Bad Dreams

I read something once about how there is nothing more boring then hearing about someone else's dream. I love telling people about my dreams, so that came as a nasty shock, and I hope it isn't the case with me. I feel I am quite blessed with my dreams, they make no sense, like all dreams, but they are hilarious. I am fortunate in my family as well, they never have any objections to hearing about my dreams, my father often tells me I should write them down.
Now, here's something I find interesting about the topic of dreams. It is really common in fiction for someone to have bad dreams, full on recurring nightmares that make the prospect of sleep terrifying. These dreams are often about something legitimately bad, or scary to the person having them: watching a loved one die, being chased by monsters, something creepy and disfiguring happening, whatever. The point is that this literally scary thing haunts this person in dreams, and they don't want to sleep because they don't want to live this nightmare over and over at night. Well, I used to wonder if dreams were really like that, and when I saw something scary on TV I was terrified that I wouldn't be able to forget it and that I would dream about it that night. If that happened then it was all over, just a couple of steps until I refused to sleep and spent my last days in a mental institution refusing all food but peanut butter covered celery. That was the logical progression in my mind at least. Now, I am scared by a lot, and two things that I'm absolutely terrified of are tornadoes and zombies. Zombies are a little illogical (right now at least! Always be prepared), but any time I try to actually imagine myself inside a zombie movie being chased by decomposing corpses I start hyperventilating. I mean ugh. And tornadoes are just wicked horrid forces of nature that kill people and make lots of noise.
I am scared of both of these things, and I dream about both of them a LOT. Like, several times a week. There are zombies creeping around outside our house or in old hospitals my family is inexplicably inside of. The zombies always end up finding us, and we have to run, and we do run, or drive, or fight, but it is SO scary, because my mind knows it's one of my worst fears and it makes me feel every second of it.
And somehow, in the midst of this zombie pockmarked wasteland in my head, a storm will stir up and tornadoes will come down. Multiple tornadoes, while we're in the car, and they come straight towards us, and they're making that train sound that they're famous for, and I'm curled up in a tight little ball in the car watching the horrid funnel thing come after us as we try to find a sturdy spot free of zombies. This is all horrid.
But you know what? It's awfully fun to remember when I wake up. It's fun to tell people, and it doesn't bother me when I wake up. The idea of dreaming about tornado zombie worlds doesn't make me afraid to fall asleep. I'm pretty okay with it.
The dreams that do bother me are hard to explain. It's not the contents, it's the feelings they invoke. They make me feel sad, or helpless, or ugly in some way. When I wake up, I feel BAD, and I can't stop thinking about them unless I pray to God that they stop bothering me. I remember one dream, kind of disgusting, but mainly weird. There was something killing deer in my dream, always in the woods. I would look at the bodies and try to find out what had attacked them. To go to the woods I had to cross a bridge covered in fire ants, and they would attack me. The actual woods weren't woods at all, everything was beige and orange, and soft, like we were in something's insides. The surroundings reminded me powerfully of vomit. When I woke up I felt horrible, and seriously disturbed. Now the dream was weird and kind of gross, but I don't know why it felt so creepy. It was just the atmosphere.
I take a certain kind of antidepressants, and I forget to refill the prescription quite often. It's kind of idiotic of me, because I have a terrible reaction to going cold turkey off my medication, it's called SRI discontinuation syndrome. One of the symptoms is bad dreams, and they are very much the kind that make you feel wrong and ruin your day. I had one night of these dreams, I kept waking up and going back to sleep, and I had bad dreams every time. By the time day rolled around I felt kind of hysterical and the thought of having another night like that made me cry. I was off my antidepressants darn it, I cry easily. In any case, the only thing I actually remember about these dreams is a lot of vivid color. That's it, that's all I've ever been able to remember, but the feel of them was bad, like my brain was assuring me, "yes, this is really bad, this is awfullll, this green color reminds you of boogers, now scream in despair!"
So all in all, zombies and tornadoes and other things you're scared of, they aren't half bad to dream about, but fire ants or the vivid color of avocado? That's terrifying.

Cannibalism and Rescues of the Rodent Variety

      I was at my friend's house today. Her place is the sort of house where every time you're there you end up in a situation so ludicrous you never imagined it happening. Today's strange event was definitely exciting, but mostly sad. 

     It had reached the point in the day when my friend began to feed her animals. Though she lives in the suburbs, she has many, many more animals than the average person. Primarily, she has rats. She loves rats more than any other living thing, and she makes a bit of money breeding them. She has more than thirty rats, and they are scattered in cages all over the house. Most are in one of two cages, the boy cage or the girl cage (color themed, because it’s stylish), but others are housed elsewhere because they are new, they are moms with babies, they are sick, or they are too vulnerable, like her completely hairless rat, Ruguru.

     We had just started the feed the rats, and my friend was checking up on the newest mother and her three week old babies, when she found that the mother was gone. After a few seconds of searching, we found the mother in a dirty laundry basket along with a baby. This made us a bit nervous, as neither of us had considered that any of the babies would be out, and after doing a headcount we found that we were missing two of the eleven babies. Me, my friend, and my friend’s mother searched the entire room. The cats had been in the room overnight, and we thought that one of them would definitely eat baby rats if given the chance. The only thing we couldn’t understand was the complete lack of blood or hair.

     After roughly half an hour, my friend’s mom saw something red in the bedding of another rat cage. I opened the cage and pulled it out and found that I was holding a leg. I gingerly put it down amidst horrified cries, and searched through the rest of the bedding. I found the rest of the poor little guy a few seconds later. He had been practically skeletonized, only some fur and a little bit of flesh remained.

