I know that everyone has a continuum of crazy. Like for girls, the week before their friendly visit from the vag fairy probably rates pretty high on the meter. For me, unfortunately, irrationality hovers at a consistent, high-pitched quiver, just waiting to burst forth into balls-out, stone-cold batshit. I can generally rate how close I am to nuts by monitoring my dreams. If they have a consistently ominous tone I start to worry about myself, because really, if your dreams are all fucked, how can you operate optimally in the waking world?

Lately, my dreams have been weird. Not like, “I went into a crackhouse and beat up Christina Aguilera with a mixing spoon” weird, more like, “I was trapped in a swamp and I could tell that one day I’d die there” weird. It’s not the dreams themselves, it’s more the somnial subtext that has me on edge.

To wit:

I was in this bar, drinking with a friend. The friend left. I looked across the way and saw Boozie sitting at a table across the way. In my dream, I knew I had never met her before, but I figured we would recognize each other from our profile pics. But somehow, I couldn’t figure out how to go over and say hello to her. I could picture a fun evening of blogger-chatter fueled by coors light and jagerbombs, chain smoking and whatnot, but i JUST COULDN’T GET UP. So finally, somehow, I go over to say hello, but she’s in the middle of talking to some other girl. It’s weird, because I know she sees me, and I know she knows who I am, but she’s not acknowledging my presence. So instead of saying hi, or maybe leaving, or getting all rhett butler and sending her a drink from the bar, I just stand there like an idiot, completely paranoid and weird. I woke up unnerved – it’s bizarre when you’re even more socially inhibited in your dreams than you are in real life.

But then later on that night I had a dream where I was in love with a set of midgets who weren’t really midgets but one was a girl and one was a guy and the guy thought I was a girl and vice versa, and there was ballet dancing and speedos and a castle and vomit and then I was on a mission to get six ocean spray cranberry juice cocktails out of a vending machine and then I looked in the mirror and I weighed three hundred pounds.

Phew! What a relief! With a dream as left-field as that, it’s obvious that I’m totally sane.