Thursday, July 20, 2006

I was a . . .

Ok, so here's one of the little quirks of married life. Every so often the dreaming world decides to take a day trip to the waking world and wreak a little havoc. Initially you have odd dreams involving your new spouse and your new relationship and some facet thereof (typically fidelity or lack thereof, or some aspect of personality that was only discovered upon actually living together) and you find yourself waking up mad as all get out at him or her. It happens. At first you might take it out on them for a bit till the whole it was a dream thing kicks in and then you feel silly and have a story for later.

You don't ever completely grow out of this, but sometimes, after you've been together for a while, it gets stranger. Take last night for example. This afternoon my wife informs me that she had the oddest dream about me last night. First a little background: For those not in the know, I've been playing through Resident Evil 4 of late. I do my best to keep it away from the kids, but they occasionally get curious and I occasionally play it before they go to bed. Last night they decided to "play" RE 4 at bedtime. This mostly involved one of them saying something like, "Leon help!" and the other pretending to rescue them. When Miranda tired of the game she came downstairs and informed us that McKenna wouldn't get out of her bed. She then launched into a fairly accurate retelling of the bit of RE 4 that I'd played through that afternoon. In spite of the fact that she and her sister had been warned several times not to come downstairs. I tried to keep from laughing while my wife gave me The Look (admittedly on one of it's weaker settings).

Ok so I suspect that was at least partially responsible for the dream she had. That or watching Clerks but I'm pretty sure it was the first thing. Anyway, in this dream my friend the letter 'r' and I were playing RE 4. And oddly we had a gun controller that we used to do the shooting in the game (which was kept under the bed so as to keep it away from the kids). The letter 'r' made some comment about the fact that I was actually a pretty good shot. I then made a joke about the recent target shooting we'd done at Trout Lodge. Then we both "laughed knowingly". You know, that fake little laughter like we have a secret. At this point my wife decided to head for bed and leave us to our carnage.

Once she arrived upstairs she noticed a gun under the bed. A rifle or "AK-47" or something (she was very specific about this when telling me her dream). But this was confusing, after all weren't we already downstairs playing the game with the controller? Closer inspection revealed that the gun under the bed was a real rifle. This caused a "Confrontation". I believe at this point that the letter 'r' was no longer in the dreamscape. Instead my wife confronted me about the real gun in the house. There was a slap and some tearful exclamations about kids and loaded guns and so on. And then painful understanding. She looked at me and said (with all seriousness), "Why didn't you tell me you were a zombie hitman?!" At this point, my secret out in the open, there was more yelling and tears. "People call you up and you go and kill zombies!", "What do you mean you don't really wear glasses?!", "Your day job is just a cover!" and so on. I tried my best to console her, but she would have none of it.

It was at this moment that something woke my wife, the end of the dream, some random noise, who knows. Fortunately we've been in this territory enough that she managed to calm down before throttling me in bed for living a secret life bringing the undead back to their maker. Although she did almost wake me then to share the joke. I must admit we had a pretty good laugh about it. Of course, I'll now have to kill her in her sleep tonight for knowing too much, but sometimes that's the price you pay...

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