     My friend took his remains away, and I checked out the two rats who were inside the cage. They were the picture of innocence, running about and pressing against the bars, all excited to see me. I had trouble believing that they would have done something so horrible, but I don’t think rats think of things like eating babies in the same way that humans do. I looked closely at the two happy rats, and I found blood on their paws and whiskers. Case closed I suppose.

     There was still one more baby rat missing, and we looked around for another twenty minutes. No sign. My friend started cleaning other cages while we searched, and I looked around for any other place we hadn’t checked yet. My friend went outside to clean something and I walked to one corner of the room to see what she was doing. I looked down at a roll of chicken wire that was standing up in front of me.

     Lo and behold, the other baby rat was squeezed into it, her eyes were HUGE, and she was absolutely frozen. I reached into the chicken wire on either side of her, put my hands together under her so she couldn’t run further down, and drew her up. She didn’t struggle at all, and I could cup her furry cotton ball sized body in one hand. I lifted her up over my head and made excited squeaking sounds at my friend. She looked up and came running inside, where she took the baby from me and kissed and snuggled her.

     We delivered her carefully back to her mom, and moved them all to a smaller cage so they couldn’t get out again. For the rest of the day I told everyone about finding the living baby rat, I felt like a hero. Well, I still do actually, and now I’m writing this on the Internet so MORE people can read about it. So I suppose I feel the same, it makes me happy when I can save an animal, I wish we could have found them both before the Cannibal Twins had gotten the other one, but at least one survived. She’s back with her family now, hopefully not too traumatized, and she should go on to live a good and happy life.

British Television

My family have enjoyed watching shows from the UK for years, such as The Office, Jeeves and Wooster, and Pride and Prejudice (it was a miniseries so it counts as both a movie and a show in my book). I was introduced to Monty Python at an early age, and I knew the entire Holy Hand Grenade speech by heart at the age of 8. We love Doctor Who (everyone loves the Doctor, don't even pretend you don't), and now that we have the exciting online sections of Amazon and Netflix available to us, we try out a lot of shows. My father generally finds something important to do instead of television, which he regards as a pointless waste of time that could be used compiling bird information or reading Flannery O' Connor, so Mom and I get to pick what to watch, and we like to watch mysteries. British television has quite a selection of mystery shows, and because we think the accents are wonderful and we are totally well versed in Britishness we are generally drawn to them. Now that I have seen many UK adventure and mystery shows I have noticed something odd. British shows are much more soul crushingly depressing then any other shows I watch. I am used to the occasional sad episode in the American crime solving shows I see. Sometimes the bad guy gets away, sometimes the good guys don't save everyone, and once in a great while, a character you love will die (although generally the important character death that has been forshadowed by the media is that guy in background who is always eating cheese). Most of the time though, our heroes catch the evil people, save the last victim, and are entirely protected from danger via the Main Character Bubble of Invulnerability. It's only when a show is on HBO or described as 'gritty' that all bets are off. In the British shows, sad and hopeless endings are the usual, and happy endings are exceptionally rare. The murderer is going to go free because of lack of evidence even if the police walked in on him stabbing someone, any living victims or extra characters in a show will die messily, and every season or so they kill off a main character. My mother and I watched a British show called Touching Evil, starring the delightful Robson Green, Nicola Walker who is lovely but reminds me of an unpleasant person I know, and Rose's Tyler's father. We could never remember the name of this show so we preferred to call it Poking Evil and we had fun watching it. At first. I think each of the show's three seasons should have its own name, corresponding to how fun it is to watch. Therefore the first season is christened Poking Evil With a Stick (fun), the second is Evil Pokes You Back (not fun), and the third is Evil Goes to the Bathroom on You and Steals Your Clothes (don't watch it if you like being happy).
One of the more upsetting things that I find in these shows in something that I call the Purge. This is when every single character in a show is killed off and the entire cast is replaced by new folks. I never even knew a network could DO that. I stopped watching a particular show when I learned I only had one season left before everyone was murdered, including the baby. I stopped watching another one when I looked ahead and found out that the main character was going to be replaced no less then four times. Your main character should be a precious gem! You should take care of them and treat them well, going through FOUR main characters is simply negligent! If you did that with a dog you would be placed on a LIST and not allowed to have pets anymore.
Even Doctor Who, a remarkably fun show that is often considered to be for children is absolutely horrible about this. There are multiple deaths every episode, and very few non recurring characters make it through a visit by the Doctor (not his fault, just bad timing). My mother and I get sad every time the Doctor promises that he will save someone. I can't even think of a time when he promised to save someone and managed to pull it off.
I have watched British shows that were quite nice, and it's taken me several years to actually watch enough television to notice this, but it makes me unhappy. I understand when a show is trying to be realistic, but most real people have both good and bad things in their lives, and the characters in these shows basically have no good things at all. I often wonder how they keep going and don't lie comatose in bed all day. Oh well, I will continue to watch Doctor Who and that new mystery series that doesn't seem quite so bent on tearing viewer's hearts to smithereens. It's called Wire in the Blood (Robson Green kick, I have to see him happy somewhere), and you must believe me when I say that these characters seem to have reasonably good lives. Yes, they live by themselves and only have work and cops and crazy people for company, but they love each other, they occasionally smile and eat together, and one of them has a cat that hasn't been killed by anyone yet. It's a charmed life.