Blood

Grandma Grosser used to keep Reader's Digests in the bathroom. I must have been pretty young when I started reading the jokes, which probably explains a lot about my sense of humour. As I got a little older, I started reading the articles, too, if they weren't too boring, and I remember once reading something that said people who had a lot of nightmares were usually very creative and had a greater chance than other people of going crazy.

This was not overly comforting to me at age 14 or however old I was when I ran across it. It was bad enough not knowing who my friends were on any given day. Now I learned that Yay! I was creative! (already knew that) and Boo! I was going to end up insane! This all because I had had nightmares (or at the very least extremely vivid dreams) ever since I could remember. My childhood bedtime prayers had always included a request that I would have "a good sleep with happy dreams." It rarely worked, although I kept praying it for years without seeming to have been too terribly disillusioned by the lack of results.

Or maybe it was just a really delayed result. I don't have nightmares much anymore, and when I do have them, they generally seem to be of a repetitious variety, so I'm not very frightened. There is, of course, always the suspense as to whether the "bad guy" chasing me through the secret passages of a house is going to find me this time, but this kind of thing has happened so often that it doesn't usually really induce genuine fear anymore.

This past week, though, I've been having lots of weird dreams again. I don't remember them as well as I usually do. They just haven't been very restful. And at least two of them have involved blood. In one of them, a blood vessel burst in my eye, but instead of making that rather alarming red patch that such things cause, it burst externally, so that my eye was actually slowly oozing blood. I could see with it and everything, but it was pretty annoying having to continually wipe blood out of my eye. It was even more annoying that everybody around me in the dream was so grossed out by it that none of them would help. Everyone kept saying, "You really need to go to the doctor. You really need to get that checked out." But apparently I was incapable of getting to the doctor on my own, or else other more grave things kept happening to other people who we had to help more urgently or something, and no one was willing to bring me to the doctor themselves.

The other dream was just two nights ago. A lot of things happened in it, but one of the things was that someone kicked or punched me in the mouth or something, and loosened my teeth. We (whoever "we" were) decided to just leave it and hope that they'd firm up again, but shortly before I woke up, one of the teeth loosened instead, and blood started oozing from around it, too.

So now I'm wondering. What's going on in my head? And what's this blood stuff? And is there some kind of connexion between the fact that one dream was about an eye and one was about a tooth, and "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth"? I don't think I'm feeling particularly vengeful toward anyone . . .

Oh. Except maybe Sleepy's. Which is a little ironic, really . . .