whiskey in a teacup . com

I’ve been a mild to moderate insomniac for as long as I can remember, so the classic trope about the sleep deprivation of new parenthood doesn’t really apply to me.  I seem to get more or less as much sleep as I always did; the difference is that it’s more likely to come in a series of naps.  This means that I don’t always sufficiently cycle through the deeper stages of sleep, and I don’t often remember my dreams.

Last night I got in an uncommon five-plus hour stretch, and had a rather rich, extensive dream, the centerpiece of which was a joke I overheard while sitting in traffic.  The set-up was in dream-English and can’t really be reproduced, but the punchline was “Well, I didn’t expect to see Richard Dreyfuss!”  and the humor hinged on the fact that Richard Dreyfuss is known for his big, George-Michael-in-Wham!-style hair.  Which, as we know, he is not.  Throughout the rest of the dream I kept retelling the great joke I had heard, and it wasn’t until I was completely awake that I realized how inscrutable and non-sequitery the whole thing was.   Ahh, but it’s good to dream again.

Last night I dreamed that there were extra doors in my house, and none of them were secure.  I’d lock the locks at night but this guy kept getting in somehow.  One morning I found that he had rigged up this machine on my kitchen counter that turned lemons into lemonade (GGRRROOOAN).  He was short and mustachioed (universal symbol for evil, duh) and I told him to stay out, but he wouldn’t.   The doors just wouldn’t close all the way.  I recruited his two large, sympathetic sons to help me reason with him, and they tried, but he just kept coming back and he yelled at me for throwing out his lemonade.

Last night I dreamed that the baby was a collection of sock-puppet snakes and that his kicks were the snakes’ way of telling me how to handle the nefarious stranger I had just met at Target.  Fortunately, his kicking was so persistent that it woke me up and took me out of that inane plotline.

Today we had a prenatal appointment, and it was the extra-crappy one where you drink a bottle of sugar water so they can screen you for gestational diabetes.  The drink made me feel sick (and caused a minor argument because Jared thought I was yelling at him when in fact I was jumpy from the sugar).  While waiting in the exam room for the midwife to come in, I decided to pee (in the bathroom, that is).  When I came back, the midwife had arrived and Jared was telling her about my various near-fainting spells over the previous weeks.  “Oh, I’m much better now,” I said with a confidence that verged on boastfulness; “I’ve been taking iron and things are fine!”

Several minutes later I was struggling to maintain consciousness as I was hit by a grotesque wave of nausea and dizziness and my vision started to go black.  I mentioned my plight, and for the next couple of minutes I lay there like a useless, sweaty lump while the midwife put cool compresses on my forehead and somehow managed to turn me onto my side (I heard her asking me to turn over, but couldn’t quite make sense of the request).  Jared took my hand and announced that my palms were wet; a nurse took my blood pressure, which was 72/48 (down from 110/70 when I first arrived).

I recovered quickly and was able to stand up and leave shortly thereafter, and it really wasn’t a big deal at all.  (I was able to complete a forty-minute workout last night, so I am really not as pathetic and dainty as it may seem.  I am just occasionally pathetic and dainty.)  In fact, the only reason I’m even mentioning this is because I’ve made the tough decision to add a second theme song to this pregnancy.  I don’t know why I like or even know this song, and it could do some serious damage to my credibility, but I’ll take the easy way out and blame it on “the hormones”.  So, let it henceforth be known that the official wiatc.com Blacking Out or Nearly Blacking Out While Pregnant Theme Song is “Low” by Flo Rida!  You might have thought lyrics like

she hit the floor, next thing you know
shorty got low low low low low low low low

were about sexy girls “dropping it like it’s hot”, as the young kids like to say, but to me they will always be about falling and/or lying down as my blood pressure plummets to dangerous levels.  In much the same way as my mother constantly tells me about the nightmares she had after seeing E.T. while pregnant with me, I hope to one day bore my son with frequent re-tellings of this hilarious tale.

I dreamed that I was in a library with the cast of Lost on some sort of mission.  A bear was following us (not the polar bear from the island, but a brown bear) and someone from our group eventually felled it.  As it lay dying, Hurley pressed his meaty palm against the bear’s to compare sizes.  (They were the same size.)  Some of us were worried that the bear would deploy its claws into Hurley’s flesh; someone else argued that bear claws don’t work that way.  I suggested that, being in a library, we could find a book about bears and use it to answer our question.

This then segued into a dream about one of Jared’s friends accidentally smashing the windows of Jared’s car while I was inside it.  Now you know.

Two selected dreams from last night:

1) I am mauled and partially eviscerated by a werewolf in some dive restaurant.  Not sure what the exact context was, but shit was scary.  My entrails looked like angelhair pasta, which was disappointing because I’ve seen human intestines up close and I know they don’t look like that!

2) I am trying to kill Hitler with a broomstick in my parents’ living room.  I can’t get too close because he’s brandishing a razor blade.  Luckily the real-life sun comes out just enough to wake me up before things get too ugly.

I let myself get worked up by this song* before bed, and was startled awake at 2 a.m. by a terrible nightmare:  I had been in a horrible screaming fight with a family member, and to escape the chaos I propelled my wheelchair (I don’t think I was disabled, but with dream logic, who can tell?) outside.  Once on the sidewalk I pushed down on the joystick, and suddenly the chair took flight, and away I soared, as fast as I could.

*Forgive me this transgression into teenage girlness, but if you’ve got sorrowful family dynamics like I do, that song is pretty darn cathartic.

Scene: some basement.  A long table is adorned with a row of cupcakes.  Each cupcake has a lone candle stuck in its frosting.  Lighter in hand, I try to ignite each wick one by one, but as soon as a flame appears it is somehow extinguished.  When I get to the end of the row of cupcakes I realize I am at a combination seance/birthday party for Lennon and McCartney and that their spectres are blowing out the candles.

I wish! No, instead I dreamed about my parents’ basement and horrific demonic forces haunting some anonymous family who lived down there.  (This is almost certainly because every time I reluctantly go into my own basement to do laundry, I think, “Boy howdy, I sure still am scared of basements!”)  The haunting later turned out to have been staged for some sort of game show, but that didn’t erase the dream’s earlier imagery of decaying babies and swirling lights.  And that’s not all!  The other night I dreamed that Richard Nixon was trapped inside the closet in my parents’ bedroom, and he was scratching at the door trying to get out.  This might have been because my cat often tries to open closed doors by picking at them with her claws, and the sound has slowly driven me insane over the years.

I always thought the word “nightmare” was equine in derivation: a metaphor for sinister black mares stampeding through your head, causing your fears to hemorrhage out from your psyche in the form of bad dreams.  The internets, however, suggest it comes from “mara”, the name for an old Nordic demon that visits you in the night.  That’s way creepier, and pretty cool, but I still prefer my theory.

I woke up around 4:30 this morning because I was shaking.  I was shaking because I was laughing.  I was laughing because I had been dreaming of helping Jared pick out clothes in a store, and he was trying on a shirt that I suspected was a women’s shirt.  He started to fret and adjust the shirt and then removed it, revealing a sheer camisole with florets.  Now, I love a man in drag, but it’s got to be in the right context.  I think we can all agree that “lace” and “Jared” do not go together like peanut butter and chocolate.