So Matt and I were driving home from dinner last night, and Matt said he should go to the doctor soon, if only to get a baseline physical so that when he's seventy, the doctor has something to compare his health to.

"'See, Mr. Brooks, here's you when you were thirty... And this is where you are now. Yes, down here by the zero. Don't worry, we've got this nice jar for your brain, and a nutrient solution.'"

"'With an internet connection,'" I put in. "'You'll hardly even know you've been disembodied!'"

"'Except that you'll have the constant sensation of needing to urinate. It's a bug. We're working on a fix.'

"'How's it going, Dad?'

"'Oh, I can't complain, sweetie. The net connection's pretty good, and I'm not in any pain. I'd give my life's fortune to take a whiz, though...'"

"This conversation is getting both morbid and surreal," I said. "It's time to stop it."

"I just want to know what kind of dreams you're going to have tonight, with that floating around in your subconscious," Matt said.

The first dream was a stupid-bad horror movie.

There are good horror movies, that have you on the edge of your seat, one more startle away from actually screaming. The ones that make your sleep restless for a week afterward.

And there are funny-bad horror movies, where everything is just so ludicrously over the top that they're funny. Most of these never took themselves very seriously to begin with.

And then there are stupid-bad horror movies. The ones that take themselves very seriously, but aren't quite over-the-top enough to be funny. The plot is bad, the acting is bad, the special effects are bad, the filming is bad... Yeah. That's the dream I had.

I dreamed that my friend Nathan - whom I haven't seen since college, mind you, or even corresponded with in about six years - found me and some friends at my parents' house (at least, I think it was my parents' house; the crappy camera angles never let me get a good look) and tried to kill me.

I wound up killing his girlfriend by accident, but then we caught him and someone (was it Kevin? I know it wasn't Matt; he had gone off to do... something.) was going to start cutting Nathan's toes off one at a time, in revenge, (through his extremely stupid cowboy boots, which I remember vividly in the dream and am quite certain the real Nathan would never have worn anything quite so hideous in his life) and I launched into this astonishingly boring monologue about how we could kill him, or we could turn him over to the police, but we couldn't torture him.

It was so bad that when I woke up, I couldn't even feel creeped out by it.

The second dream was even stupider. Matt and Penny and I were playing in this water park. (Penny was a bit older. Like three or four.) And I had to leave to go get something from the car. But when I came back, I found out you couldn't go back into the park once you'd left. Or at least, you had to pay again. And I didn't have any more money.

So I decided to sneak in. But the bottom floor of the park (?) was this weird hospital kind of place, with heavy security everywhere. I wound up trying to slip through the mental ward. I remember hiding behind a door, and there was a high, narrow window behind me, and if I looked up through it, I could see the feet of the people standing in line for the waterslide.

Needless to say, it wasn't a very restful night.

--Liz