(title purposely left blank) (cuz I got nothin')

Lately I KNOW I have been having dreams, but I just can't seem to REMEMBER what they are. This is usually because I wake up while I'm still right in the middle of one (shows you how whacked out my sleep routine is), and as I groggily try to get awake, the dream just *poof* vanishes.

I'm a friggin magician, I tell ya.

So nothing to report, except apparently my dreams have decided to go on a luxurious vacation in Hawaii and DIDN'T INVITE ME.

Keeping the bearded lady at bay

I think I hafta start watching what I eat before I go to sleep, because WOW. Somehow that rice and beans makes its way up to my brain and starts dancing on my neurons a bit; THAT is the only explanation I can come up with to explain what I've been dreaming about lately.

For example, Sunday night I dreamt I was in a circus. Yes, midgets, clowns, jugglers, acrobats aplenty. I don't know what MY part in this whole menagerie is, but I'm talking a bit to the clown, talking a bit to the jugglers, and man, what is up with the bearded lady? Is she on her period or something? Because that attitude was totally uncalled for.

Next thing I know, I'm getting up on stage, carrying a little boy who is about two or three years old. I don't have the faintest idea who he is, but I start explaining to the audience that recently his mother passed away because she was an alcoholic, and isn't alcoholism bad?, and this poor little boy has no alcoholic mother anymore, and have I said alcohol enough? Next thing you know, I start singing to the audience that one song from Brad Paisley and Alison Krauss - "Whiskey Lullabye" - except, I can't remember anything but the chorus, so I hum the rest of the song in between the chorus and then sing, "They found her with her face down in the pillow, clinging to his picture for dear life. We laid her next to him beneath the willow, while the angels sang a Whiskey Lullabye. La la-la la la la la, la la-la la la la laaaaaaaa."

And so there I am, standing on a stage in the middle of a circus with a weird, sad little kid I've never seen before, singing a horrible song about people dying from the same horrible condition that my own grandmother died from, and I wake up all like, HUH?

The rest of the day, I could not get that song out of my head. I haven't heard that song in, literally, months, and all of a sudden, there I am humming it to myself at work, as if I just spent the night before partying it up at their concert.

I know personally, I'm still trying to sort through all the pain, memories, and feelings from my grandma dying a few months ago. It's hard to push past so many emotions when you've lost someone you feel so very connected to. I miss her, a lot, and I wonder - is my brain trying to exemplify how I feel in the real world? Is my life, the circus that it is, full of strange and bizarre characters that I deal and fraternize with day to day, needing to sit down for a bit, and just listen? Stop and watch the single, hot, beaming spotlight on my still wounded heart, and listen as I sing about what I had, what I lost, and what I hope to regain? Is that child on stage, frightened, helpless, and alone, me sometimes? Hurt, and lost, and yet holding firmly onto a strong hand, knowing somehow, some way, I'll pull through?

Hm. Maybe I just have.