I had the most amazing dream last night.  I went to my writer's group, which was in a Taco Bell.  Geoffrey Rush was also in my writer's group.  We decided to just stay at the Taco Bell after writer's group for the Oscars, which were being held there as well.  Geoffrey won.  We took the bus, and he let me hold his Oscar.

(That's what she said.)

I think it was my brain's way of compensating for the absolutely horrible night's sleep I had.  I mean, it was just an awful night.  I tossed and turned and kept waking up and then tossed and turned some more.  Usually I can pinpoint what stupid thing I did to cause a bad night's sleep (caffeine too late, slept in that morning, etc.), but I can't think of anything.  Ugh, I'm the kind of tired where everything seems sort of fuzzy and like you're moving about half a second behind the rest of the world.

Laura, Sarah and I have watched, oh, four episodes of MTV's Fear the last week - did any of you guys watch that show? If you didn't, basically, they take six people ages 18-22ish and drop them off at an allegedly haunted location, usually something old and abandoned and in disrepair. There's no film crew, so they have those cameras that point back at one's face and infrared lighting and that kind of thing. The team members complete dares, things like going to the cell where an inmate was bludgeoned to death and locking themselves in and staying there alone for twelve hours; if they chicken out, they have to leave immediately, but anyone who makes it through two nights wins $5000. Laura and I were talking about how we would have done, and we immediately came to the conclusion that we would have failed. Hard.

I'm pretty much a giant scared baby. Not only could I not sit in a cell in an abandoned prison or check out the hotel room where a woman was murdered or climb down into a smokestack in a Mexican mine, I don't think I could, like, sit downstairs in my own basement with all the lights off, by myself, for very long without freaking out. I remember when I was very little, my dad would assure me that when I grew up I wouldn't be afraid of things like the dark and ghosts and bumps in the night anymore. I'm still waiting for that.

Way back in December, I linked to a series of horror shorts called Marble Hornets, which purports to be footage shot behind-the-scenes as a film student tried to make a film but was unable to do so because of the mysterious events that began to take place. Namely, the young director keeps catching glimpses of a tall man in a suit, and starts keeping a camera running at all times. The tall man's name is Slenderman.

Laura and I watched the introduction through part four one night before calling it quits. That was December 14th, nearly three months ago.

I am STILL AFRAID OF SLENDERMAN. He probably has a total of five seconds of screen time in the videos I watched, and there will be times when I'll be walking down the hallway at night or be in the middle of opening a door and it will suddenly occur to me that Slenderman could be RIGHT THERE, and I'm eight years old again. I had to pee with the door open the other night because the thought of having to open the door afterwards (what if he's standing right on the other side waiting for me!?) was too much to take.

It's absurd. And yet there it is. Honestly, I can't help but feel that a lot of it is because of the sleep paralysis I've suffered my whole life. I only found out what it was when I was in college; before that, for as long as I can remember, scary, inexplicable shit happened to me at night, things that felt completely real, things for which the only explanation I had were the kinds of things that one eventually stops being afraid of: ghosts and vampires and demons and monsters. Two of my few memories from what we call The Old House, which I lived in when I was 3-4, are both of what I now know to be sleep paralysis incidents. In one, I woke up and there was a girl standing right next to my bed staring at me, and I couldn't move and just stared back at her until I finally woke up the next morning and realized that I'd fallen back asleep (my dad told me that it was probably the moon, which I still yell at him about); in the other, I woke up to feel my bed bouncing and shaking and understandably surmised that two monsters were dragging it behind the wall and down the secret stairs into the hidden basement where they would kill me. Four years old! Of course I ended up more afraid of the dark then some other kids might have.

All this to say that when I woke up in the middle of the night last night after a particularly gruesome and disturbing dream - and I've had some doozies over the years, let me tell you - after rehashing it over and over I creeped myself out to such an extent that I had to get up at 6am and just go sit in the living room and read. It's sad, right?

Aaahhh I had the scariest dream last night. I sometimes find myself bemused at the fact that I still have nightmares at my age; not just nightmares, but that I wake up and continue to be genuinely freaked out for some time. I have to share this one, because brrr, but I know how difficult it can be to read someone else's dream, so I'll try to keep this as succinct as possible.

