Fuck. I just woke up from the scariest dream I've had in a long time. It was inspired by the movie Waking Life. I was having some kind of normalish dream, and I think Alan Alda (playing the character he was in Flirting With Disaster, which I also recently saw) took his three grandkids to the zoo. I was wasn't really there, but I was. It's like I was watching it as a movie. But then, eventually I sort of became the person being taken to the zoo, and Alan Alda turned into my own father, so it ended up being my father taking me to the zoo. The zoo, which didn't end up really being a zoo, more like some kind of gypsy fair, was run by two gypsies, a husband and wife. The husband took care of admission and entertainment, and the wife took care of food. You had to pay for the food, but the condiments were out sitting where everyone could get at them. The husband was telling us that we could eat the condiments as long as we bought some food; he was telling us that anyone who ate the condiments without paying for the food was a thief, and like that was pretty much the worst crime one could commit, eating the condiments without buying food. So the main show started; I'm not sure what it was. I was sitting up there, and the gypsy husband somehow told me to go get food from the wife. I went there, and she started telling me something about clothes, and how they got dirty from being around the cooking fires or something. She was speaking in very heavily accented English, but it also seemed like she wasn't speaking much at all, like most of the communication was happening without her actually talking. It wasn't something I was aware of in the dream, it's just something I remember now, looking back. And then she asked if she could look at my clothes, and I said yes. I was wearing some sort of grey shorts, like my grey boxers, but they weren't boxers, because I had a pair of boxers on underneath. She looked the the legs of my grey shorts and showed me how they were already starting to get a thin layer of dirt and grime on them. And then she pulled the leg up, almost exposing my boxers. She did expose my pubic hairs, and I forget if she plucked one, or if I just thought she was going to. And then she was looking at the inside of the crotch of my shorts, pointing out urine stains. Then I can't remember if we started making out, or if it was just something I thought was going to happen. Side diversion for a sec: that's the second time in that dream (and I don't think it's ever happened before) where I can't remember if something actually happened in the dream or if my dreamself just thought that it was going to happen but it didn't actually happen. I wonder if that's signifcant at all. Okay, back to the dream. The end is a little more fuzzy, but I think I ended up going back to the show, and the husband knew that something fishy was going on, because he started chasing me or something. Or at least I have a sort of feeling-memory of being chased, even though I don't remember the actual chase.

And here's where it got really fucked up. I woke up. There was something a little weird going on with the lights (it was dark), and it either was the alarm clock or it was affecting the alarm clock. Either way, I looked at the alarm clock, and I couldn't really tell what time it was, and the led was a whole rainbow of colors, not just its normal red. I got up out of bed and flipped the light switch. The light level only barely changed. The light didn't come on. I knew I was dreaming. Looking back, I don't know if I actually knew I was dreaming, or if I as dream character knew it, but I as sleeping person didn't. And I don't know if the distinction matters, but I'm pretty sure it does. Anyway, I was running around the house (which wasn't layed out anything like my house, but that didn't occur to me while I was still dreaming), telling myself to wake up, telling myself to open my eyes. I came into Kit's bedroom (and it didn't strike me as odd that she had a separate bedroom), flipped the switch, which caused nothing to happen, so it was still dark. I woke her up and told her to wake me up. She was obviously very sleepy, but solicitous, telling me okay, she would wake me up, or that I was awake or something, but nothing changed. I still couldn't make out the clock or turn on lights. Oh, btw, for those who haven't seen it, in Waking Life, the supposed way you could tell you were in a dream was that you couldn't read numbers and stuff, and you couldn't change the light levels. I was getting really extremely panicked, needing to wake up. Finally, I asked (well, hysterically implored would probably be more accurate) Kit to pinch me, and then to bite my arm, in order to wake me up. I think that was when I woke up to Kit's alarm, or there was possibly just a little bit more after that. Kit got up right away, and I asked her, in a somewhat panicked voice, I think, to turn on the light. Right after I woke up, before Kit got into bed, I was sitting there, convincing myself that, yes, I actually was awake. That I could distincly hear sounds, which I didn't really remember from the dream. Not that I noticed a lack of sound from the dream, but, looking back, trying to remember the dream, I didn't have any distinct sound-memories. And since I was acutely aware of the sounds around me at the time, I was deifnitely awake. Still, I think I held my breath in the time between when I asked Kit to turn on the light and when it actually finally did come on.

Okay, I feel less creeped out now than I did upon waking. Time to get ready for work. I really would rather not go to work today. Blargh. I really hope I finish up with the stuff that I'm working on for the high school project so that I can get started on the middle school project. The stuff that I currently have to do will get finished up today, but I'm sure Boss Lady could find more stuff for me to do on the high school project instead of giving me up to the middle school project, especially since I'm scheduled to go on to help with an edit of the sample chapter, but the stuff coming back is a bit later than originally scheduled, so Boss Lady I'm sure is thinking that she'll keep me at least until that edit comes back to be worked on. Oh well. At least I'm getting strokes, as dway put it, from Boss Lady, and she really seems to rely on me for getting these emergency type things done.