There is nothing like waking up with a nightmare in the middle of the night and not being able to go back to sleep. There are even fewer things like waking up with a nightmare, not being able to return to sleep, and having a job interview the next day for which one had previously held out the hope of seeming collected, focused, and semi-smart. Oh, well, even if the black circles under the eyes are egregious, I can still hope for 'interesting,' clean, fully dressed, and amusingly small.
The dream, though! I was driving in a car with the neighbor's cat in the passenger seat. I know I was driving the Mazda car, because when we pulled over there was no dome light. We had to pull over because I couldn't find my house keys, keys that belong to a house I have never lived in except in dreams, a small Victorian in an old mining town in NE Washington, Nevada, or Central California. I had to find the keys because I had to give them to someone, and where we pulled over was next to a swamp alongside a highway that was also the road that the megachurch pastor who interviewed the Presidential candidates last week has his church on now, and which used to be across the street from an orange grove. But his church wasn't in the dream; it didn't exist yet, or maybe the dream only existed in a world devoid of megachurches. I don't know, but I was on the side opposite the orange grove, and down the street from a row of saloons, blacksmiths, and rooming houses that I've also only been near in my dreams.
It was hard to find the key without a dome light or streetlights, but then I remembered I thought it was in this pretty green carved box with turtles on it from Indonesia. Naturally, I knew exactly where the box was, but as I started to open the secret compartment on the box that had always worked before, it turned out just to be a a decoration and came off in my hand. At that point, I noticed that there was a cat sitting on the windowledge of the car and trying to get in. The neighbor's cat hadn't noticed the stranger yet, and I was starting to get scared of what else might be lurking on the roadside in the middle of nowhere so, although my fingers were shaking, I figured out how to open the regular compartment of the box to get out the key. I managed to open it, but inside were only hallucinogenic and shiitake mushrooms, the latter of which is of as little interest to me as the former, and as soon as I was realizing that, the outside cat figured out how to get inside, leapt at the other cat, they started fighting, and I woke up.
Now, I used dried shiitakes today, so they were in my head and I don't need to believe my subconscious is telling me to eat more mushrooms. We were also talking at the soup kitchen about people getting addicted to opiates after surgery, and how someone's tolerance for pain might decrease while on them and cause dependence, so maybe that's how the other kind of mushroom got in there. My brain should also not be telling me to replace the dome light, as I already succeeded masterfully in performing that bit of highly technical auto repair. It may have been saying, 'Be sure to take the GPS to the interview, idiot,' and 'If you got another cat of your own, maybe the wandering one would want to stay inside and you wouldn't have to worry if he is okay, since his owners will never care one way or the other.' Or maybe just 'Get copies of your keys made, don't drive around with cats, and don't move to a ghost town.' Either way, I woke up in the middle of a fight between two cats on my lap in a tiny car, with my heart pounding, and sitting straight up in bed.
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