Last night I had two nightmares. I basically have two recurring themes in my nightmares: babies and self-mutilation. In the baby dreams, I am always an observer. I am omniscient and can only watch the carnage. In the self-mutilation dreams, I am always alone, and the violence is, obviously, perpetrated by me. They baby dreams always have a huge scope, and are ridiculously detailed. I can hear every sound and see every child’s eyes. The self-mutilation dreams are the opposite: there is no location, there are few sounds or feelings.

Here are last night's offerings:

Dream No. 1

This dream was incredibly vivid. The babies aren’t really central to the nightmare’s theme, but they’re there, so I’m categorizing it as a baby dream. It takes place in a third-floor apartment in Council Bluffs, Iowa. I don’t know why it’s there; I just remember that detail.

The dream is really about a man. He’s very nondescript. One night, he’s sitting alone by the television, and he reaches out, lights a match with his Zippo (I don’t know why he does this, but he does), and tosses it over by his curtain. The curtain starts on fire. He gets up, calmly goes to the phone, and calls the hospital. I don’t know why he calls the hospital, but he does. Soon a little firetruck, about as big as a VW Microbus, comes. A few nurses in scrubs get out, go up to his apartment with fire extinguishers, and put out the fire. The man thanks them, and they leave.

Here’s where it gets creepy. The man sits alone in the dark for awhile, and then goes to his kitchen. He takes a match--a different one this time. This one is dark in color and about as long as one of the punks you use to light fireworks. He takes the long match, lights it with a Zippo (again, I don’t know why he bothers), and kneels down and touches it to a very convenient trail of gasoline on his kitchen floor. The entire apartment erupts in flames.

The fire department comes, and when the firefighters get out of their trucks (there are three trucks), they hear something awful. All anyone can hear are the screams of children, babies wailing. The noises all come from the third floor. The firefighters rush in and go up to the man’s apartment to try and save the babies.

Now the dream gets a little different. Instead of focusing on the man, I watch one of the firefighters. He walks around, listening to the screaming, looking for the baby. He follows the sound to a closet. He opens the door, looks in, and realizes that the baby is actually one of those dolls they make you take care of in a parenting class. (I had to take one home in ninth grade. I named her Spike. She was a pain in the ass.) Anyway, he realizes that the baby isn’t real, and reaches around to its back and pulls the batteries out. As he does so, the man (we’ll call him Firestarter now for identification’s sake) creeps up behind him holding a butcher knife. Before the firefighter realizes what’s happening, Firestarter stabs him over and over. The firefighter dies.

This happens again. Fourteen times. Firestarter doesn’t always stab them; sometimes he beats them to death. I watch him kill fifteen people in the space of three or four minutes.

Finally, a firefighter (this one’s a woman) sees Firestarter beat a guy to death. She runs over, and for some reason, there’s a Segway sitting in the doorway. She grabs the Segway and clocks Firestarter across the head with it. The Segway flies out the window. (I don’t know what the purpose of the Segway was. Maybe to lighten the mood after I’d watched fifteen people die horribly bloody deaths.) She and Firestarter fight for awhile, but she gets the upper hand when another firefighter sees them. He runs over, and together they kill Firestarter.

Yep. That was the dream. Again, it was very specific about numbers; there were forty of the screaming baby robots. This one wasn’t so scary by the end. It was really gruesome and frightening watching the guy kill all the firefighters, but the whole Segway bit made the end kind of comical. Well, as comical as watching two people beat a man to death can be.

Dream No. 2

I’m sitting on the edge of my bed. There’s a corkscrew in my right hand. Suddenly, I reach around and stab the corkscrew into my left shoulder. I twist it all the way in and listen to my shoulderblade crack. It doesn't hurt at all. Then I pull the corkscrew out. Um, yeah.

I'm beginning to think that I'm seriously disturbed. Anyone got any Abilify?