Good Friday Freewrite

Good Afternoon Cyberspace.

I just rolled out of bed and it is an absolutely beautiful day. So, out of respect for Mother Nature gracing us with such a gorgeous occasion, I am going to write something very quickly. I'm going to do a freewrite. I'm just going to write and see what comes out. I will not edit it (save for spelling and maybe punctuation if I feel like it) so what I write is exactly what you'll read. I hope something interesting develops...

I slept in today...it's been a loooooong time since I can remember sleeping in so late. I don't know what happened...I wasn't particularly tired before I went to bed. Yet I still slept until noon. I recently read a small textbook from the '60's called "The Anatomy of Sleep." It was surprisingly interesting, especially the stages of sleep and their different effects on your sleeping body. As you may have seen in the movie 'Inception' there are four stages of sleep, the fourth being the deepest. I guess the only explanation I can give for sleeping for so long is that I fell down the proverbial staircase of sleep and landed hard in a stage 4 four slumber. That kind of sounds like what Lewis Carroll was envisioning when he wrote 'Alice in Wonderland.' I know that everyone says he must have been high on LSD or something to that effect...but why couldn't he have just dreamed it? Dreams are an entirely different reality...dreams are the only place where we are bound by no laws. I've had some pretty crazy dreams in my day (well in my night mostly I suppose) and I'm sure that you have as well. One of the dreams that sticks out most in my mind is a recurring dream I had when I was younger. First, you have to understand that I was completely obsessed with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - I had a closet full of pizza throwers, turtle vans, turtle copters and action figures...not to mention my bedspread, curtains, floormat, underwear, pajamas, etc. Anyway...so I used to always begin this dream in some dark, dank, foreboding city. Suddenly I would catch a glimpse of something green in glow of a streetlamp...and of course, I had to follow it. I would follow these fleeting glimpses of green (or shell, or headband, or whatever) until the creature I was following eventually ended up going down a manhole cover into the sewer. I would follow all the way back to the lair, at which point I would realize that I was actually chillin' with the Turtles! Of course we would order pizza, Splinter would say something profound while Donotello fiddled with some type of gadget...Raphael would sit off in the corner...Leonardo and Michealangelo (he was my favourite by far, is that why I ended up liking The Fresh Prince so much? hmmmm) would sit with me on some ratty old couch and watch the old beat up TV. And wouldn't you know that every single time April O'Neill would come on with a breaking news story - a werewolf terrorizing the city. I'm dead serious, I dreamed this over and over and over again. The Turtles would spring to life and take me along for the ride. We would pile into the Turtle Van and follow the sirens and screams right to the werewolf. We fought - but the werewolf always won. Donotello would always be the first to concede defeat with a cry something akin to "We can't beat it here, let's at least get it away from the people!" So we would taunt the werewolf and do everything we had to to get it to follow us - and we always ended up on the same hillside. This was no ordinary hill...the top of the hill was a cliff. There was a single barren tree that grew here...grew out over the abyss. Everytime, the werewolf would push us back, further and further, until we were forced to climb the tree or face being eaten by the damn wolf. I still have the image in my head of the four Ninja Turtles and I clinging to the limbs of the tree; the full orange moon dominating the night sky; holding on for dear life or until the sun rose. This was always the point that I would wake up. I know, I know...anti-climatic right? Well how do you think I feel? I still wonder what the hell happened.

Well, that went somewhere completely unexpected and weird, but I promised you I would write unedited, so there it is. I hope you enjoyed at least some part of my childhood hero nightmare and learned a very valuable lesson - don't ever get cornered by a werewolf...it sucks.

Peace and Love
The Critical Stranger

As always thoughts, comments and suggestions are encouraged and appreciated!