I still see people in my sleep.

A few nights ago there was a little boy in jean overalls smiling and waving at me from my doorway. I screamed so much. Also, I actually slept walked the other night. I woke myself up after realizing I was walking around checking behind doors.

Sleepwalking with a Pillow

The other night while sleepwalking, I went to the kitchen to get a glass of water and into the bathroom with my pillow from bed. While on the toilet I sort of woke up and realized there was a pillow on my lap. A little dazed, I went back to bed and woke up in the morning with my husband's sweater wrapped warmly around my neck and chest like a blanket. Somewhere in my sleepwalking state I found his sweater and brought it to bed. Most nights I go to the bathroom or the kitchen and I usually don't remember. During the nights that I don't remember David can hear me going into different rooms and I'm usually out of bed for a longer time.

Tales From the Bed: What I Think About Latte Art

[Inspired by a dream, originally posted on my blog Penny Lyra February 1, 2012.]

I sort of dreamt this the other night (even the last sentence),

Their knees touched underneath the table at the café months before their lips would ever meet. She felt his boney kneecap tap against her fleshy leg. Neither of them pulled away, with bone and skin together their chemistry turned all the plain foam in everybody’s drinks into latte art. They never had to discuss anything, they knew they were in love.  He knew in the way that she looked at him and she knew in the way that he followed her around town. 

“Why do you even try to drink cappuccinos and that pipe…what is the point of that pipe?” she asked. “You spill and make a smoky mess out of everything.”

 “I like the way I look with my pipe and I like to sit with you and admire your olive skin and freckles,” he said. 

They’d spent every minute together. They would take a blanket down to the river and she would read books to him and he would play his guitar for her. They would dance and laugh, but she wished for more. He was only bones, but they were bones she wanted to jump. She had fallen in love with a skeleton. 

It wasn’t until a witch friend would bring him back to life and turn him into a vampire like her that he would no longer be only bones, he would have eyeballs to look upon and lips to kiss.

Tales From the Bed: Careful Walking

[Inspired by a dream, originally posted on my blog Penny Lyra December 2, 2011.]

Your friends live in a house filled with human corpses underneath the carpet.  The corpses are covered completely by the handmade Moroccan carpet that fills the entire house. There is different carpet for each room, some patterned with pink and teal camels and others in plaids and stripes.  

Life is normal with the corpse cocoons.  You catch your friends making out in the hallway with one of them by their feet. You go into the kitchen to take out a pan from the cabinet to bake cookies, it falls out and lands on one. You pick it up. On the sofa you watch a movie while holding hands with your friend under a blanket. You use one of them as a footstool.  

When you sleep over you are careful not to trip over the corpses in the middle of the night to get a glass of water. 

It’s Christmastime and Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” is playing on the record player. You all dance merrily around each corpse as you decorate the Christmas tree with gold tinsel and popcorn garland. Pieces of popcorn fall like snow from the garland and land on the corpses. You don’t pick up the pieces.  

The house smells like warm cinnamon and pine forest and the corpses are always there.

Good to remember when falling asleep...

We can’t ever go back to old things or try and get the 'old kick' out of something or find things the way we remembered them. We have them as we remember them and they are fine and wonderful and we have to go on and have other things because the old things are nowhere except in our minds now.

~Hemingway to Bill Horne, Paris 1923 

I'm just protecting him.

I made David jump out of bed because I didn't want the giant crispy spider crawling on the wall to poison him. It wasn't real. Also, the other night I woke up to glass shattering everywhere. Glass didn't shatter anywhere. I imagined it in my sleep.

Sleep Worrying

One night in  beautiful Bruges we decided we wanted our Cokes and Dr.Peppers really cold so we put them outside the window and fell asleep. All night while dreaming I was so worried about those cokes thinking we would get in trouble for having them on the ledge and thinking they would fall on someone. The next morning I woke up and they were inside the room all lined up perfectly. It's really creepy to think I opened that giant window and took all six drinks in in the middle of the night and lined them up while I was sleeping. I could have very easily fallen out the window. Do you ever do things like this?

