Originally posted to my site: http://www.tygerwolfe.com/ ___________________________________________________
I have a lot to talk about, and soon - just got back from my parents 50th wedding anniversary in Texas, and visiting fellow dire wolf therian (and wonderful friend!) Paleo, and her husband Jay...SO much to talk about...and yet I find myself with even less time as usual so I'm working around it by posting a random blog that has no affiliation to any of this at all!
I had a weird experience last night, and another one this morning.
After the plane trips and the hard bed at my parent's place (not your fault, guys! You didn't know...and neither did we!), my back is bothering me so much that I've had to sleep the last two nights on a recliner in the living room with a pillow pushing into the small of my back, trying to make a chiropractic adjustment through the weight of my body and the action of the chair alone. It works, but after a few hours of being up and moving around, my back slips back out a bit again and my hips say "What in the world do you think you're doing? Sit DOWN!" The point of all this is that last night, I was sleeping in a recliner in the darkened living room.
About 3 hours after I'd fallen asleep, I heard, very clearly, someone give a long-suffering sigh. It sounded like they were standing right over me, on my left. I blinked awake and looked around, but wasn't able to turn my head far enough to bring everything to the left of me into focus - even though I'd been sleeping in my glasses. It was very dark. But I saw a shadow that looked like my fiancee, Lona, carrying a pillow.
It should be noted - using the recliner to fix our backs is a common thing in this house when we don't have time to get to a chiropractor for whatever reason. And I have been woken up before by Lona telling me her back's bothering her and could I please move to the reclining end of the couch for a bit so she could use the recliner. So naturally, after hearing the sigh (which I assumed was frustration with her back hurting enough to make her get out of bed and have to come DO this), I blinked in the direction from which the sigh had come, focused on the shadow, and said, "What's wrong, sweetie?"
Here's where it got weird.
There was no answer.
I furrowed my brow, now worried she was maybe mad at me and trying to figure out how to phrase what she wanted to say. Scenarios flashed through my head - did the cat pee on the bed sheets? Was the fan that Nyx had blowing on her bothering Lona? Was her back just that bad tonight? Was there anything I could do?
Still, nothing from the shadow. So I shifted, craned my neck, and focused. Could still see the shadow - but I could see the whiteboard on the wall behind it, THROUGH it.
Chills went up my spine and I fumbled fro the light above my head. I managed to get it flipped on, still staring at the shadow, and it vanished as the room flooded with light. There was nothing there. And as far as I could see, nothing that could've cast the shadow unless it was the shadow of me in the recliner...and let's be honest - if that was what the shadow of me in the recliner looked like, I would've seen it before now and recognized it.
All I can figure is that I had to have been mostly asleep still, and it was kind of a waking dream. I felt no presence or malice from the shadow, so I doubt it was any kind of shadow being. And I know this actually happened, because when I went to sleep, the lights were off. And when I woke up this morning, the light over my head was on, just as I'd turned it on to banish the shadow. So all I can figure is that the sigh was something out of a dream, and the shadow was an optical illusion. Still, it startled me.
Then, later, after the shadow encounter, I had a strange dream. I dreamed that Lona and I had moved into our apartment, but we were regularly visiting my parents, who had moved out here to somewhere in Riverside. My parents still had, in addition to their cat, Harmon, my old turtle, Pokey. Now, it's important to note that Pokey, a red-eared slider about the size of the palm of a hand - a little smaller - has been dead since a few years before I moved out of my parent's old apartment. At the time of Pokey's death, she was living in a 20 gallon aquarium where she had land and lots of water to swim around in. She was in that same aquarium now, and Lona and I were at my parent's new place in the dream. My mom was telling me that Pokey was so much happier when we came to visit, and maybe we should take her home with us.
The dream jumped around a little, and Lona and I had taken Pokey back to our apartment. Her aquarium was on the little island that separates our kitchen from our dining room area. Then the dream jumped again, and Kata had come over and brought the turtle a present - a weird little jungle gym type thing designed for reptiles. It had a warming rock with a heat lamp, and a little flippy door that let the turtle go down a little silt slide into water, then she could swim around and climb out to get back to the rock and start over again. She obviously loved it and was "playing" as best a turtle can. This was set up on the coffee table.
We were sitting around, laughing at the turtle's antics, and Lona called me into her office for something. I went in, leaving Kata alone with Pokey. When I came back, Pokey was about....oh, bigger than a dinner plate. She'd quadrupled in size. Kata was acting like this was perfectly normal and that turtles expand to four times their size regularly. I was surprised, but with Pokey that big, all I could think was "Uh oh...we need a bigger aquarium."
I picked her up, wrapping part of her in a towel because she was wet, and she craned her neck at me out of her shell and looked at me with her bright blue eyes. I petted her head, told her very quietly that I was so very happy she was here with us....and then, with the weight of a giant version of my old turtle in my arms, I woke up. My alarm going off had woken me, and I was really too out of it to claim to be ACTUALLY awake. Since the last important thought in the dream had been the need to get a much larger aquarium, I spent the first few minutes I was awake trying to budget for it because we couldn't just let the turtle run around without some sort of enclosure....
Yeah. I wasn't awake. However, now, almost six hours after waking up, I still remember the dream in that much detail, so I figured I should blog about it. I can imagine what triggered it - pictures of Pokey I saw while at my parent's house this last weekend, and the missing of my past pets that always comes with visiting them. However, for the first time since I moved out, I had a past-pets dream that didn't focus on my little kitty, Smokey, and I felt that needed to be documented. Not to mention the weird shadow thingie.
So, now I have blogged. :P I'm going to try and fix my back again now.
