I Dream Dreams .... and wake grouchy.

And you will immediately note that I'm not saying 'I have a dream!'no ... this is something else altogether. I dream dreams full of life and intricate details that leave me exhausted, making Gert laugh when I wake grouchy or sad and recount them to him.

This morning, after dreaming of the big old gloomy house where the sad young couple lived with their small daughter who was dying due to an allergic reaction she had to eating melon at a child's birthday party ... I woke deeply depressed, both from the weight of the couples sadness and from the fact that my little sister, the nurse, had detailed the care the young couple had to give their daughter as she slipped away ... peach droplets on her skin but of course. And there was the exhaustion from keeping little Miss 4 quiet as we changed from our swimsuits in a room in their house after swimming in their pool. The sad young man was Colin Firth, as he appeared in Bridget Jone's Diary and the house had the look of the old house next to the place where I used to ride horses as a teenager.

This morning I tried slipping back into bed after breakfast was done but my daughter, the one who has loved sleeping since she was small, came and told me she was running a shower because we were going to the city to shop for Christmas presents.

Anyone who knows my daughter will laugh over the idea of her hustling anyone out of bed in the morning ...

I guess last night's dream was slightly less fraught than the one where the albatross was standing in the ruins of his wings which had dropped off for reasons I didn't get round to dreaming. I remember being devastated that I didn't have my camera to record this mind-blowing scene ... which wasn't as terrible as it sounds because the albatross was fine without his wings, as in he wasn't dying, although he was incredibly annoyed and did end up chasing me around something that looked suspiciously like a small village hall from my New Zealand past.

Liz, Fiona, Jessie and I did attempt to escape by scaling a tall chimney-like cliff nearby by, with me leading but at the top there were these bars. But that was the other night when, I just kept getting horribly terribly lost and further away from wherever it was that I was staying.

And parts of that particular dream, most particularly the 'lost' part, were close enough to recent realities to confuse me on waking.

So you see how it is ... my life is more bizarre once I am sleeping.