Milkshake on a Rail

MORNING OF JULY 3, 2009

I remember being at my grandmother's for a Fourth of July family gathering. The odd thing is, we never do family get-togethers for the Fourth in real life. I remember a group of us were going out to get milkshakes from Chick-Fil-A. Two of my cousins and I were going to ride with my dad, while another group were going in another car.

As we were walking out to the car, I had some Nerds candy in my hand. I haven't had Nerds candy since I was a kid (or at least a teen). And it was in one of those plastic containers sculpted like one of the "Nerds" (I don't even know if they still make those anymore, but they used to). I stuffed it in my back pocket as we were getting in the car. Only after I sat down did I stop to think that, #1, it was rather large to be stuffed into a back pocket and sat on, #2, I had apparently stuffed my digital camera in the same back pocket, so it was really crowded!

My next clear memory is that we had our milkshakes in hand and we'd gone to a fictional mall to drink them. We were on the second level of the mall, standing beside the thin metal railing that served as a guardrail as you looked down on the floor level. Suddenly my dad and some others climbed up on the railing and sat on it, with their legs dangling nonchalantly over the side.

Besides the fact that railing this thin would truly be perilous to sit on, my terrible fear of heights would keep me from ever climbing on it like this even had it been of safer build. But in the dream, I just climbed up there and sat like everyone else, and wasn't really very nervous about it.

Down on the floor level, around a corner that obscured our view, I could hear some apparently young guys talking loudly about a movie they'd just watched. They were laughing and describing favorite scenes. I was trying to figure out what movie they must be discussing, and apparently was subconsciously leaning in a bit, because I suddenly began to lose my balance on the railing!

Fortunately I was able to make myself fall backwards on the the floor behind me as opposed to falling forward down to the level below. The others asked me if I was okay, and, though my heart was pounding overtime in my chest, I realized I pretty much was. Still, my knees were now too much jelly to allow me to stand, so I lay there on the floor for a minute. Suddenly I realized there was actually no railing on the edge at all, and the floor just dropped cleanly off to the bottom with nothing to stop anyone falling. I wondered what we'd just been sitting on.

That's when I realized I wasn't lying on the mall floor at all, but was lying in my own bed (but still in a dream). My alarm was going off. In reality usually alternate what type of alarm I use, and this time I had used the radio. I heard just faint radio static coming from the alarm, as though the station it was tuned to had lost signal. Still, the alarm was turned up pretty loud, so the static was extremely annoying.

I tried hitting snooze. Nothing happened. I kept trying. Just more loud static. I was more fully awake now, and listened hard to make sure the static was actually coming from the radio. It was. So I turned the alarm completely off. Still the static noise. I tried turning the actual radio itself on and back off. Still the static. Now getting a little freaked out, I unplugged the entire alarm clock. The digital clock readout went to black, but the radio continued to blare static.

I kept trying different ways to turn it off and never reached any level of success. Finally, in a combination of frustration and panic, I began physically destroying the alarm clock. It was lying in pieces on the floor and the radio static was still loudly emitting.

You've probably already guessed that this is when I really woke up, and my actual alarm was playing radio static. And it went away when I hit snooze.