Warning: Post Contains weird, stream-of-consciousness recounting of the dream experiences. It’s weird. Feel free to ignore. I just had to get it out.

Due to a number of factors, including stress and anxiety on all manner of fronts, and the lack of my wife in my house and bed this weekend (She and the girls were out of town for a dance competition; the boy and I went to a stand-up show, ate bbq, and watched bad movies), I’ve slept terribly for the last week or so. Such a state has induced some strangely lucid and bizarre dreams (or at least dreamlike experiences, as I’m pretty sure I was at least partially awake/aware) while at least attempting to sleep.

Last night, for example, got really weird. I present the narrative in blockquote, so as to avoid any semblance of connection to reality.

My real-world ability to fall asleep blended into the dreamlike suggestion that I’d actually gotten up and driven to a nearby grocery store to return a video around midnight. Never mind that I haven’t rented videos from a real rental place or grocery store in who knows how long, nor does this grocery store rent videos (or even have a redbox terminal), nor would the movie in question (a surely fictional documentary on economic theory and quantum mechanics) be in stock at any of those places. Of course the grocery store in question wasn’t actually a grocery store inside, nor does this place look like it did in this semi-lucid dream (for example, it does not have two Taco Bells in pad sites in the parking lot). Needless to say, there was also a significant fee for damage to previous rental media on my bill.

I suspect that I’d actually fallen asleep by this point, because, in spite of the fact that I’d driven a perfectly good car to the store, I decided to disregard that fact and walk home. In walking home, I ended up purchasing a late meal at both Taco Bells, eating said meal on the way, and witnessing both a drug deal amongst strangers who happen to be walking home along the same path I was walking, and later witnessing other nameless, mostly blank people smoking crack on the sidewalk (“don’t worry, there’s no cameras on us!”) out of pipes constructed from aluminum foil and discarded taco shells. The fact that they were using Taco Bell food as drug paraphrenalia worried me a bit, in spite of my innocence, as I was carrying a bag of tacos, though the only police cars travelling the route were chasing down horses illegally travelling on city thoroughfares.

Did I mention that my path home was a fusion of pretty much every town or city with a hill in it that I’d spent any significant time in during my youth? There were definite elements of Sunbury and Ashland, Pennsylvania, plus various other real-life bits and pieces and stuff that was clearly made up. No? Okay. So noted.

I ended up stopping my travels for several hours at a bluegrass jam session populated by both made-up people and a few folks I know (or knew), where I played a bunch of instruments (that I seem to have had with me the whole time). After that, I ended up hiking home, hefting two very large and heavy guitar cases. Somehow, I dropped these both along the way, and spent a lot of time worrying that the crack smoking dream automatons would take them before I could go back and retrieve them after I’d gotten home (which was very important to do).

My hike home became suddenly very arduous – it started to involve ladders, and sagely advice from co-workers past – and I ended up stopping at several homes along the way, often asking simply for passage through them for some reason, despite the (admittedly steep) sidewalk outside. I think these stops led to some side-spinoff dreams – I have memories of a manufactured novelty musical group made up of superheroes with a long and storied history in the city of Richmond Virginia – but the details are lost to me. I remember somebody in an antique shop being pretty nice to me, though. Pretty sure I was well and truly asleep here. There were whales.

Eventually, I got home, to a home I totally didn’t recognize, as a strangely-colored sun was rising. Things happened here, though they’re lost to the dreamscape. I somehow did get back in my car (it apparently came home on its own) and successfully retrieved the guitar cases. One was intact, though the other wasn’t. the contents were stolen, but were somehow replaced with a much more valuable, but confounding to play, instrument.

I blame the crack dealers.

I can only imagine my nocturnal utterances last night. I apologize to my wife for any disturbance while she was trying to rest.

I really hope things get better tonight. I could really use the sleep.