Carol-Anne, I have asked you to keep the children quiet today! And for Christ's sake, get them out of the gaaaaaaaarden!!!!

I gave my mother a bit of a fright the other morning.

(Actually "bit of a fright" might be an understatement...)

You know how sometimes you have a really vivid dream right before you wake up in the morning, and the stuff happening in the dream kind of mimics stuff that's been going on in real life at the time, so when you wake up it takes you a minute before you can separate the dream from real life? Like for example, I often have dreams in which I find and purchase super exciting stuff like Baroque-style gowns, epic shoes, or extremely rare and expensive My Little Ponies, and wake up thinking I actually DID find and buy these items for a low price. And then when I wake up properly, I get kind of depressed when I realize it was only a dream.

The other morning, when I went back to bed at around 5.00 after a trip to the loo, I had a dream that my colourist, Greg had died. Aside from the fact that he is the one and only person on the planet whom I trust with colouring my hair, I adore Greg as a friend. We're both kind of snarky and sarcastic and love to gossip whilst I'm getting my hair did. We've even gone to see the Pogues together. So naturally, in the dream I got quite upset about his passing. Like REALLY upset. And because sometimes in dreams, your reactions to things can be quite a bit more extreme than they would be in real life, I was like FRANTICALLY upset. (I don't get frantic, even under extreme stress or in life-threatening situations.)

Most of the time after these types of dreams, it does take me quite a while to sort the two out (more than it probably takes normal people, I think). But the other morning... Perhaps it was a result of the sleeping pills? Or just a side effect of having epic sleep problems in general? Whatever the reason, that morning when I woke up again at around 6.00, my brain refused to separate the dream from real life ever after the normal waiting period.

My brain also failed to shake the frantic-epic-panic-attack that Greg's death had caused. I was wide awake, I knew I had just had a dream about Greg's death, but I COULD NOT figure out where the dream ended and real life began. That made the panic attack worse.

So, naturally:

You know when something sudden and startling shakes you out of a deep sleep, you get that heart-stopping FEAR? That particular kind of terror that is only caused by nightmares.

Yeah I'm pretty sure Mum almost had a heart attack.

While her brain was struggling to (a) wake up properly, (b) make sense of what I was saying, and (c) respond in the appropriate fashion; my brain decided to figure out how to separate the dream from real life.

Funny story:

This one time, a bunch of us stayed up at my friend, Number2's house in Upstate New York. His parents were away, so we were having the craic wandering around in the wilderness, dressing up in Number2's mother's old 70's and 80's clothes she had stashed away in the attic,

and drinking ourselves into a stupor. Even my friend T was drinking, and she NEVER drinks.

We retired to bed at around 2.30/3 in the morning--T and M in the spare room, S downstairs on the sofa, and me in with Number2. Myself and Number2 stayed up until like 4 in the morning finishing off the two bottles of wine we had stashed in his room and trying to convince the old and quite contrary VCR to play Harry Potter. (I'm amazed we didn't keep anyone else up with the racket we were making trying to get that VCR to work before we eventually passed out.)

I had a really bad dream. I was locked up in some kind of hospital, and awful horror-movie type things were happening all around me, and then someone started screaming. Like SCREAMING--horrific, blood-curdling screaming. It was so horrific if woke me up.

Except the screaming didn't stop when I woke up.

My brain actually cannot recall the sound of the screaming. It was that terrifying.

I tried to wake Number2, but he sleeps like the dead and so after shaking did not work, I punched him in the arm several times until he woke up and then made him go out into the hallway first to investigate. The screaming was coming from the spare room, and the more awake and alert I got, I realized it sounded like two people screaming. To be precise, it sounded like both M and T were screaming.

S was first to the scene, which still amazes me as she was downstairs, in the dark, ALONE, and yet she still rushed TOWARDS the scariness. By the time Number2 and I got there, the screaming had stopped and S was in the bedroom doorway asking T and M what the heck happened.

T was sitting up in her bed, the blankets pulled up to her chin, with a look of confusion and terror on her face. M was standing in the closet looking kind of dazed.

(Now before I go on, I should perhaps mention that M has a long history of intense sleep-walking and sleep-talking. (Sleepovers at M's house were super fun in high school.)

[His exact words--none of that was fabricated.]

I feel bad for M's mom. There was a while there that she kept finding all of M.'s pillows at the bottom of the basement stairs every morning for like 6 months. And then there were the times she'd be sat in the living room watching tv, and M (whose bedroom was on the other side of the living room wall) would start banging on the walls and screaming swear words.

Oh and my personal favourite:

The time M knocked his bedroom door clean off its hinges. And that didn't even wake up him up.)

T, still shaken from the whole incident, said she had half-woken up to M wandering around the room in the dark. He wandered into the closet and then started banging around and shouting "ARE YOU SERIOUS? ARE YOU SERIOUS, T?!?!?" etc., and so T not being properly awake, she got frightened and started screaming, and then M started screaming louder.

I'm guessing that's when I woke up.

M.'s version: "I don't know what was wrong with T, I was just getting up to go to the bathroom."

He managed to say that with a straight face, while still in the closet.

S managed to calm T down and the rest of us--dazed and shaken and still kind of confused--went back to bed. The next morning, once we were all fully awake, we discussed the events of the night until all of us were doubled over and sobbing with laughter.

That incident still makes me laugh quite a bit, actually.

Statcounter is really fun. It shows you more detailed info than the Blogger stats (although the downside is that there's a limit to how many records it keeps, unless you pay for it). I am greatly amused by some of the ways in which people have arrived at my blog when searching the internet. I think my favourite ever was "nude man bears explosion". And A LOT of people search for images of women in electric chairs. And baby bunnies. It's a bit disturbing how many people search for baby bunnies. And recently someone read my entire blog over the course of 2 days. I'm not gonna lie--I felt immensely flattered. :)