So, while I've never taught myself to lucid-dream, or managed to do so under any circumstances, I can occasionally recognize when I'm dreaming - the only problem is that I then wake up immediately.

The challenge is just that, while I'm in the middle of a dream, I am willing and able to believe almost anything.

Almost.

For instance, a couple of nights ago I was having a back-to-work dream. Not surprising, since it was the night before my first day back to work. But I was dreaming about being in the office, along with two doctors who have never worked together, one of whom I haven't worked with in over a decade.

And in the dream I was talking to a client who had a problem with their pet. So they brought their pet in, which happened to be a human baby. And that was no big deal, and in fact I stood around chatting with the old vet while he stuck the laparoscope (which neither of us know how to use in real life) into the baby and started rummaging around and pulling out stuff at random, and the other vet talked with the ex-wife of a friend of mine (said friend, I believe, has never been divorced).

And eventually we pulled the miniature internal organ out of the baby, at which point I realized I needed to change because I was wearing a sheer shirt and had forgotten to put on a bra, so I wandered into the closet - which was a hideously spooky old wooden thing with holes and bats in the ceiling and lichen all over the floors - and changed into a more work-appropriate top, and took the baby back to its owners.

And there I was, telling them how their baby was going to be just fine, and that it should recover from the procedure with no complications, and I looked down at my feet and realized I was barefoot.

And somehow my mind suddenly seized up, and I realized that, holy cow, this is some malarkey, because I would NEVER come to work barefoot, and this couldn't be real, and I had to be dreaming.

At which point, sadly, I woke the heck up.....

There are certain questions that I am fairly certain only ever come up in my dreams. Questions like whether being gummed on by a zombie baby would pose any actual risk of zombification. Also, whether my irresistability-to-babies-and-children would make me a particular target for zombie babies and children (my subconscious seems to feel that the answer to the latter question, at least, is yes).

Then again, only in my dreams would the primary Zombie Resistance Army be called the Sushi Ninjas. (I have no idea of how raw fish is supposed to help them fight zombies; they wouldn't tell me. They were kind of pretentious.)

I'm not sure whether this was better or worse than the nightmare where Matthew Broderick was making me turn him into my vampire blood-slave, but either way, it's been a week for bizarre dreams....

With all the junk going on in my life lately, I've been having nightmares again for the past few weeks. Which is a pain in the butt, but survivable - I've had chronic nightmares most of my life. Unfortunately, the ones I've been having lately have been.... well... lame. Dreams about work, or being chased by snakes, or boring crap like that. Just not up to my usual standards.

Last night, though, I dreamed that Alton Brown had his left arm bitten off at the elbow by an evil carnivorous coffee table/jacuzzi hybrid that ate his mermaid girlfriend while he was trying to make marshmallow marigolds for my graduation party.

Now that's more like it! Thank you, subconscious, no more phoning it in! If I'm going to have to put up with nightmares, the least you can do is make them so utterly bizarre that I can confuse my husband and entertain myself for the rest of the day by poking at it and trying to figure out where the hell those images came from....

I've always been fascinated by the fact that, in my dreams at least, emotions are completely dissociated from circumstances. I have no idea whether this holds true for other people and their dreams or whether it's just a quirk of my own brain chemistry, but it's always been true for me. I can have dreams about topics that are, to my waking mind, completely horrifying without being the least bit upset in the dream, and I've been known to have horrific nightmares about completely mundane items and actions - for some reason, in the dream, the emotion of terror and horror gets randomly attached to whatever's nearby or happening.

Last night's adventure into inappropriately scary nightmares involved dreaming about snakes escaping from their cages, jumping out at me, and biting me. Never mind that I'm not scared of snakes at all; I think they're beautiful and fascinating. Never mind that if it ever would have been appropriate to have anxiety dreams about snakes, it should have been last week, when I was leading up to performing with one who's been known to bite me on multiple occasions. No, just somehow suddenly out of the blue, my brain decided it was time to entertain me with horrible, jumping, flying, improbable on the level of Snakes-on-a-plane horror serpent dreams.

Sometimes I wish that I could understand my subconscious. Other times I'm fairly certain that it's much better for my overall sanity that I don't.....

Anyone can dream about totem animals. It's a standard symbol.

But it takes someone truly.... special, I guess, to dream about totem vegetables.

Noone wanted the iceberg lettuce as their totem - it's kind of the frog of the vegetable world, not as trendy and hip as the other options. I'm not sure why, though; Joe Two Spears, Broccoli Warrior doesn't sound any more prestigious. Tasty and nutritious though they may be, I'm pretty sure almost all vegetables are intrinsically uncool....

Memo to myself: Never watch Buffy and Smallville back to back while extremely tired. Or if I do, distract myself for at least a few hours before going to sleep. Watch Fraggle Rock, or read something nice and mentally fluffy and soothing. Definitely not an Anita Blake novel. Otherwise I wind up with dreams like I had last night.

The part about teaching a class of arrogant, disdainful burnouts wasn't bad - the metaphor about a cell-bus and the sodium-potassium pump being a turnstile was actually kind of interesting. And the part where I summoned an invisible monster in my bathtub was handleable, too. Stupid - I remember even in the dream thinking, 'why did I do this?' and not being able to come up with a valid answer. We tried to dispel him by taking all the water out... first very carefully with a 12-cc syringe, then when we saw him starting to simultaneously manifest and disappear and the murky gate to a monster realm appeared, with large buckets. It didn't quite work, but we wound up with a kind of gaunt, ineffectual monster who had a crush on my friend and kept trying to point at her, which didn't work because he was, well, *invisible.*

But the vampire... *UGH!* Yuck, yuck, ick, eww.... I hate my subconscious. It was huge, all fat and glistening and grey and ewwww.... like a mountain of horrid flesh. If you ever read the WildCard novels, and slogged through to the ones where Bloat became a character, like that, only cold and grey and undead. He had women crawling all over him, they were his slaves, and against his huge icky body they were like tiny mice. His trachea had collapsed under all the weight, and he needed a breathing tube to breathe. I don't know why a vampire needed to breathe, it made sense at the time. And it was all because of the kryptonite that mutated him to be like that. That's what the slaves were for - rubbing the stuff into him, so he could still live. Or un-die, or whatever the word for vampires is. And for sacrificing their daughters to him; this was in ancient greece and sacrifices were in vogue. I don't know how the kryptonite wound up in ancient greece, it's a dream thing.

Anyway, this is an image that's going to linger. No amount of trying to imagine pink bunnies or sing songs is going to wipe it away until it's good and ready to go invade someone else's subconscious. I love having an active imagination and vivid dreams, but sometimes it comes back to bite me in the rear....