I typically do not remember my dreams. This is somewhat unusual, and I am reminded of it whenever I'm scanning Facebook updates and come across someone relating to the entire internet that during a blissful REM event he or she bested Han Solo in a game of naked high stakes poker, but the Millennium Falcon turned out to be a pizza delivery truck they crashed in college. In recent months, my protracted battles with insomnia have negated any concerns over my lack of memory.
My mother used to have wonderful dreams. She also delighted in telling people about them. There was one where she was cooking Thanksgiving dinner for our entire family but the turkey caught fire so she made everyone eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches instead. My favorite by far was the night that she dreamt she was being chased by robbers. After a vigorous chase they cornered her, and she decided to fight. In the blackest depths of night, my father was sent sprawling onto the floor by the right hook of a diminutive, sleeping woman beating the stuffing out of her shadowy pursuers. The entire household was awakened by peals of laughter when she awoke and bore stunned witness to what she had wrought.
Last night, I successfully dropped into a blissful slumber without medication, alcohol, or as a result of extreme sleep deprivation. Last night, I dreamed a dream worthy of my mother. I was swimming in the ocean, a wholly relaxing experience under normal circumstances to be sure, and suddenly became aware that I was about to be the victim of a shark attack. I spotted the dorsal fin speeding toward me, cutting a menacing path through the waves. It dropped under the surface preparing to strike. I decided to strike first. My fist flew out in a desperate attempt to hit the creature on the snout, the mythical Achilles' Heel of the shark.
I too, awoke to the awful crunching of skin and bone making hard contact with another surface.
Before I finish my story, please note that I am not currently in prison nor sleeping in a hotel. There have been no calls for my head on spike. And my children still look at me with love in their eyes.
But also know this: Leah and I have an ongoing battle over of boxes of Wegmans Granola. They are yummy, delicious, and every last crumb is worth any amount of abuse for eating the entire box. Also, in keeping with the age old tactic of providing less of something good and charging money for it, the boxes are exceptionally small.
At breakfast this morning I took out a box of Granola and sat down to eat with the boys. Leah was getting ready for work, making herself pretty yet professional (or should it be the other way round?). She had, in her dietary wisdom, purchased a low-fat version of our beloved cereal last week. One so foul that we both agreed it would never again be allowed through our doors. I emptied my box of Granola into the bowl, and then strode to the back door to place the box in our recycling pile. We don't use a bin, per se, because every time we attempt it, the collection company men pick it up along with all our bottles and cans and recycle it. More than a few frigid mornings this winter have found me pacing in our front yard, watching my profanity infused breath disperse into the air, cursing the garbage men of the apocalypse.
Tossing in the properly collapsed cardboard, I took notice that at some point in the last few days, Leah must have fallen on the sword and finished the box of undesirables. Better she than I. I sat down at the table, poured out the milk, and tucked in. Yet with the first bite, the smallest crumble of oats, the merest scraping of a raisin against my tongue, I knew something to be very, very wrong. She'd switched the boxes.
I swallowed the bite. I stood. I walked back to the bathroom and slowly opened the door. The look of complete innocence that emanated from my beautiful wife said everything. That treacherous woman already knew. Her laughter echoed down through history. Girls rule, boys drool.
So I ask you, if while in the grip of Morpheus, thinking myself in imminent danger I accidently sent a haymaker her way, would I suffer eternal karmic retribution?
As fate would have it, we may never know. In my heroic efforts to dissuade the predator from making a meal of me, I punched through three slats of the headboard.
