What a nightmare

I dreamed I was pregnant.

I'll be 61 in a couple of months, so you know it was a nightmare to dream about being "in a family way." (Don't you just love those old-fashioned euphemisms?) I can barely stay awake after 8 p.m., any infant depending on me for sustenance at 2 a.m. is going to starve.

Several things have come together recently to create this line of subconscious thought. In theory, anyway.

• My husband found a box of his baby clothes in a closet at his mother's.*
• I saw the cutest pattern for baby booties that look like little Uggs yesterday.
• The gardening marathon lately must have me thinking fertile thoughts.

Really, what more do you need to conjure up images of diapers and sounds of babies cooing than that?  Heh.

My husband is a shrink, but I don't think I'm going to request an analysis of this dream. Best to let sleeping babies lie. Or lay. I always did confuse lie/lay.

Today is a gym day, and then I'm dropping off what I hope is the final proof of the design-by-committee project I've been working on for the last two weeks but am charging them for only three hours' time. Non-profits get a break, but this will be an especially big one. Sigh. If it doesn't rain this afternoon, I BET THERE WILL BE MORE GARDENING AROUND HERE.

Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of my husband stopping smoking. He's still chewing way too much nicotine gum (by his own admission), but his lungs surely are clearer now than they were when we found out he doesn't have lung cancer a year ago. Nothing like a miraculous diagnosis to get you to quit smoking, eh?

Speaking of the husband, he put this note by the coffeemaker several months ago:

Gardening is an active participation in the deepest mysteries of the universe.

~ Thomas Berry

(I'll help you next year.)

And he's following through! All the work I've been doing this week has been in tandem. He's not crazy about weeding onion beds, but he doesn't mind raking dead leaves or moving rocks. Whatever works. I just wish he didn't mind cleaning bathtubs.

* Also in the baby-clothes box was his Little League baseball uniform, which he last wore more than 55 years ago. He tried on the shirt last night and it fits! He was as proud as any woman still fits into her wedding gown on her 10th anniversary. What it really shows is just what a big kid he was in Little League, because he's a perfectly normal-sized man.

Oh, what a relief it is …

to wake up and realize it was all a dream.

It's taken nine days without sugar for my subconscious to break free and put me in one of the craziest using dreams I've ever had.

Recovering addicts/alcoholics frequently experience dreams in which they're high or drunk. I've had more than a few of those myself. But this is the first time I've ever had a similar dream about candy.

SCARY!

I'll tell you about it in a minute (this is your opportunity to go read someone else's blog if you don't want to be bored by my dream). First, though, I ran across this website while I was searching for the identity of the tote-bag logo. I contacted the site owner, a graphic designer living in Northern Ireland, and while he said chances were slim that he would be able to identify it, he agreed to take a look.

Okay, if you're still with me, here's my dream.

I was in the terminal of Yaeger Airport in Charleston, WV, getting ready to board a puddle-jumper that would take me directly to Ft. Wayne, IN. I paid for a magazine and a big bag of Kraft caramels. I then proceeded to find my seat, where I leaned my head against the cool window of the plane and started methodically opening and eating every. single. caramel.

It took the whole flight to polish off the bag. I felt no remorse or guilt or discomfort. In fact, I was giddy and up for anything.

I ended up getting married in Indiana, to someone I hardly knew and who later turned out to be a woman – a reverse Lola moment, if you will. When I found out he was a she, I was perfectly okay with that. We were in college and trying to figure out dinner plans. She had a class at 1:30, mine was at 2:30 and we weren't going to be able to get back together for several hours. And there were lots of other people involved. It got very complicated and messy and apparently my subconscious had had enough and it was over. Just like that.

I was greatly relieved to wake up and not find a sack of empty caramel wrappers next to my bed. Oh, and to find my current husband still beside me.

The first time I went sugar-free, 21 years ago, I remember crying for the first three weeks. It wasn't that I was sad or upset, but that I was tender, brittle, fragile. I was going through a lot of personal stuff at the time, so I might have cried easily anyway, but I've always associated those easy and frequent tears with abstaining from sugar.

This time around, I'm not so weepy, but I'm short-tempered and sarcastic. The brittleness is there, certainly, but is being manifested differently. I'm nice when I have to be; otherwise I'm sullen, quiet, dark. This, too, shall pass. It did before and I lived to tell about it. Aren't you glad?

The flooded basement is more than likely still flooded, even though I personally removed more than half a ton of water from it yesterday. (A much better workout than the previous day: Suck up water until the wet/dry vac container is full, roll it across the floor to a tiny kitchen with a sink, bail the water out of the vessel until it's light enough to pick up and dump the rest.) A sump pump took out most of it before I got there, but I was left to finish the job. I noticed that one area wasn't drying up, and upon further investigation found a crack in the floor from which water was flowing. The project ended up being an exercise in futility; water was coming in at a rate equal to that which I was pumping it out, so I stopped.

Not sure if I have to go back again today. When I think about yesterday, I spent about five minutes in a room of the house that had a big candy bowl in the center, filled with – no, not caramels – snack-sized Hershey bars. There were other bags of goodies on one end of the table. It was, at the time, my worst nightmare.

Until I went to bed.

Have any of you experienced anything like this? I can't imagine I'm the only one. It's certainly strengthened my resolve to remain sugar-free: I'm really not ready to get married again.