I'll See You In My Dreams, Kevin Costner

I love to sleep. Love. It.

That decade I spent at the beck and call of nursing infants and nightmare-riddled toddlers left me a woman who values sleep over almost any other natural function. I'm grumpy if I don't get my Sunday nap, and practically nonfunctional if I don't get my customary almost-eight hours every night.When I have a lot going on, though, interrupted sleep is the first symptom of tension.

(Well, almost the first. Have I mentioned my attitude? Ahem.)

Now the accumulating to-do lists and crescendo of responsibility leading up to this weekend's shindig are beginning to creep into my cherished nighttime hours. Last night I woke with a start to worry about things over which I have no control.

Ack! Why does construction make the campus look so shabby? Ick! Why didn't I get the back entrance to the house painted? Yuck! Why doesn't it RAIN already?

When I finally fell back to sleep I had dreams whose interpretations would stump Freud. I woke not completely remembering what and who had pranced through my REM stages, but with a clear knowledge I had just dreamed about:

1. An inability to find my make-up bag,
2. An inspection visit (I was the inspector) to check on a sorority's initiation rituals, and
3. Ed Asner and Kevin Costner setting up one of those elaborate courses of dominoes where one tipped tile knocks down an intricate pattern of thousands more dominoes. Then the two of them took me out to lunch.

Oh, yeah, it's a trip  inside my head right now.