Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Shortly after I woke up from an unusually healthy nine hours of sleep, the police helicopter started circling nearby. (No, that wasn't what woke me -- it started while I was checking my email.) I woke up from the tail end of a dream. I don't often remember dreaming. It's always been that way, even before the fibromyalgia -- I'll remember having dreamt a few times a month maybe (and not at all, some months), and remember anything about the dreams less often than that.

What follows is what I wrote in my paper diary as soon as I woke, with just-now edits in square brackets.

Just woke from a dream in which what started off as [the making of] a movie about Vikings turned into the filming of a movie about Vikings in modern times (longship, axes, raiding folks with minivans and SUVs) and then turned into a real life counterattack against the Vikings. I was staying near two women I really like -- actually one was supposed to go with a different group but I was glad she came with mine instead so I could keep track of her and make sure she was ok. I don't remember who they started as [people I know in real life], but somewhere along the way they turned into Buffy + Willow from Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and both died. They popped like balloons when they died, and when the fighting stopped people started speculating on what this meant for the next season of Buffy. A child who was in the fighting on our side complained (after we'd beaten the Vikings + smashed their boats) that too much stuff had gotten broken, and he wanted Viking arrows and stuff, and we'd just lost a huge research opportunity, so I showed him how we could stick pieces back together to make study examples to make copies from.

Oddly, the Viking boats were much lighter and more fragile than the ones I've seen. Almost like they were woven out of grass instead of made of wood. It seemed important to smash the boats so that any Vikings who escaped couldn't come back and use them.

I wonder whether perhaps I just don't stay asleep long enough to dream, sometimes. But that probably doesn't explain my seldom remembering my dreams as a child. (Though I do remember a couple especially vivid childhood dreams and one or two from high school, including a recurring childhood nightmare about being chased through a castle by a giant, half-eaten crab (which the rest of my family had been eating, but not me, and which somehow had a spine and was walking upright), and a recurring as-the-alarm-clock-went-off dream from later, about being in a one-man spaceship.)