It started off as a CSI dream. (Does anyone else have TV episode dreams?) They were investigating a pile of dead cats in front of an abandoned store in a strip mall. No one wanted to go inside the building to collect evidence, and they found out that as they moved toward the bottom of the pile, some of the cats were still alive, and they started putting them down.

Then, I was in the passenger seat of a car, being driven by some kind of military officer past the same strip mall. A dozen or so cops were inside that abandoned store, shooting towards a hole in the ceiling tiles. They ran out of ammo, and before they could fall back, men in the ceiling killed all of them with absolute precision. Bang, bang, bang. Then, two men turned long rifles on my car and shot; I screamed for us to hurry up and drive away, but not before I saw that the men from the ceiling had their eyes sewn shut. The leader, who was looking right at me, started talking into a walkie-talkie and I heard his voice on the radio; the men were turning that abandoned building into a hotel and were charging $9 a night, and I realized that they would kill anyone who checked in.

Then I woke up, and had to roll over on my back and stare at my pitch-black room for about ten minutes because I was convinced a man with sewn-shut eyes was standing in my corner, just watching me.

This also reminds me that I haven't posted about my three sleep paralysis incidents this year, about which I had intended to keep a log here. The first two this summer were fairly benign. One, I just woke up and couldn't move, and very rationally knew it was sleep paralysis and just waited for it to wear off. Another, I woke up with a heavy weight on the small of my back; I assumed it was Phoenix sleeping on me, and didn't even realize I couldn't move.

The third, though, I had about two weeks ago, and it instantly entered my top ten. I woke up on my back, frozen, with someone pressing their knee into my throat and holding their hand over my mouth and nose. I couldn't breathe, couldn't move, couldn't even think beyond the cold certainty that I was about to die. I wasn't even distantly aware that this was just sleep paralysis and a hallucination; I was convinced that someone had broken into the house and was quietly and methodically going to kill us all.

Sometimes I wonder why I look forward to sleep so much. ;/

The other night, I watched Quarantine, which had a scene in which an evil, infected rat came running at the cameraman with intent to attack. It wasn't the scariest thing in the movie by a long shot, but still kind of unnerving, even for me, and I'm not really particularly afraid of rats or anything, since they're just little mammals and all.

Anyway, I had a dream that night, and I can't remember most of it, as it dissolved upon waking - however, it ended with a rat coming at me. I woke up rather suddenly, then TOTALLY FREAKED OUT when I realized there was a warm, furry animal body pressed right up against my chest and underneath my chin. I may have launched myself out of the bed and squeaked. I don't even think Sasha woke up, heh.

Does anyone else have a cat that's a complete and total bed hog? I try to put him in a chair, and sometimes he sleeps there the whole night through, but I wake up half the time, like, hanging off the edge of the bed while he does his Supercat impression, stretched out horizontally. It's kind of amazing, how strong that instinct is, for us to not roll over in our sleep and crush the tiny creature beside us.

I have a most horrible, pounding headache, because of my allergies. It has made entertaining myself this evening very difficult, as computer screens, TVs, and reading are all kind of painful. The headache's beginning to let up, because my dad gave me one of his surgery pain pills, but not to the extent that I want to sit and watch another episode of Pushing Daisies. Which means I have three to watch before the premiere tomorrow night, and I'm not sure I'll have the time, especially if I work.

I kind of feel like all of the topics which I normally blog about, we now have discussion threads for at the boards, so I'm not sure what to say here. Not that it matters, in the grand scheme of things, and this wouldn't be a problem if my life weren't so boring, but I have no funny anecdotes or anything to relate.

Ah well. I'm going to eat a piece of Laura's birthday cheesecake, and finish In Cold Blood.

ETA: Whenever I dream of a TV show (which isn't that often, but does happen), it's always a fake episode. Whether I'm watching it, participating in it, have run home to miss all but the last few minutes, or am flipping and catch a promo, it's always a fake, dream episode. Sometimes they're very real, sometimes not, but usually it's recognizable as that show's world, if that makes sense. Last night, I dreamed that I was watching an Entertainment Tonight promo for the upcoming Heroes, and the promo centered on watching Jack Coleman practice his singing and dancing. For the upcoming Heroes. The upcoming musical Heroes.

I woke up and was like, thank you, brain.