In which a nightmare is had and a blog is begun

Horrible pregnant dream this morning. I rarely have bad dreams in normal life, and if I do, they are are about trying to get away and my legs don't work. I save the really hideous ones for pregnancy. They are never about babies. Instead they are like episodes my own bizzare Twilight Zone. With Eva my teeth feel out every night and I would be left with a handful of teeth and bloody gums while all the men in my family laughed silently and grotesquely. Good stuff.

So this morning I was at a house that in my dream I knew, but it's not one I've been to in real life. All my extended family was there (like Tevia). My Grandma Shaffer was alive. My mother in law was there. My cousins, only they were children again. We had been having a barbeque and everyone was sitting outside eating and listening to my Aunt Patty talking about her trip to Paris. Someone (I think it was Gail) started handing out fish. Betas in Dixie cups swimming in tight circles. Naturally she gave one to each of the kids.

"I don't want any fish," I said. But no one would listen.
"Go get some tupperware containers," my mother told me, "and put them in there."
"But I don't want them." It didn't seem to matter. So off I go to look for tupperware. I searched and searched through all the cupboards and under the sink but I couldn't find anything, and then Patty came in and said it didn't matter anymore because it was time to go to bed.

I was asleep when I woke to pounding on my door and when I answered it, two of my cousins (as children) were on the other side. Could they sleep in my room? There was a noise and they were afraid. I left my room, in one of those long flowy nightgowns - which I've never owned - and went downstairs. As I descended, the Colonel (? yeah, I have no idea) came bursting out of the study with a flashlight and a gun leveled at me. He berated me for leaving my room in a sort of turn of the century-esque fool of a woman kind of way. Didn't I know I couldn't go back there now? Didn't I know we would have to switch rooms because I'd left my warmth there and "he" would find me?

The Colonel told me to go into his room and he went into mine, but in a moment he burst into the hall and called me back into my room.

"Who was in this room?"
"My cousins and I."
"Is that all?"
"Yes."

And then he showed me three bodies lying on the floor. Two were my cousins and one was a young woman I don't know, but in the dream she was a friend of mine. My cousins were dead, but the woman seemed to breath though her eyes were open and dead.

"Oh, she will die," he said. "I've seen this before. He's perforated the ___________ and the bile is oozing into her blood stream. A slow and painful death. Nothing you can do of course."

And although I was horrified, I did nothing. The Colonel said he would keep watch and that I should sleep, and somehow, the way things do in dreams, it seemed natural to sleep in a room of dead people. Then, in the sleep of my sleep, I felt a presence in the room and when I opened my eyes a hand was emerging from where the light bulb should have been on the lamp. In the hand was the electrical cord of the lamp, but where an arm should have been - there was nothing. The cord was coming to strangle me. Absolute terror. I lept from bed and the hand dissapeared, but I grabbed the lamp and took it to the bathroom where the Colonel was watching. I tried to explain, but he didn't understand. He started to say that it was all my fault and pointed at the bodies on the floor. The hand in the lamp grabbed my wrist and forced the cord around and around the Colonel's neck - pulling tighter and tighter, and at some point, I stopped struggling against it until the Colonel fell to his knees.

That's when I woke up. My heart pounding, afraid to let any part of myself leave the safety of the bed, afraid to stay in bed alone. Finally I forced myself up and downstairs where I found Leroy asleep on the couch.

Seriously. What brings on a dream like that?

It's time to get the girls up for school. I've been up since 3:45ish. I'm going to be very tired later.