Last night, probably somewhere near four a.m., the boy and I were very comfortably and very deeply asleep. I was having a dream about something that I think was rather fun and exciting -- like, I was about to, say, go on a scavenger hunt or something. I remember being out in a big sunny field, at least.

Then suddenly in my dream I was standing in my bedroom and the walls were falling in and the fireplace was collapsing and I was screaming and then I was awake and in pitch black and I was screaming and thrashing around in mortal fear and my poor boy screamed and leapt straight out of bed in a huge tangle of sheets and stood there with his teeth bared and eyes wide and wild going "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA" as I sat there, legs still thrashing, going "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA" back at him until I had to take a breath, paused, and finally stopped moving long enough to realize what in holy flying FUCK was going on and grabbed my boy's hand and told him to stop screaming.

Apparently a picture had fallen off of my mantel, taking a commemorative champagne bottle, two brass cranes, and a water glass with it, all of which landed on the floor, hitting the desk and the printer on the way down and making what was apparently an absolutely unholy cacophony. (Amazingly, none of it broke.)

For the next half hour, I curled up in bed, head on Flex's shoulder, shaking, panting, pulse racing. A fold of sheet settled on my unsuspecting foot and I violently jerked around to get away from whatever THAT just was. My boy's eyelash touched my cheek and I flailed away from it in blind panic.

I swear -- I have never been more terrified, more certain that my heart was about to beat so hard and so fast that it was quite literally going to explode. At one point I even had the thought that nothing was ever going to be the same again, that I was going to flinch at the tiniest movements forever. It is hard to express, the morning after, just how overwhelmed and shaken and just plain...afraid...I was.

The part that I hate most about the whole situation is that when something happened in the middle of the night, something that, perhaps, could have been my walls falling in on me -- my reaction was to lash my arms and legs all over the place and shriek. "Fight or flight," my ass -- apparently my adrenaline initiates the "Flail and Fail" response. I mean, at least Flex stood up.

In other news, I straightened my hair again last night and it looks really cute.