This doesn't happen because they're actually scary, although that does happen on occasion. What scares me is how damn real they are.
Take Monday morning, for example.
Mondays suck ass to start with, so I think my brain should be forgiven in advance for anything it conjures. But this Monday is insane. You see, I'm an alarm clock addict. I obsess and check and recheck and triple check and quadruple check my alarms before I go to bed. I set one alarm that's in the room with me, and I set a second battery-operated alarm clock in the next room, you know, in case the electricity goes out during the night or the radio station is fuzzy or I've slept-walked and already shut the damn thing off. (All of these things have happened, by the way.)
Imagine my sheer horror waking to no alarm and discovering it's 7:00 a.m. on a Monday morning. I snap out of bed, start clicking off the list of things I have to do: finding something to wear and getting ready to call work to tell them I'm running late and throwing the bed together and turning on the television to try and get a weather report so I can figure out if it's an open- or closed-toe shoe day. My heart is pounding out of my chest, and I'm sure I'm having a dizzy spell because suddenly I am very light-headed and the room melts away a little bit at the edges.
And I wake up. No, seriously, this is where I wake up for real. I focus on the clock that says 5:24 a.m., the clock that is currently set to Power Ocho Ciento, the local Latino station, but has six more minutes of sleep time before blaring out a fiesta of music into the air. I am still in bed under the covers, and I realize I have been dreaming the whole damn time.
Dreaming.
Dreaming.
Dreeeeeeeeeeammmmming.
Like I don't have enough things keeping me awake, now the dream of not being awake on time is waking me up on time. Then comes the deja vu. I make the bed haphazardly, trudge downstairs, shower, watch the news to decide what to wear, run late, and panic as 7:00 a.m. chimes on an even different clock, and I realize I have somehow managed to run myself a few minutes late even though I got up on time.
Ack! My dream is coming true. Like the guy in Chris Van Allsburg's The Sweetest Fig (by far the darkest, most frightening, twisted children's book you will ever read), life is imitating dream-states, and it's going to get ugly if I get caught in anything that slightly resembles traffic.
Monday morning. Small wonder even dreaming about it scares the shit out of me.
