Another Day Another Dollar

So I had a really intense nightmare last night.

I was sitting in my apartment with Carrie. We were kissing, and everything was good between us again. We both kept saying how much we loved each other, and I remebered how great it felt to be with her. Everything seemed so real, how she smelled, her mannerisms, everything was so realistic. But then, she got really pale, and said she didn't feel very good. Then, she blacked out. I started to get a really sick panicy feeling, as she seemed to get whiter and whiter. So I started screaming for help, when these three men, dressed all in black with black doctor's mask things on and wierd dark glasses/goggles (kind of like the goggles WWI pilots used to wear, like Snoopy did on Peanuts) over their eyes rushed into the room. One of them turned to me and said: "She is dying, and needs our help. Do you love her?" I responded "More than anything" and then they rushed the two of us off to a strange hospital place.

We arrived, and the hospital looked kind of like a normal hospital, only dingier. Like all of the normal bright white, antiseptic feeling associated witha hospital was gone, and everything here looked cracked, rusty and dirty. They rushed her into a room, and the same guy who had spoken to me earlier said "The doctor will be in shortly" and then the three of them just stood over Carrie staring at her. I was frantic, pacing, wondering when the doctor would get there (isn't it weird how dreams make total sense when you're having them?), when finally the door opened, and a man walked in. He was dressed just like the other men, except his clothes where all white (even the goggle lenses), and there were weird little decorative things sewed into his sleeves. He approached me, and put a hand on my shoulder. "Your lover is desperately sick,a nd she needs a blood transfusion. The procedure may kill you, but it's her only chance." I remember swallowing hard, and looking over at Carrie. She looked so pale, and sickly, and weak, and fragile. But at the same time I could see everything about her I loved, her beauty, her strength, her smile. I rolled up my sleeve, and looked at the doctor. "Do what you have to do" I said. He nodded, and then the three men in black ran towards me, making this weird clicking noise (it sounded like the scissors at a barber shop), and the grabbed me, lifting me off the ground, and put me on a bed next to Carrie. Then, they ripped off all my clothes, so I was lying there completely naked (perish the thought of people seeing my unattractive nude self), and started taking hundreds of needles with clear plastic tubes attached to the ends, and they started sticking them into the skin of my thighs and arms. It hurt really bad, and I started screaming as I watched them putting the needles in a vein, then out the skin on the other side, then into a different vein, like they were sewing a stitch in my skin. It burned really badly, but I tried as hard as I could to stay still so it wouldn't ruin the process, but I kept arching my back because of the intensity of the pain. As this was going on, I watched them strip off Carrie's clothes as well, and put six needles really long needs (at least 12 inches) in to her chest. As the blood started pumping out of my body, the burning got more and more intense, and I felt myself getting weaker and weaker each moment. But I could see the color returning to Carries face. The pain got worse and worse, and my body started to writhe in the agony, so one of the men dressed in black grabbed two big nails, and began pounding the nails through my shoulder with a huge black hammer, and into the table underneath me. It hurt so intensely, and my body was then pinned in place. Eventually, my vision started to give out, and everything was fading into a bright whiteness, and that's when I woke up.

Erik had walked into my room, because he had heard me screaming (he was sleeping on the couch, watching out for ghosts). He said I was rolling around in my bed, screaming and yelling like I was possesed. When he turned on the light, I noticed there was a bit of blood on my sheets, and when I looked at my arms and legs, I had these small nasty looking scratches all over them. I must have done like a sleep walking thing, and been scratching myself with my fingernails where the people had been putting the needles in. It didn't hurt to badly, it just kind of felt like a snburn or something, and most of them weren't bleeding, they were just these red scratches, but it feaked me out. I mean, c'mon, I've had some pretty intesnse dreams before, but this was a little out of hand.

Erik lectured me for awhile about how I should be seeing a therapist for this kind of stuff, that it wasn't normal, and now I'm hurting myself. But I don't really want to go to a therapist. It'd be too emberassing. I swore Erik to secrecy (of course, now I'm telling all of you about it), and he left to go back to sleep on the couch. I put some bandaids on the scratches that were bleeding, so i wouldn't stain my sheets any more than I already had, and then tried to go back to sleep (which, of course, didn't happen). This morning both my shoulders were really sore and a little bit bruised as well, so I must have hit myself too. So now I'm at work, wearign a long sleeve shirt so as to avoid emberassment, and I'm missing Carrie terribly. Man, just when you think things are going OK, something like this has to happen, that reminds you of how much you liked someone in the first place. This sucks.

Have any of you ever had sleepwalking episodes?