so I dove in after her and then...

I woke up breathing really heavy. It was kind of funny and kind of scary.

That day we decided to go to a state park nearby to go on a hike since I had the day off (I guess that's just the kind of compensation you get for working 8 days of 12 hour shifts in a row). When we got there we started the hike around the lake. At the trail head there was a sign warning hikers to stay away from the water since there were alligators in the lake. At the time I thought it was kind of funny and topical because of the dream I had just had the night before.

As we got further from the parking lot every noise seemed to be some animal that was coming to get us. Abby laughed at me for being so jumpy until we walked closer to the water's edge to get a better look at an informational sign about alligators and we heard a small splash in the water, as though an alligator was sunbathing and heard us coming so he slipped into the water. Then Abby wasn't laughing. She also wasn't laughing when we saw that nasty black snake slither into the water. And she definitely wasn't laughing when we had to cross those rickety bridges across the swamp and when we stepped on the bridges they sank into the water a little.

Gatorphobes beware!

Ok we were laughing a little, but if all those nature documentaries (I am a long time owner of the Planet Earth series) have taught me anything, it's that alligators are NOT to be messed with.

I hear the secrets that you keep...

When you're talking in your sleep
- The Romantics

So every once in a while Abby tells me that I woke up and talked to her in the middle of the night. She's even said that I've talked in Russian. I usually don't remember any of it, but I find it pretty funny. A couple weeks ago I woke up and started talking to Abby, but I remember the whole thing.

I must have been having a dream. I woke up and I was picturing something that I was trying to figure out. I couldn't really piece it together. Abby asked me what was wrong and I was having such a hard time putting a sentence together that all I got out was "I'm trying to figure out the... things... and the... things."

Because Abby finds it amusing that I talk in my sleep she tried to keep me talking. She acted interested in what I was trying to say. I felt what I was trying to figure out was really important and was frustrated that I couldn't put it into words. I was picturing a rocket and said, "I need to measure... the fins."

Abby wanted to keep me talking, but she was laughing too hard. I was upset that she wasn't taking it seriously. At the same time I had started to wake up a little more and realized it probably was funny. I rolled over and went back to sleep. When she asked me about it the next day we both laughed really hard about it.

Yeah, that totally makes sense

Unfortunately work keeps me kinda busy so I haven't been writing down as many dreams as I would like to. However, the other week I had a pretty good one.

It was like a mix of the mission and military. I was forced to go back on my mission because I had done something wrong. My old companion and I were living with a family in a tree. We spent a lot of the dream looking for a gym because we couldn't shower at the tree because we weren't supposed to waste the family's water.

Anyway, the dream ended with a meeting with all the missionaries. The guy leading the meeting was some military guy that kept yelling at us. Oh, and we were standing in a pool of water in a cave that happened to be the top of a waterfall. So two companions were mad at each other and one of them pulled a rocket launcher out and pointed it at his companion. In the dream I was thinking, "Yeah, that makes sense. I mean he is pretty mad." We wrestled the rocket launcher away from him and it fell over the waterfall and the dream ended with the two missionaries pointing pistols at each other and threatening one another.

Assuming there is a pool in the cave this pretty accurately depicts the cave

Do you ever see something in your dream that is completely impossible and think, yeah, that makes sense? That is one of my favorite parts of dreaming. Of course, once I wake up I realize how insane the dream was, but its fun to take a break from reality. Maybe its the mix of realities and impossibilities that leads our minds to believe its all real.

Chevy Chase!

I was driving around a post apocalyptic, run-down town filled with dirt roads. I was driving back and forth between a building and a motel. I finally parked at the motel and walked across the street to another hotel looking for someone. When I got back to my car I saw two guys and a girl shut the doors of my van and run off. I ran after the guys as the girl ran in the other direction.

One of the guys was a balding middle-aged guy and the other was Chevy Chase. Chevy Chase outran the bald guy and I decided to chase down this bald guy. It was hard for me to run and it seemed like my legs were really heavy. I finally caught up to the bald guy and pulled him down to the ground.

I was choking him and asking him what they did to my van. He told me they put a bomb in my van and then he was shot before he could say any more. I looked up and Chevy Chase was standing on the balcony of the motel with a gun aimed at me. I deduced that he shot the bald guy so he wouldn't tell me any more about what they did to my van. As Chevy Chase took aim at me I pulled the bald guy on top of me to shield me from the bullets.

Once he stopped shooting I ran off. I ended up at the other side of the city and called 911. I told the operator there was a bomb in my van and I explained where the van was parked. A cop picked me up and we drove to the motel in his squad car. When we got to the motel the room I was staying in had become a crime seen where a bomb had gone off. The dream ended with me in the room trying to help the police figure out what happened.

