Random Dreams and the Mouse Nightmare

I have written often of dreams I’ve had. Throughout my life, I have been a vivid dreamer. A very vivid dreamer. Although many of my dreams are the standard issue “I was at a place with a person when I realized I forgot a thing and then something strange happened,” many involve bizarre combinations of people and events that I would never be able to conjure while awake. Like the giant, bubble-belching chipmunks from a couple of years ago. Pretty sure I wrote a blog post then, too.

Last night, I dreamed I was getting ready to use the bathroom at Menard’s. I was in a stall and was lowering myself to the toilet when a blonde-haired, blue-eyed little girl from the stall to my left quickly ducked under the divider before I could react, causing me to plant my naked bum right on her face. I know what she looked like because of the horrified post-bum-to-the-face expression she wore at the sink while her mother and I took embarrassed turns apologizing profusely for what had happened.

And, dear friends, the joy of being a vivid dreamer is that this ridiculous dream incident will be forever burned into my brain as if it were a real memory. Anybody with me?

While I’m at it...

A couple of months ago, I had a particularly rough dream. It was the kind of dream that left me with a sore throat from dream-crying and a heavy sensation in the pit of my stomach from all the emotional trauma I endured while I slept. I was still suffering from some sort of moody dream hangover well into the next morning. It seemed totally justifiable...until I started recalling details and realized that part of this “realistic, soul-crushing nightmare” involved me trying to sign a credit card receipt with the plastic prosthetic arm I was fitted with following a savage crocodile attack sometime in my distant past. The remaining shreds of the dream’s validity unraveled quickly from there. At least I recovered by noon.

In other news in the Stratton house, I think we have finally won our battle with mice. It started a week and a half ago when my friend, Laura, and I were sitting on my couch after my kids had gone to bed and I saw a dark little mouse poke its head out from underneath the piano in my dining room. Sick. I spent the next hour and a half trying to chase the thing out of hiding and growing increasingly agitated as I found mouse poop behind the piano, underneath the grandfather clock, behind and under the refrigerator, under the kitchen sink and--get this--INSIDE MY PIANO. Little devil had apparently been shacking up against the pedals behind the lower front panel. While I poked and prodded with a yardstick, lined likely exits with sticky traps, and tried to plug alternate escape routes with my kids’ old bath towels (as if I would seriously use my own...gross…teasing… sort of), Laura had my back from her perch on a kitchen chair. To her credit, she could have gone home, but she stayed until it became apparent that setting traps and going to bed was more prudent than yardstick poking at midnight.  

I set traps with cashew butter, almond pieces, and Kix cereal, and I bleached the devil out of the poop-defiled areas. Brian ended up sealing a hole in the brick exterior of our house where we suspected the intruders were making their way in. Over the next several days, I ended up trapping 5 mice. FIVE MICE! In a creepy way, after mouse #3, I started looking forward to checking traps once I woke up in the morning; it afforded me a sick sense of accomplishment. By the time we caught the fifth mouse, even my kids seemed to think this was going to be our new norm, however unpleasant. With mouse #1, I had to stop my curious Kate from running outside to try to sneak a peek of the dead mouse in the dumpster. By mouse #5, she casually asked in our morning’s conversation if another mouse was in the trash.

The first morning with no new signs of mouse activity felt like a giant “Hallelujah!” Now, all has been clean and quiet for three straight days. I could live a happy life never seeing a mouse again. Ugh. Maybe we do need a cat...