Jenna's House of Idiosyncrasies Version 10.0 [Focus.]

I had a dream last night that I was traveling the country in an old Aston Martin1, breaking into people's homes and stealing food from their fridges because I didn't have any money. I didn't look like myself; I was fit, lean, but slight, a little shorter than I really am, with straight strawberry blonde hair and a pointy chin.

Despite my choice of car, I was absolutely compelled by my hunger. The thing Dream Me did that struck me as especially cavalier is stick around to slice my newly acquired apple, carefully make a sandwich, or flip through a magazine left on the kitchen counter while I downed a banana.

I confined myself to the kitchens of these homes, but didn't have any concern for time of day or whether people occupied the other rooms. Even so I kept seeing the myself in the dream from these security camera type angles, like I was observing through a fisheye lens from the corner of a kitchen's ceiling. Dream Me didn't seem to be aware of this angle, and would continuing casually chomping as I observed.

One day I went into a house and was caught by this little Asian lady and her daughter. Well, to say I was caught implies that they walked in on me; instead I walked into a kitchen where they were already seated at the counter, working on the child's homework. The woman yelled at me in a foreign language, and I offered to just leave, and tried to, but none of the doors opened from the inside. As I ran around the house in search of a working exit, the woman was making a call, and Real Me figured out why Dream Me was driving a $100,000 car and still stealing food. Some bad guys were after me, and I had to keep moving around the country. I couldn't unload the car without setting off alarms and alerting them to my position. I have to be clear here that I wasn't some kind of police informant; I had screwed up in some totally different way that made it impossible for me to go to the police.

The bad guys showed up fast, and I hid. Instead of searching until they found me (which would have made sense) they looked around, couldn't find me, and vowed to come back several times until they did. For days, in between visits from the bad guys I watched TV with the woman and her daughter and played a lot of chess with the kid. When the bad guys showed, I'd just hide, and she'd yell at them for not being capable of just going through the house until they found me. She accused them of being lazy, which I guess they were, because Real Me knows my hiding places were not very good.

One day I didn't have much time to hide when they showed up, so I ran to the master bath and hid in the large tub, pulling the shower curtain closed. The boss of the bad guys strolled in the room and sat on the toilet. I briefly thought I was home free, and then he hooked his head around the side of the curtain and looked straight at me. I could now see he was fully clothed, and he was smiling at me. I felt terror to my bones.

Smash cut to the cliche scene of me tied to a chair in the middle of an abandoned warehouse, surrounded by heavys and being tortured. One of the stranger things about this dream is that at this point, Dream Me begins to look more and more like Real Me. The more frightened I am, the more I morph from this pseudo badass Beatrix Kiddo type I created in the dream, into regular old me. I answered some question wrong, or said something the boss didn't like, and his lacky lifted a sledgehammer and destroyed my right hand. It was awful.

When I woke up, I found I was sleeping with my head resting in my open palm and my elbow tucked into my side. This awkward position had my hand bent back at the wrist as far as it would go, and my right hand was completely numb, like it didn't even exist.

1. 1. like this one but cream colored, with a dull finish and in need of a wash