Double Header

This morning, I woke up actually remembering both the dream I was having when Sabrina (our cocker spaniel) woke me up at 1:30 this morning and the dream I was having when the alarm went off. Pretty cool, eh?

To set up some background for the first one, sometimes my dream-making faculty will contextualize stimuli that would otherwise wake me up, keeping me asleep and making me odious to Mary if she's trying to sleep. This morning at 1:30 was one of those times. Sabrina had detected either a squirrel or another dog or a cat or a deer out in the yard, and she had jumped up on the bed and taken her place right next to my head to scratch at the window and bark and carry on. Incidentally, she once cut the right side of my face open in one of these frenzies. But this morning, my dreaming brain created a scenario in which Sabrina had read a sign out by the street that said it was election day, and she was protesting the fact that we wouldn't let her go vote. Eventually Mary woke me up for real, and I took the dog out to pee.

In the second dream, I discovered that I had a hard lump in my right palm and a socket like a headphone socket in my right wrist. Moreover, I was at Circuit City, and they were trying to sell me various cyber-punky devices to plug into my wrist or to interface with my palm sensor. I shaved and showered before I sat down to write this morning, so I don't remember much else, but just having those cyborg parts was trippy enough.

I began my fifth wall-to-wall reading of Paradise Lost yesterday, and Milton's great epic gets better every time. Each time I attempt it, I get more involved in the imagery, the theological import, and especially the rhetorical tricks and ironies that Milton uses both to keep me, the reader, at a distance from the things going on and to let me in on the cosmic joke as the demons attempt to convince themselves of their importance. I'll attempt book two today, and if I keep it up, I'll have completed my fifth read well before November.