In my dreams last night, I was working some sort of job that I had issues with, issues enough that I decided to sit down with my boss and tell him about them. The boss listened, was non-commital and barely responsive...then he pulled out some sort of dart gun and shot some kind of a barb into my left shoulder.
The barb looked like a jet-black seed, something you'd have to watch your step not to step on for fear of hurting your foot. And after it had embedded itself in my shoulder, I felt -- yes, felt, in a dream -- my body become infused with a full-body ache, an uncomfortable warmth. And it hurrrrrrrt.
Am I getting paralyzed? I thought. Is this going to even stop me from breathing? Am I going to die?
And the boss simply sat there, smiling.
I fought my body's desire to just stop and struggled up and out of the office. Keep moving, keep moving, somehow. And somehow I did. And somehow I worked whatever was in my system out of my system. Later in the dream I managed to tell someone what had happened, and that person informed me that this had happened before, that this boss was known to do this.
Other moments from the dream were less disturbing but, at some level, vaguely sad. My brother T.J. -- single again for some reason, no wife or kids in his life -- gave me some safe haven in his apartment (again, in reality, he and his family have a house) and we talked. However, I seemed to be missing syllables he said, here and there, just enough to miss his meaning.
The dreams made me sad. This rarely happens. Non-sad events happened in last night's dreams, too -- I was ceremonially pulled on some sort of pad past the entrance on a big box department store where people were in line to buy something related to Star Wars, and no, I don't know where that came from, either (this was after I'd stopped getting paralyzed, too, so I didn't need to be pulled) -- but I woke up wanting to cry.