M&M Chronicles

One of our little morning routines is that on days where I don't have to get up super early and go to work, Mike will tell me what he dreams and (if I can remember) I tell him mine in return. This morning, I told him that I had that one dream where you go someplace and when you look down you realize you forgot your pants. I thought that dream was pretty universal, but apparently not because Mike looked at me like I was all crazy and stuff.

"What about the dream where you know you have the ability to fly but you just can get off the ground?” Blank stare. “You’re in a play but forgot the words?” Nada. “You’re in school and you realize that you have a test that you didn’t study for?” “Yeah! I had that one in high school….Although, that may have been real life.”

That conversation reminded me that a month ago, I had started a little dream “experiment,” if you will. It all started the Monday morning that happened to be President’s Day (and Mom Stacey’s birthday--Happy Birthday, Mom!). We had the following conversation:

Mike: I had the weirdest dream last night.
Me: Me too!
Mike: I dreamed that there were, like, 6 rusty broken down cars parked in Mom’s driveway and I had to go out and fix them.

Me: That is weird!
Mike: What did you dream last night?
Me: I dreamed that I was at a wedding, and then aliens sent down pink mind-control rays and brainwashed the groom and about 10 of the guests and I spent the rest of the dream trying to find out why they did that.
Mike: *pause* OK, you win.
The next day, Tuesday, as I was getting out of bed, Mike sleepily told me he had just dreamed a bee flew by his ear. I, on the other hand, dreamed that I popped a zit on my leg and out came a banana, peel and all. Mike was slightly grossed out.
It occurred to me, though, that it was now two days of peculiar dreams and at that point, I decided to keep a tally of whose were the most bizarre. So far, I was ahead with a score of 2 to 0. The rest of the week played out thus:

Wednesday:
----Mike: A little person was teaching a class. (He didn’t actually finish the story because he awoke with a sore throat and he didn’t want to make it worse by talking.)
----Me: The goblin king was stealing souls and a small group of freedom fighters had to battle him to save everyone. High points: I had to learn the Goblin language “Waku” to sneak into the castle and Betty White played the part of the grandma.
----Discussion: While at the very least I should win by forfeit because Mike opted not to complete the telling of his dream, the fact that Betty White made a cameo appearance in mine hands down puts me over the edge.
----Point: Me. (3 to 0)

Thursday:
----Discussion: Mike prefaced his telling of the dream by saying, “I wasn’t really asleep when I dreamed this…” At this point, I think whatever either of us dreamed becomes irrelevant, because what Mike had wasn’t so much a dream as a hallucination. In his defense, however, he was up all night with the flu. Hallucinations aren’t a regular occurrence for him. Still, that’s definitely weird. ----Point: Mike. (3 to 1)

I was going to give it a week, but I felt that I had to call off the whole thing after four days because Mike developed full-blown influenza and was absolutely miserable. I didn’t think it was fair to judge his dreams on the scale of sanity when he was so, so sick. I guess that means I won by default, but did I really win? I mean, what kind of mind comes up with that stuff? Mike had to knock on death's door to have weird dreams, whereas I have them all the time. Let's just chalk it up to a vivid imagination. Yeah, that's it.