Dreams......

Insomnia is an annoying thing. You lay there trying to shut down your thoughts to sleep and only end up thinking more and more and more. One thought leads to the next and if there is a clock close by you will consult it frequently. If you are mathematically inclined you will then start to tally up the hours and minutes of sleep you are losing, then you will calculate the hours of sleep you will achieve if you fall asleep by a given time.....thus creating a vicious cycle. To top it all off when you do finally fall to sleep, you dream. Must be my last published thoughts of my childhood that have me dreaming about my childhood. I loved cream soda when I was a little girl of about seven or so. In those days any kind of soft drink was an enormous treat---very out of the ordinary. I dreamed about this one incident..... I had apparently gone to the supermarket with my dad and was helping bring in our bounty. He had purchased a six pack of cream soda just for me, so , of course I wanted to take it in and flaunt it in front of my sister and mother. Back then all soft drinks were in bottles, as cans hadn't made their appearance yet. With my hand firmly holding the cardboard container of bottles I rushed into the house, tripped on the threshold and fell face first into the mess of broken bottles and the spreading puddle of my cream soda. My first thought was to wonder how mad my mother was going to be about the mess I had just created and to wonder if any of the bottles had survived. My chin hurt, but I was unaware of any injury until my sister screamed "blood" and ran to another room. I had a piece of glass lodged in my chin. I cried that loud open-mouth wail that is so spine tingling it makes you want to slap the crier. I was actually relieved that I was injured; my mother wouldn't be that mad about the mess. She was somewhat unpredictable with her reactions to any given scenario. As I remember, she was still pretty angry about the floor, although I think my dad probably cleaned it up as well as tending to my injury. I remember that it was him cleaning the blood off my chin and discovering the bit of glass still lodged in my chin. He applied a drawing salve and a band aid and the glass worked it's way out three days later. I was as proud as a child losing a tooth. Years later, I guess I was around ten or eleven, and Palmolive dish wasing liquid had come out with the plastic bottle with the pull-up stopper. On the TV ad they would hold the bottle up and drop it to the floor proudly proclaiming the bottle to be shatter -proof and with the innovative new lid, leak-proof. Not so much, I'm afraid. I don't know why I decided to emulate the commercial for my mother. We had a very small kitchen, so I took the bottle to the dining room to put on my show. The dining room had carpet, so you would think this would have helped me, it didn't. The bottle bounced once, just like on TV, then to my horror it broke and all 48 ounces spread across the floor. I braced myself for punishment. I had made a huge mess in addition to wasting the Palmolive and I knew I was in for it. To my utter amazement she told me it was not my fault!!! She blamed the TV!!! I was safe!!! She was not happy, but told me to go outside and she cleaned it up. Carpet in a dining room is never a good idea if you have kids. This was a rental and removing the carpet was not an option. That carpet smelled very clean and would suds up if you spilled anything on it until the day we moved. Ahh, dreams of childhood......