Horizontal Precipitation and the Man in the Tan Sweater

Tonight after a great evening at the 99 for some comfort food, and with the company of lovely Kate... I plodded my way back to my world through a driving rain that showed no mercy.

My fragile umbrella held strong somehow, and luckily for me, the forceful wind held fast in one direction. I held my flimsy canvas and wire shield outward and it cried out with a rhythmic drone as it was forced to shield me from a horizontal wall of water. The rain bubbled, splattered and glistened as it pounded the earth into a glazed glimmering display, reflecting the orange hue of the street lamps and the yellow of the headlights of brave automobiles.

It was totally worth the strife, as it always is.

Don't have much original stuff to say, so I'll write about sleeping?

Last night I had a strange dream. Aliens took me aboard their space ship, and Scott Bayo gave me pink eye.

In all seriousness, I did dream, and it was one of those dreams that seem to blur the lines between being awake and asleep. I rolled over in bed, and saw what appeared to be a man looking into my dresser mirror. He was dressed fairly contemporary, in a tan sweater. My response wasn't so much of fright but of sort of disbelief, and my odd reaction was to reach over and try to grab this person, who disappeared. At this point I sat up and looked around the room, and I was awake, but wasn't sure whether I had just woken up. The odd portion is I play a soft easy/listening mix off of my PC to sleep at night, and I'm fairly certain I could hear it throughout this experience. I probably just woke up during the dream state as they say occasionally happens at times. I didn't have trouble going to sleep after this. I can't say it was frightening, just weird. Psychologists claim that this phenomenon is quite common, and that it likely explains claims of alien abduction (implants & Mr. Bayo aside :D).

I've had other "paralysis" semi-conscious dreams before that were more frightening in the past, but only one other recently. This dream was the feeling that there was a warm body, a woman, on top of me as I was trying to sleep. I rolled off my side to try and push it off, (which seemed easy) and a whitish mist could be seen dissipating above my bed. Once again, I wasn't really scared by this, because I didn't feel like I was in danger for some reason, (maybe I felt just a little nuts & insecure about it... So here I am sharing it. heh...), so I reached over and turned the lamp on. I was a little shaken, and read a chapter in a book on this occasion, before going back to sleep.

The soft music generally has kept me from having these dreams in the past but didn't seem to help me last night. In college, I had the suffocating with the pillow, or people stealing my stuff while I lay frozen dreams. Then a couple of years ago, I would dream that I was paralyzed and my body was numb and vibrating and floating 2-3 inches off of the bed. I would slowly float/glide to the right until I fell off the bed. In this dream I was also blinded and would feel my way around the bed and climb back on. I had this dream several times, once I remember I tried to talk, and my voice came out like a big croak. Since I've had a history of mild epilepsy, my first thoughts were that this could be the culprit. So, I began placing piles of boxes intentionally on the right side of the bed. If the dream was some sort of seizure that just distorted my perceptions, when I fell off the bed, I would bump into and knock over this pile. Low and behold, the dream happened again, and everything remained intact. Even though it felt incredibly real, it was all contrived in my noggin. I began listening to music again around this time, and perhaps coupled by reassurances that I had not become physically ill (mentally is debatable, am I right? ;D ) I didn't have these semi-conscious dreams again until these past two, which were really mild. If I had to choose between these and the bat I got in my room last summer (I have NO idea how it got in :$) (oddly the bat gave me that same feeling that "I'm not alone" even though it was just a silly annoying bat) I'll take the people looking in the mirror minding their own business. I do suppose with the bat I eventually muster the courage to let it out the window... not something you can do with dreams or phantoms.