Sudafed Dreams

Late last week, my husband came home sniffling and coughing. "Don't worry," he reassured me. "It's just allergies."


By Monday night, I was sniffling and coughing, too. (Riiiight. Allergies my ass.)


Brian came home from class bearing a heavy bag from the Target pharmacy. In it were all the goodies required for me to power through a head cold. Zycam, Advil Cold and Sinus, tissues, and the best ingredient of all---Sudafed. (Let it be said that Sudafed is mana from the gods.)


For the last 3 nights, I've been doping up and hitting the sheets, ready for a night of drug-induced sleep. When I say that my dreams have been memorable, that's a major understatement. 


Why else would one have a blog if not so she could share her most bizarre dreams?


Monday Night
Night one of Sudafed.  I was absolutely worn out from a strenuous workout with friend and trainer, Dana. The head cold had hit me, and hit me hard. The last thing I remember was setting my alarm clock. In what felt like less than 4 minutes, it was going off, and I was sitting up in bed, giggling like an idiot. Because, in my drug-addled state, I'd dreamed a dream unlike any other I've ever had.


In it, Dana and I were wandering around in the woods. It became apparent very early on that it wasn't just a regular old bunch of trees and moss that we were traipsing through. No, indeedy. We were wandering around the Forbidden Forest. (You know, from Harry Potter?) We spoke in hushed whispers, hoping not to invite the attentions of unwanted creepy crawlies. Finally, as we scampered over a particularly muddy crest, we saw what we had come looking for.


A blue, sparkly unicorn.


There he stood in all his glory. Dana and I were awed. She leaned over and whispered to me, "Do you think that's him? Do you think he'll be able to teach us what we want to know?"


"All we can do is ask," I replied. And so, slowly, quietly, we made our way down to the unicorn. As we approached him, he slowly opened one eye. And then, miraculously, he spoke.


"The next class doesn't start for 20 more minutes. The mats are over by the wall."


Twenty minutes later, Dana and I took our first yoga class from the unicorn master. Dana couldn't stop laughing, I spent my time trying to ignore her and meditate, and the unicorn was too busy murmuring directions for downward facing dog to notice.

Tuesday Night
I was well into day 2 of the head cold. I could barely breathe, my head was throbbing, and it felt like my eyeballs were about to pop out of my skull from all the pressure in my sinuses. I couldn't WAIT to pop another Sudafed and hit the hay. Brian and I finished watching the newest episode of Blue Bloods (which had saved to our DVR.) As soon as it was over, I crawled into bed and into oblivion.


I woke up Wednesday morning with a giant smile on my face. Not only was I feeling better, but I'd just had a dream about Donnie Wahlberg.


I know. Color you surprised.


In the dream, I was back in high school. I was pretty, popular, and petite. The last bell had just rung, and I headed to my car in the school parking lot. The roaring engine of a motorcycle filled my ears, and my heart skipped a beat. It was Donnie--the leather-wearing, bike-riding, bad boy at school. And he was heading straight for me.

He asked me if I wanted a ride home. I giggled and said yes. And the dream ended with me climbing on the back of his motorcycle and riding off into the sunset. 


Yes, it really did. No, I'm not lying.


Wednesday night
By last evening, I was feeling better, but still slightly nasally. Brian and I completed a 2-mile jog earlier in the afternoon, and the only way I got through it was with Brian's enthusiasm and ingenious idea to chase me making zombie noises when I started to slow down. By 10, I was ready to call it a night. In one last attempt to knock this cold out for good, I took my Sudafed like a good little girl and turned out my bedside lamp.


I bolted upright in bed far before sunrise, cold sweat trickling down my neck. And the vivid dream I'd just had playing in my brain.


I was walking alone down a quiet, country highway. The rifle in my hand was heavy, cold steel. Every single sense was tingling, and I knew I was on alert, though I wasn't sure why. Every footfall sounded like a clap of thunder to me. And as I rounded the bend, the sound of someone following me was unmistakable. 


And when I turned around, my worse fears were realized.


I was being chased by a zombie. And I had led it straight toward camp.

Fortunately, in the dream, I found my bad-ass Buffy attitude and whooped some zombie tush. However, the encounter woke me from a dead sleep, heart pounding. With fear? Adrenaline? Excitement?

I don't know. But zombies seriously creep me out. It's the poor dental hygiene. Oh, and their deep desire for wanting to eat my brains.

