someone tell the boogeyman to leave me alone

Last night I fell asleep on the couch at 11, transferred to my bedroom at 11:45 and flew out of bed at 3 am as though my footie pajamas were on fire because even though the clock said 3:07, my brain read it as 8:07 and I thought I had way overslept, missed the only bus I can get (which is probably going to be canceled anyway) and wouldn't make it to a Very Important work day.

As I calmed myself down and lay down again, I realized that this is the fifth or sixth in a series of bad dreams that have shaken me awake in the last few weeks, including one where I was in an underwater knife fight with some broad with long red hair that was flowing around so much that I couldn't see well enough to get a good shot at her.

That's not the half of it. I know the last thing anyone wants to read about is somebody else's messed up nightmares, but mine run like feature-length black and white movies. Maybe one day I'll sit down and write about that time when I was this badass cop named Keshia who could actually pull off the running-roll-onto-the-floor-while-shooting move and caught the badguys or that other time when I was a 56-year-old white man contemplating suicide because I had shot my Throw-Mama-From-the-Train (I think it was that same actress, too) mother and the feds were coming for me. But those are stories for another time.

For today, I am TIRED. Normally I sleep like a brick—it practically takes a wrecking ball to dislodge me from bed, and with a few solid hits, at that. Waking up multiple times a night with nobody to blame that doesn't live inside my head makes having to actually wake up so much more agonizing when I realize it's the real deal.

So I'm going to need this to stop. Like now.