Well, more like a nightmare. I don’t dream often, or rather, I don’t remember my dreams often. Whatever – the point is, me waking up and remembering what happened during a sleep cycle is a rare occurrence. Even rarer is a nightmare. This wasn’t necessarily a night terror nightmare, but it’s sufficiently bizarre enough that I feel justified in sharing it with all of you. Yep, you. My lone, solitary reader.
Annnnyyyyhow. The dream begins with my 10 year old daughter, Gillian, as she is lizard hunting. I never knew that lizard hunting was something that a girl did, but it is – she’s come home from school on more than one occasion with a “pet” lizard or two.
So there I am, sitting in the backyard, chilling out, when Gillie comes up and says, “Hey Daddy, can you hold this lizard I just found while I go get the terrarium to put it in? This one’s different and really cool.”
Because I’m a loving dad and such, I reply with, “Sure, honey. Let’s see the lil guy.” She then hands me the “lizard” and heads into the house.
So I look at the lil guy, and think, “Hey, this looks an awful lot like a crocodile. Cool.” (The lizard in question was about 1/4 the size of the one in the picture, but looked exactly the same, in my dream.)
So I’m holding this thing between my left thumb and forefinger, and checking it out. I notice that it’s also checking me out, and in particular, it notices the little wound in the center of my left thumb (from what, I don’t know. It’s a dream, not a fully thought out Lucasfilm epic. Not that Lucas’s movies are fully thought out.)
With lighting fast reptilian speed, this diminutive prehistoric creature spins round, opens it’s maw, and starts GNAWING at the wound on my thumb. I jump, but for some reason I can think of is “NOM NOM NOM” as it digs in the wound a bit, then stuffs its head, and most of its body, inside my thumb. It then proceeds to eat its way into the meat of my thumb, crawling inside like one of the scarab beetles from the movie The Mummy.
Ordinarily, I’m a pretty cool guy under pressure. However, in the dream, I completely snapped, and I started running around and screaming “Get it out! Get it out!” like a little girl. Of course, that brought MY little girl out of the house. She runs up to me, looks at the outline of a midget croc through the skin of my hand and goes “Oh cool, Dad. You should totally tweet that while I go get Mom.” (In our house, Mom is keeper of all things animal and medical. Since this covered both situations, she’d be the obvious one to get. Calling 911 would be superfluous.) Gillie then runs into the house, presumably, to grab Mom.
Eventually, after about what feels like 15 minutes of running around the patio table like something out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon, my lovely wife Kelly shows up, grabs me, sits me down, and looks at my partially digested digit.
“Whoa. That’s trippy. The lizard’s in there?” she asks.
“YES! AND IT’S A FREAKING BABY CROCODILE, AND I WANT IT OUT!” I scream.
Kelly just looks at me with her standard “Did you scream at me, dolt?” expression, and after a moment of quiet thought she allows me the outburst. She grabs my paw and starts poking at the outline of the tiny reptile, coaxing it back toward the open (and now bleeding profusely) wound. Every poke brings a quiet whine of agony and disgust from me, but after about two weeks of this torture, she gets the mean little f*cker out of my thumb and plops it into the terrarium where it belongs. She then gets up, and walks into the house, leaving me holding my leaking hand.
A minute later she returns, with a bottle of alcohol, rags, and a rum and coke. “Drink this and shut the hell up,” she says. Fine by me – I grab that cocktail and start sucking it down as if it was life saving medicine. Which it was, in a way. As Kelly put the first alcohol-soaked rag to my mangled thumb…
… I woke up. Disoriented, I rolled over, thinking, “That was weird,” as I unconsciously rubbed my left thumb and forefinger together. I then noticed that there was NO FEELING coming from my thumb.
“OH SHIT!” I exclaimed as I sat up in bed. Turns out, I’d been laying on my left hand while I was dreaming, and the hand had gone to sleep. That’s probably what triggered the whole nightmare in the first place.
My brain is weird.