My Husband Picked Today's Blog Topic

As he was leaving for work this morning, I told my husband I had no idea what I was going to write about today.


"Write about writing," he said.


I brushed it off. Thought to myself, 'something will come to me. It always does.'


Then I really started thinking about it, and came to the conclusion that he really is a genius. (Don't tell him I said that. His ego is big enough as it is.)


It all started with books.


I don't have the memory of when my parents started reading to me. That's because I was so young. I do remember, though, my parents switching off night after night, tucking me into bed and reading a stack of books to send me off to dreamland. By the time I was four, I was reading them myself.


I was the only student in my Kindergarten class who could read. My teacher, Ms. Hurley, would sometimes let me read to the class during story time. By the first grade, I was wandering in the library, looking for books my classmates wouldn't have thought to checkout. I remember having a conversation with the school librarian, who found me in a section with novels. "Honey," she said, "don't you want to look at the picture books with the other kids?" 


No. No I didn't. I wanted to read The Boxcar Children. It didn't matter to me that it didn't have pictures. I wanted to read a real book.


I started writing stories when I was in the fourth grade. Illustrated books about fictional characters, filled with the childish drawings created with fat crayons. My parents reveled in my creativity. Where other families had lopsided drawings of houses and flowers and Picasso-esque dogs secured to their refrigerators, ours was covered in books and poems and cards I'd written for my family. My parents encouraged me constantly, and the amount of praise I received from them each time I delivered another volume was huge.


By the time high school rolled around, if my nose wasn't in a book, I was feverishly writing in one of my many journals. I settled for paper folders filled with notebook paper--that way, I could write in class, and transfer the pages to my journal when I got home. I wrote about the usual teenage angst, mixed with poetry and short fiction. If I could dream it, I could write it, and I did.


My junior year of high school, I met Mary Ginny Dubose.  My English teacher.  When I told her my name, she paused and said, "Now, that's a name that sounds like it belongs on the jacket of a best seller."


She had no idea I wanted to be a writer.

Visiting with Mary Ginny on a trip home from college, 1999.

Over the course of the last two years of high school, Ms. Dubose inspired me to reach for the moon. Her passion for literature was evident in every conversation I had with her, and she turned authors into rock stars for me. I devoured classics like a starving artist. The Invisible Man, Wuthering Heights, The Jungle. I fell in love with John Keats, William Shakespeare, Saul Bellow, Jane Austen, and Emily Bronte.


My notebooks began to fill with storyline, character analysis, words rich and ripe with meaning. I'd find myself jotting down a turn-of-phrase I liked, or a description of an everyday object that turned it into something extraordinary. I played with iambic pentameter, alliteration, juxtaposition, onomatopoeia. 


By the time my senior year rolled around, my passion for writing had come full circle. I was writing prose and poetry for Ms. Dubose's creative writing class, and receiving nothing but praise. If she received word of a county-wide poetry contest, she would quietly slip me a flyer along with a graded paper or assignment. She whisked me away to a student writer's conference one spring weekend, where I presented my poetry like a prize fighter. And she was always there, in my corner.


When graduation rolled around, I mourned the loss of this exceptional woman in my everyday life. I called her from the floor of my dorm room on a regular basis my freshman year of college. I shared stories with her over the classes I'd enrolled in: Shakespeare in Film, a literature class we affectionately referred to as "Big, Fat Books," the English class that had me reading everything from Sci-Fi to psychological theory. 


As things often happen, I eventually lost touch with her. School, social life, growing up got in the way, and the telephone conversations eventually stopped. But I always carried her with me. Each time I got an A on an analytical essay, I thought of her. Anytime I proofread a short story I was preparing to turn in, I would wonder if she would have approved. When I read a really great book, I would wonder if she'd ever read it before, and if she had, what notes she'd scrawled in the margins. 


I carried her with me to New York City, to a writer's conference with Orson Scott Card, who told me, about a short story I'd given him to read, that if he'd had the idea first he'd have already gotten it published.


I carried her, and my various writings, along with me as I got my first apartment, met my husband, got married. 

Just a few of my journals, filled with papers, poems, and short stories.

I often wonder what Mary Ginny is doing these days. I know she retired from teaching a few years ago, and she's probably traveling the world, spending time in the UK and taking Shakespeare tours through the English countryside. 


One day, when I finally make my dream come true, and become a published writer, I hope she's still around to see it. Because my first book, inevitably, will be dedicated to her.