Inception lite.

Pinch me. I’m having a nightmare and can’t wake up! Actually, this nightmare involves a lot of pinching, so forget the first thing I said. My nightmares tend to be quite textural. There’s a lot of scratching, and scraping, and chewing; none of that wimpy, I’m-being-chased-by-a-wolf-through-a-molasses-factory-and-I’m-wearing-high-heels stuff. That’s for little girls and over-worked molasses factory workers and diabetic wolves. No, I’m talking about the kind of nightmares in which you bite into a crispy french fry and discover it’s filled with hair, or your mouth fills up with popcorn kernels faster than you can spit them out. I guess the second one is my own fault, since I routinely shove as much popcorn into my mouth as humanly possible, and my subconscious is probably just trying to teach me a lesson about “having dignity.” But a french fry filled with hair? The horror! That’s way worse than dreaming you’re on top of the Space Needle and being robbed at Cars II DVD-point. And not only are textural nightmares horrifying and downright disgusting, but they are almost impossible to describe to another person, or group of people, without causing shame and embarrassment. “I had the scariest nightmare last night! I was eating marshmallows and all my teeth fell out!” [awkward silence, rest of football team stares at me in locker room] THEY MAKE YOU SOUND LIKE A FRUITCAKE, is what I’m trying to say. Therefore, I suffer in silence, and the world shall never know of the hair-filled french fries, the mushy popcorn kernels, and the bewitched marshmallows that relentlessly haunt my dreams. Or, wait: now it does. Nevermind.