too much sodium

Dreams decidedly dark this week. Disturbing. Started innocently enough,

Night 1: A party. A trainer I know from the gym sits at the head of a long table, pulls out a guitar, and begins to expertly play and sing a song I wrote many years ago about a troubled father-son relationship. Presses me to perform, to take the guitar and finish the song. Everyone is watching, insisting. I refuse. They just keep pestering and staring and pounding the table.

Night 2: And I am driving Chrispy to a house in Cedar Rapids. We arrive, and I suddenly realize I am dropping him off for a date with CM, a woman I went to high school with who became an opera singer. They have fallen in love. Chrispy is europhic. CM is smug. Her mother speaks an exotic language. I plead and scream and thrash around the house. They don't care. They just keep giggling and pawing at each other. Later, after their date, CM chases me down on a dark street and taunts me, teases me about taking my husband. Bystanders think this is my fault and that I have somehow victimized this sweet and lovely opera singer. They snarl at me and try to defend her.

Night 3: My family has gathered in our old dining room in Ft. Scott (This is one of the most frequent places I dream about, which I think is weird. What is it about that dining room?). It is lined with plexiglas, and a crowd of young boys begins to throw scrap boards with nails. They throw bricks. They charge the plexiglas, and it shatters but doesn't break. They are killing each other, leaving each other in bloody heaps on the ground outside the window. Then it's over. The survivors come inside, and they have nowhere to go. We have to educate them. One young boy has dreadlocks and stares at me, sad and silent, dirty and bleeding.

Night 4: I am hiding in an oddly configured bathroom stall with an unknown baby in a stroller. I am trying to get as far away from people as I can. I look up and realize there are more people, that the stalls are arranged like seats on a bus, and they are all looking at me. Staring. There is a man on the opposite end of the stalls, and he looks familiar, but I can't place him, and it makes me anxious. A woman named Vickie invites me to a ceremony, and I am suspicious.

Tonight will be Night 5. I am going to line my body with pillows and white sage smudge the bed. I might be insane. Regardless, I am very sleepy.