Granny

Since my Granny passed away in August, I've been having dreams about her. I made her promise to visit me in my dreams before she went away. I was really upset, because for the first few months after she died she didn't visit me. But, lately I've been dreaming about her. In one dream I dug her up from the ground and she came back to life. She was so happy to be back and we were trying to figure out how to bring other people back from the dead. In another dream I was walking around holding her and she was laughing.  The next time I dream about her, I will write about it right away so I can remember more details. I really do have the most vivid dreams every single night.

For the past 5 years, I've been talking to my Granny on the phone at least every two weeks, sometimes every week. We would usually talk for 2 hours. She was my best friend. I really miss her. I would always tell her about my night terrors and she always thought they were so funny. Since I was little, I would sleep in the same bed as her while visiting. She had one of those giant Texas-sized beds. On one of the last visits, she made me take one of her Zoloft, so I wouldn't wake up screaming with her. OH i miss her. Even on my last day of life with her, we took a nap together in that bed. Granny please visit me tonight.

The Giant Spider On The Ceiling

I've been pretty good about sleeping the past few months. Every few weeks, I've been waking up screaming, but it hasn't been as bad lately,until last night. I thought I saw a giant spider on the ceiling and jumped right off my air mattress screaming and into the hallway where I turned the lights on. It wasn't real and I went back to sleep with my heart pounding.  When I'm not dreaming about spiders, I'm dreaming about people in the room.

I still dream and scream............

Last night I sat up in bed and had a conversation while sleeping. David is so used to me doing things in the middle of the night, that he didn't even try to listen. I think I was giving someone a tour of Portugal (that is what I was dreaming about, living in Spain, but giving people tours of Portugal). Also, I screamed, because there was a man in my room that looked just like my friend Vegor. I felt bad for being scared of him.

scary movies before bed...always a bad idea.

Image via

the postman

Last week I woke up, because I thought the postman was crawling into our bed from the window. I was so scared that I ran into the hallway and then I woke up. My heart was beating so fast.

the wall

My mom's dog was sleeping with me last night. An hour into sleep I woke up because I thought I saw the dog's blood all over the wall. Still dreaming, I knew I needed to protect her, so I put her in her crate until morning. I woke up in the hallway on my way back to bed.

oh kitty

I love hanging out in my new toe shoes in the middle of the night and how my cat just follows me around as I walk around the kitchen on my toes.

gymnastics

I love this.

I browsed the life archives, when I could not fall asleep.

Schoolchildren and their parents sheltering under umbrellas from spring rain on the road between Osaka and Kyoto.

field of dreams

my dream last night was beautiful...running hand in hand through a field of flowers.....I'll just say it felt like this......

Cocoon "On My Way"

cookie clicks

because I could not fall asleep, i baked cookies for my paramour's lunch....I also clicked on my friend's blog profile back and forth over fifty times, so that their profile views number would go up.

until tonight

I've been falling asleep fast! I watched Vicky Cristina Barcelona tonight. I loved it. Hopefully I have Spanish dreams when I do fall asleep. *POST-EDIT: I did have Spanish dreams afterall, I went to Spain in June. *POST-EDIT #2: Whoa, I moved to Spain.

anorak (.)(.)

I make collages that look like something a kid would make, so since I could not fall asleep I looked at Anorak Magazine, the happy mag for kids. I'd like to work for them someday, even as a janitor. *illustration from anorak

sesame construction

I made this and now I'm sleepy.......inspired by the sesame street videos I saw at Blockbuster tonight......

good ideas

one night last week when I could not fall asleep, I wrote down on a piece of paper what I thought were good ideas:

move to costa rica and 'teach the children english'

move to 'sa fraciso'

'BOSTON/RI/MAINE'

___ _____ ______

call granny

play with 'tipiip' (tippy is my cat)

in the room where you sleep

I could not sleep, so I watched this.

dee coconut

A few nights ago, I could not fall asleep, so i made this and taped it in the bath tub.