Peanut Butter Toast Dreams

I know better than to eat food after 8PM.  Even so, some evenings I don't get a chance to eat dinner until late and I think "Come on, a piece of toast this late isn't a problem -- it's toast!"  There's a still, small voice that says "Don't do it, you know what will happen!" but years of living with and around many children has made it so that I can ignore small voices when I choose.  And so last night I sat down for a dinner of peanut butter toast and a glass of wine. (Dinner of champions!)

Three things affect my dreams: sleeping in a warm house (I always dream of witnessing or trying to escape murders when I'm too warm), eating late at night, and stress.  Any combination of those factors leads to interesting dreams, like last night, for instance.

In my dream, I was in a ramshackle house owned by a friend.  A number of us were there hanging out and doing repairs.  For some reason somehow we got involved in fortune-telling and aura reading and someone predicted that I would have two significant romantic relationships punctuated by danger.  In the dream the psychic said that one would be with this other guy who was also in the house (no clue who this was, since he was 6'7" and I couldn't see his face because I was too short -- nice, dream. Way to go.).  I tried to explain that he was gay so that was impossible, but then the psychic said it had something to do with my shoes (black pumps, which I don't normally use but I wore to a wedding last night and that's probably why they appeared in the dream).  I explained I was already married once and didn't want to do that again, but the psychic said I had no choice.

Somehow, I walked out the back door of a house and found a movie crew setting things up.  It looked like a giant yard sale, but I guess it was a movie.  I said something about keeping the noise down and moving this crap off the property, which made Christian Bale (yes, the actor -- weird) very angry with me.  In my dream he had a temper and decided I offended him and needed to die.  I spent much of the rest of my dream hiding from Christian Bale and his assassins (apparently he had accomplices), both in the ramshackle house and in a nice hotel that was apparently right next to the ramshackle house.

At one point, I went to a woman who practices Kabbalah to ask her about how I could get out of this mess.  (This is probably because I watched Arranged a few nights ago and there is a Kabbalah scene in that movie.)  She did a few things and made a prediction about the danger I was in (and something else, I don't remember what), and then when I turned away (and noticed the former head of my department, Dr. T., sitting there) assassins burst in and killed the Kabbalah woman.  Apparently Dr. T. knew about this but didn't tell me it was going to happen.  I ran to find another hiding spot because I knew Christian Bale was on his way.

Then I woke up.

Weird, eh?  There are people who believe that dreams can have significance.  Personally, I believe that is possible.  But I also believe that sometimes dreams are just a way for the brain to process random information.  What I don't know is why I always dream of murders, why I always have nightmares, when I am too warm.  Sometimes I know to wake myself up, cool down, and then go back to sleep, but when dreams are very intense and plot-driven (as this one somehow was, even though I can't remember most of it), I can't seem to do that.  If I force myself to wake up, I have a headache, and if I fall back to sleep the dream just resumes where it left off, as if my subconscious were a complex DVD player (but one without HD, since I only see some things, like blood, in bright color -- everything else is in color but dull).

Maybe there is significance to all these weird dreams.  I tried to look up some of the things that happened using some random "dream dictionary" I found online, but the "answers" didn't really seem pertinent.

Perhaps it was just another Peanut Butter Toast Dream.

Note to self: Stop eating peanut butter toast late at night.  And find a way to sleep during warm summer months.