a candy-colored clown they call the Sandman

Craaazy nighttime happenings lately. No, not that kind of crazy.

A few days ago I woke around 2 or 3:00. Got up to use the bathroom & get a drink of water. Sometime between the moment when I woke and when I was making my way through the bedroom door, I apparently fell asleep again. This is not something that I've ever done before, to my knowledge. No sleepwalking, no blacking out even. So it came as a surprise when I woke up while standing, for one thing, but also pressed utterly flush to my bedroom door, having rammed myself directly into it so hard that I bruised my right hand where it was pressed between my hipbone and the door handle.

Today, I finished reading a book that was billed as "super scary" but which turned out to be only marginally suspenseful at best. It read much faster than expected, and when I was through I wasn't as jumpy as I might've expected. I was also pretty sleepy. I decided to take a nap. Because it's Sunday and there's no reason not to be decadent on a Sunday, I slid into bed like it's a totally normal thing to do at 3:PM...

...and proceeded to have the most vivid, awesome, ridiculous, terrible dream that I can remember in a long, long time. I was staying at a beach house (shades of this book, which I read last weekend and did not like AT ALL) with a group of people that I barely knew (the result of a conversation with friends on Friday night about how they Never introduce me to their friends when we all hang out). We were all there because we were going to be in a wedding together, but I was secretly dreading the wedding because I didn't think that the couple ought to be together (which could come from pretty much anywhere, honestly--there are far too many examples of this in my life right now). Still, I am nothing if not all things agreeable (never say 'nice'!) when I've made a commitment, so there I was. Oddly, it was somewhat like a party I attended thrown by a friend in college who had been engaged for a while but broke the engagement when she discovered, belatedly, that her intended was cheating on her. She cancelled the plans and never spoke to the jackass again, choosing instead to have a party to celebrate her own near-miss. She called it her Disengagement Party. It was wild. I was too young to have a real clue what it was all about, but I know it was one Hell of a weekend. It's a bit surprising that no one fell in the river....

Back to the dream: there were probably eighteen, maybe two dozen of us there. It wasn't high summer or a super tropical location, so jeans & sweaters were more prevalent than bikinis & shorts. There were lots of Activities. Lots of things Planned. It was sort of a nightmare for someone like me, preferring to do what feels right at the time rather than what's next on a list. "As soon as we finish the Frisbee game, then we'll roast marshmallows." Um, OK.... Throughout, I found myself slinking toward the back, pulling away from the crowd, declining a turn. All the action was wearying, and the only way I could stay there at all was to kick back and observe rather than taking part. There were a couple of other people who seemed to be doing the same, both men that I didn't know. I didn't bother figuring out who they were.

When we came inside after S'Mores that first night (somehow I knew we were to be there for a week or so, though it was never revealed in so many words), we got our "bunk assignments." The bride-to-be read from a legal pad attached to a clipboard (as she had all day) where each of us was to sleep. For some perverse reason, we were arranged in a MFMF pattern. It was at that point that I realized that every single one of us was completely single, with no attachments whatsoever. We had been chosen to stand up in that wedding because that couple wanted to pair us off. It was nauseating. Still, what could I do? I wasn't the first to realize it (now I could see it in the eyes of a few of the others), and to leave at this point--what would it prove? (This element is also a function of a recurring train of thought I've had lately, though it's about reproducing, not gaining a significant other.)

I took my place in the boy/girl layout. I was between a very young, very nerdy, very irritatingly chipper attorney (Good. Bye.) and one of the like-minded souls who had sat out a few of the day's events. Because I had to crawl over him to get to my sleeping bag, I didn't really take a good look; at that time all I knew was that he smelled good and that I vastly preferred him to my right-side companion simply by dint of his apparent disinterest. We were jammed cheek-by-jowl into an odd C-shaped fold-out couch that folded out in all three directions, so each of us had a back behind us and a foot-part that we could extend in front of us. It also meant that our feet were basically pooled on top of each other in the middle, depending on how long (er, tall) we were. The night was cool, and a very large, thin spread had been thrown over the center of the C; it covered each of us to the neck and was there to keep the chill off while we chatted and had a drink or two before we slept. (More from the bride's clipboard!)

I got my standard Blue Frog (er, whatever) and settled back to drink and observe. The fellow to my left did the same, drinking a beer that was darker than my preference but not so thick you could stand a knife in it. (Yeah, it's a vague standard, but we've all got to have boundaries.) He noticed me looking at his beer and he sort of curled his lip toward my glass, as if to say, "Are you really willing to start that debate?" I chuckled and bowed my head, acknowledging the point. (Yup, it's a girly drink. Not the girlyest, but it's no Rob Roy and I'll not pretend.) He raised his eyebrows, seemingly surprised that I had any humor about myself. If he thought I was like the other kids, he was wrong.

Everyone else was talking as a group. Movies, TV, sports, music. The usual, easy stuff. And someone, sitting to my right (but not close enough right to be the baby lawyer) was making a 13-yr-old move on me (or on someone, anyway--how could they know who?) with their feet in the middle of the bed/couch/thing. It was incongruous and distracting, and there was nowhere else to put my feet except closer to Dark Beer...so I moved them. Right on top of his. He looked at me again, eyebrows raised as if he was accusing me of something but wasn't quite sure what. I just smiled wide and slugged back the rest of my drink. And then I realized: I knew him. He wasn't just this good-looking, dark-beer drinking, grumpy single guy next to whom I happened to have been planted. I knew him.

First, the good-looking part. He looked like a somewhat shorter combination of Patrick Dempsey and Alex O'Laughlin.

Someone had come for our glasses; apparently fresh drinks were on the way. Everyone else in the room was involved in a loud debate about a reality show celebrity, and paying no attention to us. He turned fully toward me and said something about my feet. I shrugged a little toward my right, said I needed a little more room and that I knew he wouldn't mind. With that, I looked up slowly and made long eye-contact, batted my eye lashes (that's such a 'me move') and grinned. He tipped back his head and laughed one of those laughs that makes you wish you were holding the person, because the laugh runs right through them and must feel so good that you wish you could feel it, too. Maybe that only happens for people who don't laugh a lot, whose real laughter is rare and precious.

And then he jabbed me in the ribs. Not a hard jab, but a tiny little tickle-jab. Totally unexpected, the perfect transition. I giggled (another 'me move'--by which I mean so totally not me, when I'm schooling my responses) and instinctively rolled away. He playfully grabbed my hands and rolled me over, all the way over (like, 270° rather than 90°)...which brought me beneath him, with my arms above my head, my wrists trapped under his hands. We were both still laughing, breathing heavily, and couldn't look anywhere but straight into each others' eyes. We knew no one was watching, not that we cared. He was just about to kiss me

when I woke up.

He really does look like that. It was the soul-searing guy from the Nice post. !