Nightmares and Salsa

I’ve discovered where nightmares come from. For the longest time, I thought they were created by some neglected god from an out-of-fashion pantheon, a Morpheus or a Hypnos or one of their lower-level factotums, dredging my memory and subconscious for fresh material to splice together in garish, monstrous dream pastiches. But I was wrong. The origin of nightmares is actually about half a bag Tostitos and a jar of salsa, consumed less than an hour before bed. This combination pretty much guarantees me a very unpleasant night.

Last night, for example. I went to bed right after downing a bunch of chips and found myself in the middle of what appeared to be a pretty innocuous dream. I just remember its barest outlines, but I think the gist of it was that I was bringing cups of coffee upstairs to my wife, one after the other, which she would repeatedly examine and turn upsidedown. The coffee, no longer liquid, would squeeze out of the mug as a spongy brown cylinder and fall onto the bed and break up into several icky, spongy brown pieces. Grody, though not particularly frightening. But my dread mounted every time I returned with another cup, until finally I was just absolutely scared out of my mind.

Finally, on my last trip, as I was reaching for the cup, my wife grabbed my arm and looked at me in a certain way, and said Where do you think you’re going, and suddenly my frightmeters shot up to eleven and my adrenaline klaxons started blaring terror. I woke up screaming.

Sitting here now, writing this, I can’t imagine why this scene scared the piss out of me (the figurative piss, thank goodness). Fear is all about context, I guess, and one man’s commonplace is another man’s nightmare. I think anyone would run screaming from an angry werewolf, or a shambling zombie creature, or a Bush environmental plan; but things like bad grades, interviews, unemployment, financial ruin, brushes with the law scare some people less than others, or not at all.

I once dreamed that my skin was cracking into hard fissures and sprouting thousands of tiny heads of broccoli, and the image torments me to this day. I can imagine that some people would find this amusing, or. at worst, kind of icky. But I hate broccoli, and the thought of going through life as a walking broccoli chia pet is almost more than I can bear. But that’s just me.