For years my dreams have both plagued and thrilled me.

I’ve had terrifying dreams, waking dreams, and disjointed-but-full-of-symbolism dreams. I’ve had awesome dreams ruined by my husband’s practical nature, suffered from creepy sleep paralysis, and lately I’ve been unnerved by awful “awake-but-not-quite-awake-as-floating-faces-draw-ever-nearer” dreams.

I’ve had mom threesome dreams, dreams where I almost but-not-quite get to ride a horse, and dreams where I’m a crappy parent.

I’ve had the ubiquitous “Oh no, it’s finals day and I didn’t even study” nightmare.

I’ve dreamed I’m combating housecleaning with my specialized Magic the Gathering card decks.

I’ve had lactation nightmares and dreams of swashbuckling bravery, dreams with background music, Game of Thrones Librarian dreams, dreams with old friends I’ve never met anywhere in real life, but who I walk with regularly as I sleep…

I’ve even dreamed I was a My Little Pony with an assault rifle, only to have it ruined at the very end.

I mean, seriously. My dream life is THE BOMB. I feel sorry for non-dreamers sometimes. I go to bed, curl up on my left hand side and drift off, and then I wake up with a magic bow that shoots napalm arrows and I’m infiltrating the enemy base to single-handedly bring down corrupt governments. I have chase dreams, superhero swat team and dreams where I’m trying to survive the zombie apocalypse while high on LSD.

I have dreams where I’m stuck trying to take down the Mexican cartel and the only weapon I have is a fuzzy troll doll/banana slug hybrid.

I regularly have lucid dreams where I use my cognizance as a weapon, and even lucid dreams where I feel pity for the people in my head. Some dreams are funny, a lot of them are not. Some nightmares are so terrible that I don’t even like to write them down, because I keep hoping the details will fade.

The worst ones won’t, no matter how many decades go by.

I’ve even had epic three and four part dreams, where I wake up and then go right back to the same story line the next night, and the multi-part sprawling story line is so complex and woven so tightly that I’ve jotted down the plot in hopes of turning it into a book one day.

Strangely enough, I used to have nightmares about having twins all the time, but since I had to combat that phobia in real life, it’s gone away. There’s power in facing your fears.

Dreams sometimes feel like they are as much a part of who I am as my waking life – an entire swirling second plane of existence I visit for 8-10 hours every day (hahaha, who am I kidding? I have four kids. 5-6 hours a night?).

My dreams are huge and complex and creepy and wonderful.

And then there is the Bean.

The Bean is not very artsy. Oh, he loves beauty, but he is drawn to the beauty of symmetry, or stark beauty, or the kind of powerful beauty contained in 30 foot waves off the southern coast of Chile. I used to ask him what he dreamed about, but eventually I stopped. Even though he was honest when he shared, it took me years to actually believe him. It wasn’t that they were too fantastic to comprehend, but rather that they were too literal.

This morning the alarm clock went off way too early. Finn is still sleeping between us in our bed,

and lately he has gone from mostly sleeping through the night to waking up every 2-3 hours, asking for another bottle.

Usually around bottle number 2-3, his diaper overflows and wets all of our sheets, and we wake up gritty-eyed, exhausted, and covered in toddler pee.

Parenting: it’s not for the faint of heart.

After several weeks of devolving sleep, I finally had enough and tried putting down my foot yesterday. I told him he would not be getting a third bottle in the wee hours of the morning, and that two bottles was quite enough.

Two or three hours of disjointed, angry screaming toddler non-sleeping later, our alarm went off. I rolled over, trying to blink my hot, too-dry eyes as I returned to reality. What had I been dreaming of? There was a sense of impending doom….. had I been rappelling down the side of a burning building, Australian-style? Why was the building on fire… was it the apocalypse again?….

“I had the weirdest dream,” The Bean murmured, the sound of his voice shattering the haze of my dream into disjointed scenes.

I rolled over and looked at him. “Oh yeah?” The Bean dreams so infrequently that it’s a rare treat for him to remember one.

“I owned a gas station.”

“Yeah?”

“And I had a catalog of all the snacks, so I was going through the catalog, making decisions about what to restock..”

“Yeah?”

“……”

“Then what? You had the catalog, you were trying to figure out what to restock, and then…”

“…..Becky, I just owned a gas station. I was going through the inventory, selecting what to order from catalog. ”

“…… Wait, that’s it?”

“Yeah.”

That was it. His “weird” dream consisted of him doing inventory.

Ten years of marriage, guys, and I still don’t understand how this man’s brain works.