I'm on a boat!

The dream started out with me running in a park, but I was running a lot slower that I usually run. I got frustrated that I couldn't run faster so I went to play football with some guys. When I got back to where I was running the park had turned into a boat. Erika and Cheryl were there.

I climbed up on a high part of the ship to talk to Erika. I was scared because I didn't know how to climb down, but Erika didn't seem worried about it.When I did get down I noticed some cars parked on the ship so I went to check them out with Cheryl.

As we were walking over there the ship lurched and I almost fell off, but hung on the edge. We decided it would be safer to be with the crowd so we headed back. As we were walking back the boat was getting close to the dock and I saw 4 ninjas on the dock ready to jump on the ship. As they jumped I yelled at them and they all missed the boat and fell in the water. The next thing we knew a wave started to form behind us so we hugged a pole on the ship to hang on. The wave reached almost 50 feet high and crashed on us, but we hung on.

The next thing I knew Abby and I were moving into a house and we ordered pizza. We went into a TV room and we were having a video conference with a board room full of people. Everyone in the conference room was a Disney character and we were discussing possible movie ideas. Then we started playing one of those dancing video games.

Just then I remembered about the pizza and ran to the door because I thought I heard a knock. I got to the door and there were two small pizza boxes and a note saying that the delivery-guy tried knocking, but no one answered. There was also a lot of mail, like Christmas cards, on our doorstep.

Our creepy 40-year old neighbor came out of her house and started talking to me. She asked me if I had been feeling better because she noticed I hadn't been to work lately. I told her I was feeling better. She asked for my name and I gave a fake one. I told her the guy living in our house before us was in the witness protection program and had to move because someone recognized him. I grabbed the pizza and mail and went inside where Abby and I started to open the mail.

You are what you... watch

So I decided to buy The Mind at Night because I enjoyed reading it so much and my sisters got me Amazon gift cards for Christmas (thanks Amy and Erika). I started browsing this morning and read that sometimes our brain shows us plot-less imagery as a way of storing information in long term memory. I remembered reading that dreams are one way our brain stores such memory. Then I remembered the dreams I've been having lately. I had one dream where I was Harry Potter, one where it seemed I was watching an episode of Law and Order and one where I was making baseball jerseys.

All of these dreams relate back to something I have watched lately, including a 2.5 hour documentary on baseball. In the past 8 months I have been underemployed as I like to put it. I can't remember the last time I worked 40 hours in a week. With this time off I've watched a lot of TV and movies. Not the most productive use of my time. If my dreams are an indication of what is being stored in my long term memory I think that's kind of sad. I don't need stored memory of Olivia Benson interrogating a suspect or Harry Potter destroying horcruxes. Time to be more productive.

And now he's stuck in my brain

Running late

This dream was from a month back, but I just read it again and thought it was pretty cool.

And I haven't even watched Teen Wolf since this summer

I was a second-string player on a high school basketball team where a tall guy I worked with 2 years ago (David) was the star player. There was one other really good player on the team that I was the backup to. We were having a team meeting before a game and someone brought up that the kid I backed up was a werewolf so he wouldn't be allowed to play. I didn't say anything, but I knew I'd get a lot more playing time.

I left the meeting to walk over to the game. I met Abby on the way and started over there together holding hands. We were walking on some college campus and I was telling her that I'd get to play a lot more because the other kid wouldn't be allowed to play. Abby saw one of the girls she had met in China and stopped to talk to her. Then they saw another of their friends and they all started catching up. I noticed that I was wearing running shoes instead of basketball shoes so I had to go back to get my shoes. I wanted Abby to come with me, but she wanted to stay and talk. I gave her a look like I was upset with her and she shot back the same look so I went off by myself.

I started down an escalator that a couple people were trying to run up. The escalator dropped off about 10 feet at the bottom so I had to climb down the side of a hotel / casino hanging onto its sign. I went into the hotel and ran around trying to find something. I think I was looking for my room. I found a room with a fridge and opened it up putting my head in the vegetable crisper. I expected it to transport me to my room. I tried this a couple times even though the crisper was not clean.

I walked outside and someone met me and we went back in time together. We went to his house to watch a movie. I thought the movie was going to be good, but it turned out boring. David was there so I left with him to go to the game. We were walking through my parents' neighborhood and I was trying to get to their house because I still needed my shoes. The street they live on was gone, though. David left me to go to the game. The dream ended with me running around looking for my parents' house.