Ghost Dog- Nightmares & Dreamstuff:

I had a freaky dream last night and very strange experience upon awakening. I should probably preface the story a little by giving you some background.

I see dead people.

No, not exactly, but occasionally throughout my life I have seen "ghosts." Or something. I'm not sure what they are exactly, but the experience is always the same. I wake up, usually in the middle of a dream, and very clearly see someone standing in my room, beside the bed. Usually it's a person, though sometimes it's a dog or a wolf. In most cases, they fade away almost immediately, though sometimes they stick around for a while. Once I watched a man smoke a cigarette in the closet for two or three minutes before I worked up the courage to say something.

I know, I know, it's just what they call a "hypnagogic phenomena." Though I am awake, part of my brain is still dreaming, right? Maybe, though I have a few reservations about making such a cut-and-dried diagnosis. For one thing, the apparition I see in the room never has any direct connection to the dream I just had. For another, it is almost never a person I recognize. So why would I conjure up random people?

A theory I have devised is that dreaming perception and waking perception are sort of like two separate radio stations. When changing stations on an old-fashioned radio with a dial tuner, you sometimes skip across a signal somewhere between the two other ones. Then, when you go back to try to find it again, it's just not there anymore. I think I'm experiencing something like that. A form of perception somewhere between dreaming and waking, seeing something which might be around us all the time, but which we aren't always tuned in to.

Of course, I really don't know what I'm talking about, so that might just be me talking out of my ass again.

It has happened more frequently in different places I've lived than in others. When I lived with my ex-girlfriend at her parent's house, it happened a lot. (That's where I saw the cigarette guy in the closet.) Of course, that house also played host to a poltergeist, but I'll save that story for another time. (In case you think I'm a flake- I have never seen a UFO, Bigfoot or Elvis.)

It's happened a few times in the new place, and it happened to me this morning.

First, the dream I was having. It started innocently enough, with me on board the "Titanic." (Kate Winslet, unfortunately, was nowhere to be found.) For some reason, I was planning to stowaway on the ship and was looking for a place to hide. Then the dream shifted and I was caring for my daughter, Lily. Except in the dream, she was paralyzed. I was very sad, watching her and knowing she would never walk, and in the dream I vowed to make her life as happy as possible despite her paralysis.

For a parent, that's about as scary as a nightmare can get.

I woke up and I saw a small dog sitting on the bed beside Lily. (Lea was sleeping with Dylan in his room, so it was just the two of us in bed. Or three, if you count the dog.) It was a puppy. I'm not sure of the breed, though I would recognize it if I saw another one. The dog was not threatening, and in fact seemed almost protective of Lily. After blinking my eyes about a dozen times, it faded away. I'm not really freaked out by these things anymore, and my dominant feeling was relief that the dream was over and Lily was safe.

So, I don't know. I awake from a dream where harm has come to my daughter, to find her being watched over by a protective canine spirit. Weird, huh? I have no idea what it really means.