from the pen of icarus blake

Experimentation into the function of dreaming coalesce into one major theory: dreams are the subconscious mind’s own personal method of problem solving. Most dreams are nonsense, unremembered consequences of a sound command to “sleep on it” and awaken with fresh eyes and no knowledge of how you got there.

But, if you’re like me, you get a condensed version of this in between snooze buttons. 15 minutes per dream, rapid-fire snippets of all your most major issues played out behind your eyelids until you wake more exhausted than you went to sleep. 5 more minutes my ass.

Such is the situation I found myself in after naively slapping that first snooze down. 15 more minutes, I say to my brain.

Bet.

I wake up in the house I’m dogsitting at. The same one I hit the snooze button in, hit my alarm, and crawl out of bed for a tall glass of cold brew (these folks only have an espresso machine, and I’ve always been a 2-cup drip kinda person). My mother has shoved all the furniture in the living room against the walls and is leading yoga for a couple of my coworkers and some women I’ve never met. She sees nothing wrong with being in a stranger’s house, implies I invited her when I interrogate her about it. The old dog is running around in a backyard that’s at least 7 fenced acres of open field barking his muted cancer-pushing-on-his-voicebox bark.

Alarm goes off. I wake up in the same house, the back yard is the correct size. My mother isn’t there. The furniture is where its supposed to be. Snooze.

A big painted mural. Not a professional one, the kind that high schoolers paint themselves on the hallway walls to reduce the atmosphere from “prison” to “quirky office block”. It’s got mountains. I walk around it and, in my pajamas, am dumped into a bustling craft market with booths and tents and the high ceiling with exposed plumbing. Everyone says hi as I pass, knows me by name, before bustling back to their own booths. I wander into the bathroom, where the door is broken and a small child is playing with cleaning supplies. I don’t know where her mother is. I call poison control.

Alarm goes off. The number for poison control in Colorado is (303) 389-1100. Snooze.

I’m driving. Well, I’m in my mom’s mini van pulled off the side of the road in a little podunk desert town I recognize from my road trips to Santa Fe. One of the usual stops for gas and snacks, my husband is in the car. I’m fighting with a big, old school map that covers most of the windshield. The engine is sputtering. I can’t remember how I got there or where I’m going, and he doesn’t know either. The cars that drive by have no one at the wheel. I rip the map.

Alarm goes off. I wake up angry. Why is any of this shit my responsibility? I think. I don’t know what I’m angry about. I get my ass up anyway.