It's three in the morning as I begin this entry, and will doubtless be even later when I finish, especially since G. just messaged me to tell me to giggle at Boytaurs and I succumbed. (Yes, go look, then return.)

My parents are sleeping on the sofa-bed in my living room, so I can't wander downstairs for bad television and hot tea, the way I usually do when I wake in the night. (It's funny, really, because I have a television here in the computer room, and we have digital cable on both sets, but it never occurs to me to turn this one on at such times.) So I'm babbling in text in the hope that I can clear the last of the leftover dreamstuff from my mind.

I've written in passing that my mother's first husband, the one man I ever called “Dad,” threatened to hunt me down and kill me, as we pulled away from our old driveway in Colorado, and headed toward a new life in California. Adult, rational, daytime Zoetrope knows very well that this was a powerless man's attempt to sieze power, and feel less lost. But the residual eleven-year-old inside me still remembers the cold hatred in his tone, and my overactive imagination goes to work far too often using that memory as a jumping point.

Oddly, the dream that I woke from wasn't at all scary in and of itself. I remember bumbling thieves, a scheme to steal cashiers checks, a sword, and someone singing “Big Bad John,” quite sarcastically. And then a noise from outside (probably the neighborhood possum encountering a trash can lid) insinuated itself into my dream, and I woke, momentarily terrified and disoriented, convinced there was a gunman waiting in the computer room to murder the lot of us in our beds. I vaguely recall the sound of an obviously touched murderer laughing and saying, “Bang. Definitely bang. Yeah, bang.” in a voice not unlike Dustin Hoffman in Rainman only sinister instead of sweet.

Of course…the dogs didn't react. This is always a reassuring method of proving that it was, in fact, just a dream. My dogs can generally sense a cat padding across the deck, and will growl from the depths of sleep if this occurs. An actual noise would have had Zorro on alert, and Cleo pawing at the ground and barking. (I remain convinced that, should we ever actually be attacked, my dogs would save the day by licking said attacker to death. They're such wusses. Cleo and I have regular conversations, albeit one-sided, about the fact that wagging her tail while she's barking visciously at someone ruins all credibility.)

And so I sit here, typing like a madwoman, and no doubt convincing any readers that I'm truly psychotic, and not merely mildly eccentric, and a little obsessed by work and houses.