I'd like to stop dying. Thanks.

WARNING! This Blog Post contains Graphic and Violent Material that may not be suitable for people with weak stomachs.


If you follow me on Twitter, you already know this. I die a lot in my dreams. The old belief is that if you die in your dreams you die in real life. Well, unless I'm typing this from the Matrix, I'm alive and well despite having died in my dreams almost every night of my life.

I'm not stressed. I'm not angry. I'm not depressed. I don't feel guilty about anything.

There's no logical explanation for why this happens, but it happens. In full color and in vivid high-definition clarity. Actually, my dreams are kind of like being a doomed character in a Quentin Tarantino movie.

I'm not talking about an out of body experience. I'm not talking about where you watch you die. My dreams are always in the first person point of view. I am me. I'm inside me -- just like life.

I have had a recurring dream, for the last three years, where I am eaten alive by a cougar. Actually, being eaten alive is a pretty common plot for most of my dreams.
Anyway, the Cougar Dream goes like this:

I'm asleep in my bed. No surprise there. I have the window open because I like a cool breeze (also true when I'm awake). I roll over to face the window just in time to see two yellow eyes with huge pupils looking at me. Then it pounces. It bites my neck before I have a chance to sit up. I watch as my blood drips out onto my mattress. I burn as it bites down harder and starts to shake me. In my peripheral vision I see a chunk of my flesh hanging down.

The next thing is something out of Animal Planet. The big cat drags me from my bed, out my window, and up into a tree. At this point, I'm dead. However, as a dead person I watch as it chews on one of my legs. Pulling off chunks of muscle and eating it. The hungry, hungry lion. Then when it jumps out of the tree, I watch the sun come up and I feel my dead body start to bake.



That's when I wake up. My heart isn't even racing when I wake up because I've had that dream so many times I know how it ends. Actually, about the time I see the yellow eyes the Supreme thinking part of my brain, the part that knows this is a dream sarcastically quips, "Oh great! A rerun!"

I've chalked this one up to too much Animal Planet before bed. Just as I've chalked up the alligator one--don't get me started on the alligator one!

Just for fun... here's a list (of what I can remember) of all the ways I have died in my dream

• Eaten alive by cougar/mountain lion
• Eaten alive by alligator
• Trampled by Hippo
• Brown Recluse Spider crawls in my mouth, bites me and my neck rots away
• Brown Recluse Spider bites me in the chest and my heart and lungs rot away
• I'm covered in Black Widow Spiders and they all bite me at the same time. I convulse and die. They eat me.
• Shot in the head
• Run over by a train
• Car Accident
• Car Accident with train
  
• Boiled alive in a hot tub with the cover on (like a lobster in a pot)
  
• Drowned--six different ways
• Covered in a cocoon by moths (like in the Wilford Brimley movie). I do not change into a butterfly or stay young.
• Burned in Fire--four different ways
• Suffocated--seven different ways (including buried alive)