Nyleva, the Last American Riot Grrrrl and The Everly Brothers

So Liza and I got to see Nyleva this weekend, which was kew'. We ate at O'Charley's, listened to Liza sing along to 'nikcuS songs, translated Spanish pop, danced to Mary Timony, and did Jon Stewart impressions. I also got to see Tommy, but I see his arse more often since he's only 1 1/2 hours away instead of 10.

I had dreams (yeah, I'm getting back to dreams) for thirty minutes last night that kept waking me up, "nightmarish" ones. Actually, they didn't wake me up: they woke me up in the dream, but I wasn't really awake, which is always annoying. The only one I'm willing to tell is that one of them made me "wake up" saying the word cow aloud. I finally woke up for real, told all the ones I could think of, then slept nicely after that.

The scariest dream, I think, I've ever had in my life--or at least the most famous one, the one that still sticks out in my mind--is this one, that I dreamed when I was a kid: I'm sitting in a square room with nothing in it except stuffed animals and dolls sitting against the wall, as am I. I hear a scared voice, almost crying, that says "The dog is looking at the baby doll!" and then the dream-camera cuts to the dog, then to the doll, then I wake up screaming my head off. Any dream analysts out there?

I had another dream around that same time where my cat, Smoky, was clawing me and I could actually feel it clawing me. I'm not sure if I've felt anything in a dream since then, but I was 100% convinced that the cat was on me until Mom and Tony explained that the cat was outside. Then and now, I have dreams where I can open my eyes and see things. These days, it's mostly bugs and spiders and stuff--always waking up swatting at things that aren't there. I think recently it was a little propellor boat flying in the air. I've been waking up in general from dreams (and seeing things sometimes) more often lately, which is maybe why I'm more obsessed about them than usual.

Another thing that scared me when I was about four, that wasn't a dream, was an episode of Fantasy Island called "Man-Beast" where they set it up as this Beauty and the Beast sort of thing, and everytime I'd seen B&TB in books or on TV or whatever, he looked like an ugly monkey or something (this was before the Disney days when they made him a buffalo), so in a Phantom of the Opera moment (he was playing the organ), a woman creeps up on him to see what he looks like. I'm commenting to my brother: "He's gonna be all ugly-looking, like a baboon." But then he whips around and looks right at the camera and he's this cool-looking werewolf thing... and I scream really really loud. And then I'm just crying and trying to explain it to mom why it scared me so much: "I... was... ex... pecting this ugly... thing... and he was... like... cool looking... and... he... wasn't... ugly... he was cool..."

My brother still makes fun of me for that, but I was only about six, and he was seeing Freddy Kruegger sitting next to the bed when he was a teenager, so...

So things scare me that I can't really explain why. Or when I do explain why, it doesn't make sense. I don't know anyone who's ever been scared of something because he was "cool-looking." I spent about ten minutes just then doing searches for that episode (that's how I know the name, and even who played him--the guy who played the original Fly) to see if there was a photo, even though I still remember exactly what it looked like. It was more like a fox than anything.

I used to do a thing when I was a kid to wake out of nightmares where I'd just go "phhhht" with my tongue, and that seemed to work...