During the two and a half hours of sleep I got last night, I had two weird dreams, or one long disconnected dream.
1) I’m somewhere minding my own business when Shaquille O’Neal comes out of nowhere. Not only that, he has his dick out and is waving it around and trying to get close to me. We’re on stairs, and I keep backing away, telling him I don’t want him near me, but he won’t listen. Finally, I call out for MB – “MB! Help me, help me!” – and he runs out and with his kung fu skills (which he has in real life) brings Shaq down, during which I think, Hot.
Because MB has rendered Shaquille O’Neal unconscious, the police and paparazzi are after us. We run down the stairs and hide in some room, trying to blend with the crowd. They find us, and we run off again, and again.
2) Suddenly MB is gone, and I’m hanging out with this group of people who call themselves goth tricksters. I’m surprised to find a childhood friend there, a friend who’d be the very last person to have anything to do with something goth or trickstery. I keep telling her and the group this, and they’re all very insulted. My friend is and has been a treasured member of their group – how dare I think she doesn’t belong?
Finally, I tell her, “Okay, the person I know is you and this person who’s part of this goth trickster group don’t seem like the same person, but your essence is the same.” She and the group like this. She crosses the room and gives me a hug.
I’m not sure why I couldn’t sleep last night. I slept till nine on Sunday morning, but that’s not that late. I mean, I couldn’t sleep till five AM! I didn’t have any caffeine late in the day, but I did have some 7-Up at dinner. Was that really the culprit? Half a can of 7-Up? It’s true I rarely have soda now, so maybe all that sugar, in combination of a sleeping late in the morning, did do a number on me.
And then I couldn’t sleep past 7:30 this morning, although I was exhausted. Just an excuse to drink gallons of coffee.
Tomorrow we fly out to New York!
I’ve been prepping a book of essays for a contest that I thought was due September 15, but actually starts on that day and is due in mid-November. So now I can take my time revising a few of the pieces. Two only need medium revisions (I think) but one sucks. It’s about when I was nine and thought I was possessed after seeing The Exoricst and then getting the flu right after and being doused with too much cough medicine. I originally wrote it in combo with my paternal grandmother’s death, but reading it again, realized it was a forced combination, and that there was too much summing up in the end.
I’ve decided to go another way and focus on the pseudo-possession and the idea of demonic possession in general, which means reading articles about it. A couple are pretty good, not just linking mental illness and possession, but breaking down the dynamics of using possession as a reason for uncharacteristic behavior, but one is, how should I put it, stupid.
The author basically says psychiatrists and psychologists shouldn’t discount demonic possession because it’s, um, real. Her “evidence”? Eyewitness accounts of exorcisms. Yeah, heads up: just because someone says they saw something doesn’t mean it’s real. Her other reasoning: how can we say that demons don’t exist if exorcisms seem to work? *Sigh.*
