Flabbergasted.

It’s been the weirdest morning I can recall in recent memory.

I couldn’t get to sleep last night.  At all.  So I played around with some PC stuff – figured out how to get a PSX emulator up and running on my rig.  My first mistake – testing it out with Silent Hill.  So here I am at 3:30am, sitting in the dark by myself (well, Jackie was there, but she was asleep on the bed behind me) playing the original Silent Hill.  Thought by some to be one of the flat-out scariest video games of all time.  I only played it for about a half hour, but that was enough to give me the heebie-jeebies.

I was almost asleep… y’know that point where you can feel the sleep setting in, and it feels really good?  It was right then that Jackie’s alarm went off.  She had to be up at 4:10, so she could shower and be to work by 5.  Needless to say, I was completely out of it.  I remembered the important stuff (“your clothes are in the dryer”, “I love you”) but I’m pretty sure most of the rest of what came out of my mouth was completely unintelligible mumbling.  Jackie took off for work, and I finally settled back in to sleep.

I found myself awake at 9:30.  For no apparent reason, other than maybe the cat meowed too loudly or something – I don’t even remember.  From about 9:30-10:30, my memory is all kinds of hazy.  I sat on the computer for a minute.  I remembered that the maintenance guy was supposed to come to fix our kitchen light, so I shut the cat in the bathroom.  Then I laid down on the couch, and fell back to sleep.  This is where my weird-ass dream/nightmare comes in.

So in my dream, Steph (my sister), Jackie and I head to Mankato to go… clubbing.  (Already weird.)  Anyhow, we’re all enjoying ourselves.   Drinks get ordered – I order a Newcastle (my usual).  In the middle of my first drink… BOOM.  Blackout.  In the dream, I can feel time passing by, but there’s no visual -  just basically black.  The only audio I remember hearing during that time is two things: Steph screaming at me, “You just DON’T do that at a club!  That’s NOT fucking cool!” and the other being people cheering.

So I come to, and I’m sitting upright in a chair what would be the entryway of this club in Mankato.  There are a couple people sitting across from me, seemingly only there to keep an eye on me.  They exchange pleasantries with me, and tell me how “awesome” I was the night before, and how “cool it was to meet me”.  I find this odd… in the middle of these pleasantries, I have a “drunk flashback” of me being really drunk, hanging out with a bunch of strangers… on a boat.  No clue where that comes in.  Anyhow, I move to get up and can’t.  I look down to see that I’m chained to the chair I’m sitting in.

The strangers go on to tell me that the bouncers of the club had to do that so that I a.) wouldn’t hurt anyone and b.) wouldn’t try to drive home.  I ask the strangers where Steph and Jackie are, and they don’t know.  One of them then helps me rearrange chains so that I can get at my phone… it’s then that I discover that the chains are just loose enough to wriggle my way out if I want to - so I do.  I step outside and look at the time – 4:45.  Thinking I have to work at Gamestop at 5:30… IN VEGAS… I start to freak out.  A lot.  (That’s where the reality and the dream came together to fuck my world up.)  I call Steph, but she doesn’t answer the first time, and when I call back, she answers, but basically tells me that she’s so embarrassed that she never wants to talk to me again.

So I call Jackie, and ask where she is so that we can get back home.  She gets quiet… so I ask again.  And she tells me that she left without me.  That we were okay, but she just didn’t feel like waiting around, so she took off.  So I fuckin’ panic – I scream at her, “…but I have to fucking work at 5:30!  How could you just leave me here by myself?  I have no way to get anywhere!”  She just keeps telling me, “I know, I know… but I’m not turning around, sorry.”

About then I woke up, breathing harder than I think I’ve ever been breathing before.  (That wasn’t entirely the dream – upon getting a grip on what was going on, I found that my sinuses were fucked up, and I could barely breathe as it was.)  For about another half hour, I couldn’t get myself awake for anything.  Eventually around 12:15, I was able to muster up enough energy to come into work.

However… a crappy morning begets a crappy afternoon, and probably a crappy evening.  Grumblecakes.