Pizza, dreams and 2am craziness: A true story

Those of you who don’t have kids, let this be a cautionary tale. For those of you who do have kids, this will probably just be amusing.

It’s a confusing story - and I, myself, still have yet to completely wrap my head around it (probably due to sleep deprivation). So bear with me.

Here goes.

I don’t know if it was because of the pizza we ate for dinner last night, or my having watched the entire second half of season one of Gossip Girl, but my subconscious decided to give me strange dreams. When my dream began (or when I became aware of it) I was hanging out with Serena, Blair, Chuck and Dan at various social events, mocking the poorly dressed.

Then, suddenly, I was at a church about to renew my vows with my husband. I was angry with him because for some reason he had decided to dye the back of my hair (only a very small portion) pink, blue and purple as a joke. This is not something my husband would ever do, which made things considerably more confusing.

That strangeness transformed into a gathering of hundreds of people - some from my past, some current friends, some tv show characters. We were all waiting for something, but I never figured out what. My dream was interrupted by the bloodcurdling scream of my two-year old.

I remember being in dreamland and vaguely hearing my daughter scream. It was just loud enough to wake me up a bit. I lay in bed, disoriented but starting to gain my bearings, when my daughter screamed again. Some instinct inside me triggered, and I flew – more like pole-vaulted – out of the bed. (I say pole-vaulted because I have to climb over my husband to get out of bed, but I never even touched him.)

As I ran down the hallway, I could see light coming from their room. FIRE was the first thought, and if it’s even possible, I moved faster. I burst through the door, and then stumbled to a stop.

Hayden had woken up and apparently decided that she didn’t want to sleep anymore. She had turned on the bedroom light and preceded to start throwing toys into Anna’s crib, which woke her up as well.

So now I’m standing in the middle of my daughters’ room, wide awake myself, with my heart beating out of my chest, trying to make my brain work long enough to decide what to do with this.

Once reason returned, I did the logical thing and put a Disney movie on with the sound turned completely off, turned the lights back off, put the girls in bed and prayed they would just fall back asleep after watching the movie for a few minutes.

It worked.

Unfortunately for me, my brain insisted on replaying the entirety of my crazy dreams over and over again, mixed in with the midnight screaming/fire/children fiasco, which once I fell asleep made my dreams even more odd.


Ah, motherhood.