After a long history with all sorts of sleep aids and narcotics, I decided to switch back to the herbal type this week, the slightly useful Melatonin. In the years since I've taken the stuff I've forgotten what kind of deep, hypnotic sleep it will pull over you in five minutes flat, but it's also the first time I've woken up at 6 am with the gusto of a college cheerleader ready for a long bus ride across state lines. Basically I'm awake, but it didn't come without cost.
In the past two nights I've had the most frightening nightmares of my life, the depths and crevasses of my psyche making themselves known through subconscious self-expression. Last night was the worst ever. After watching a terrifying Prime Time Live about these deep water divers who died retrieving the skeleton of another deep water diver 850 feet below and this other nature show about the world's longest python that two huge men couldn't even pin down, it was obvious my dreams were going to be of the nightmare variety.
But drowning and snakes have nothing on my brain, I dreamed of something far more horrifying: I had a nightmare that my body was possessed by the spirit of Tom Arnold.
FAR MORE HORRIFYING!
In this dream within a dream, I could see myself in my own body, desperately trying to open my eyes but being held back by the demon spirit of Tom Arnold. The rouse here, the scary part if you will, is that the me inside my dream was being tortured with flashbacks of Tom Arnold's life and career every time I closed my eyes. They fluttered shut despite my resistance and whole episodes of Roseanne flashed before me mixed with sidebars of True Lies and that one guest staring role on Veronica's Closet. The whole time he cackled in my ear devilishly declaring he had tattooed my face on his chest, and kept holding me down to show it off.
WTF? I have no idea.
I woke from the dream at 3:16 am soaking with sweat as if I had been thrashing around fighting off the devil of Tom Arnold in real life. My heart pounded as my entire soul shook within me in absolute fear. It was the kind of fear you feel when you hear a sound outside your window at night and spend the next 4 hours awake wondering if someone is breaking into your house and if so, what you'll use to kill him once he's in your room.
The rest of the night I laid in bed shivering with fear, oscillating between brief intervals of sleep and waking in a panic. I managed to finally doze off for good a few hours later but when I woke up, I felt dirty, like my dreams had totally contaminated my body with evil. Later in the day someone asked me if I'd slept well the night before, I must have been acting incredibly off-kilt for it to shine through my usually strange and awkward personality. I responded without hesitation, "I had a dream I was being possessed by the demon spirit of Tom Arnold," and immediately heard all these cuckoo clocks going off.
