I dreamed that I didn’t sleep. Chew that one over.

In fact, my brain convinced me that I was in great peril as I was about to be awakened, that I needed to defend myself against being wakened as I had only slept a few minutes all night. Then I woke up and realized I did not remember being awake at all before then.

Or was I?

I had laryngitis in my dream. I don’t recall the situation, though. Maybe I was talking in my sleep?

I packed a huge lunch for myself (with pickles and cheese), and I walked out the door headed to high school. Unfortunately for me, my mom had decided that I must bike to school while my brothers and father took the cars. Now, that would never really happen as my school was several miles of fast-driving road away, but nonetheless.

I hadn’t anticipated this wrinkle, so I got a late start. To make things worse, I got as far as two blocks from my house when I realized I had forgotten a helmet. Helmets are the law in that state, and I wasn’t about to get pulled over. Or hit by a semi without one. It was already 8:32, on top of that, as I was an incredibly slow biker on an ancient vehicle.

I turned back. Others along the bike route did too, but they were being pursued by a gunman. Road rager or something. We ended up back at my parents’ place on foot.

I can’t remember what happens next. I do recall another dream involving the appearance of long-legged, enormous bugs. Don’t know what happened next as I woke with a gasp.

What if an alien planet with life had a solar system with a large, rocky planet between it and the sun? And this planet was so close to the sun that it circumnavigated in only two days? What effect might it have on the lively planet’s temperature (assuming it is quite large)? How might people have adapted?

Discovery of More Planets Gives Alien Life-Seekers Heart

Last night it was all about cruising. My family was there; others were there; it was a great big party. The ship was highly ornate in an over-the-top Vegas style. On our floor was a lounge with a guy dressed up as Louis XIV performing songs to piano accompaniment. One member of our party was so entranced that he missed the elevator the rest of us were on, only seeing us shoot by horizontally past him as apparently this was a multidirectional elevator.

Our ship was in port. I have no idea what port. Most European ports look pretty much the same — very industrial.

That elevator was taking us to the Lido deck at 4 a.m. to get something to eat. We figured no one would be around, and we were hungry after a late night. My ship card, which I apparently needed for securing food much like in a college cafeteria, had a mysterious title on it under my name, something like the Chief Dak of the Fifth Duck. I didn’t know what it meant in the dream any more than I do now.

On deck, we discovered that the buffet was already packed, with a huge line leading out the entryway. I looked up and saw a sign noting that registration for the eating contest was underway. We hesitated. We were hungry, but we didn’t want to wait in line, especially if that line led to registration for a food-shoveling event.

Luckily, we discovered an omelette station right next to the line’s end, with many prepared plates for the taking. I grabbed one with an omelette, potato pancakes, and a ball of sausage. I tried a couple bottles of ketchup and managed to get some on my plate. I requested some bacon from the cook behind the counter, as I always prefer it to sausage. Mmm, bacon.

Turns out my companions for the meal were John and Heidi of Carnival’s cruise-director blog fame. Heidi was tucking into an omelette meal herself, but John (as he is on a diet) only had two slices of whole-wheat bread and a whole lot of cut-up tomatoes in front of him. I commented on the number of tomatoes, and he woefully explained there wasn’t much else he could eat. At that point, the cook handed him some extremely blackened bacon, which had some special name I don’t recall that indicated it had been prepared in such a way as to render out most of the fat. I got my bacon too, though it was a lovely golden brown instead. It was still crispier than I make it for myself (I like it fully cooked by still a little chewy, which is why I often go for thick slices), looking bubbly on the outside as if it had been deep fried, but it was still lovely to have.

Dead man in the guest room closet. And I was inside the murderer’s head.

He was hanging by the neck from the closet’s hanger pole. He had a hole in his hand from a gunshot, made by the gun he held.

I didn’t see the murder, but I did see the stowing of the body.

I woke up just after the big reveal of the murderer by (I think) my mom, who played detective.

I was teaching again, in a particularly large class. The classroom was generally reminiscent of my last classroom, and many of the students were the same. However, I had absolutely no control over them. They chatted as I tried yelling for their attention. They wandered the room when they should have been working. I’d snag eyes for a second only to lose them all to socializing again. My stress levels were skyrocketing.

Maybe teaching again isn’t such a great idea??

I was baking plain cut-out cookies in my parents’ kitchen. I first made small rounds and large stars, and these I made into sandwiches with a jam filling. Naturally, the stars on top were way bigger than the round bottoms, and thus the cookies were hard to eat. I considered making smaller stars for tops that would fit inside the circle’s circumference, but I worried they would be messy with all that jam peeking out around the edges. I decided to make two circular cookies instead.

My dream also involved some sort of conference. I can’t remember what that was all about. Still, it was a happier time than what life is handing me lately.

I was traveling, exploring an indeterminate tourist attraction. My family was with me, and as we were going through some stone passage (or possibly a cave), my dad and I were having a conversation about banks.

I kept encountering a man and a woman dressed like low-key clowns in red and yellow, who I recalled were part of the experience of the place and were a good thing to get a picture of. They seemed to know this, too, and always picked up on my camera being pointed their way to make large, hammy grins. This embarrassed me, and I would immediately point my camera slightly elsewhere as if I had been lining up a shot of something else all along. Once I even yelled at them, “Why do you keep doing that?!” as I framed my dad’s face quickly with the turned camera.

One of the clowns pulled me aside later and informed me that the reason they had caught my camera each time was because the two of them were keeping an eye on me. He informed me that I was in fact a secret agent. When I denied this, he told me to listen to some video, which seemed to be in Russian. He said I would understand it, and it seemed like I was on the verge of understanding what was going on but . . . the end.

Two of my dreams were somewhat intertwined, as I remember it.

There was a race of some sort. My ragtag team (of boys dressed 19th-century style) decided to buy an airplane kit to get us from one end to the other. I objected, as none of us knew how to fly a plane. I didn’t go, but the rest of them did. As I feared, they managed to take off and fly, but they didn’t figure out how to land. Some survived, including a tall boy wearing aviator goggles and a leather cap who came out of it looking dripping wet, but half did not.

A friend and I sat on the floor in a movie theater without seats, watching this news on a film reel. We saw a news conference with that boy in the background, and then a funeral procession passing by holding up photos of the dead. Then that procession continued, but now it held up photos of other dead people we didn’t recognize. Suddenly, the number of photos in the procession multiplied, and everyone in the theater rose and rushed toward the screen. No! It couldn’t be our pictures! As we all surged forward, the black curtains behind the screen retracted and the screen lifted, showing a gleaming rainbow-colored wall and shoppers in a mall — it was only a movie, after all.

My final dream of the night (well, it turned more into afternoon) concerned some sort of conspiracy or aliens. Maybe both. I mostly remember it was pretty exciting stuff, so I didn’t want to wake up and end it.