Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Time to Wake the Donuts

I had a nightmare this morning. I had woken up early, still dark out, and fell back asleep. In my dream that followed, I saw a man in a white uniform entering my home through a window and slowly walking towards me. I never saw his face but felt a menace trying to reach me. I tried to yell, but couldn’t, which is common in some of my scarier dreams. I soon found that I could let out a stifled yell, but nothing intelligible or that would alert someone to help me. This was good practice for taking control of the nightmare rather than fighting or fleeing; after a few muffled cries, I woke up. As I returned to consciousness, I realized that I was yelling in reality, in bed. My wife was on a trip so nobody had woken me up. I don’t often have nightmares that manifest themselves physically.

My yelling probably disturbed the neighbors. I could hear the woman upstairs thumping around at 6:20 AM (a usual practice for an unusual time, for her). The shutters from the next-door apartment were noisily opened. Well, it serves them right: the scary man in my dream may have been a metaphor for all the noise my neighbors made two nights ago at around 10:30 PM when I was trying to get to sleep. Drilling, moving furniture, a weird repetitive warble that sounded like a bird squawking on TV… I needed earplugs. So maybe my brain this morning was subconsciously taking revenge on their noise pollution via “Mr. White Noise” invading my space in my nightmare, forcing me to yell enough to wake them up. Maybe the neighbors didn’t hear me at all, I don’t know for sure, but it was a strange way to wake up today.

The title of this post was inspired by the classic 1980's Dunkin’ Donuts commercials featuring a worker obsessed with the round-the-clock cycle of “time to make the doughnuts”. I was reminded of these television ads by a conversation over BBQ dinner at a friend’s house yesterday. It’s almost time for sufganiot! One person had planned her trip abroad around eating different doughnut varieties and returning to Israel in time for Chanukah’s tasty treats.

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