Lame Little Nightmares

If we were to rank the community’s least favorite products, microfiber sheets would probably come in third after politically dubious coffee and supplements that claim to help your liver. We get it. All things being equal, nobody’s choosing microfiber over cotton. And, as @spatialdrift points out:

Finding cotton isn’t THAT difficult, Meh.

Which is fair. But you have to remember, we’re not in the business of selling things that are easy to find. We’re in the business of selling things that are difficult to get rid of. So, here’s how this will go: we’ll offer these “luxury” sheets at a cheap price, you will accuse us of crimes against humanity in the comments, and by the end of the day, enough units will have moved to justify the sale.

Or… we could find something else to talk about?

My proposal is vaguely related to bedding and, in turn, sleep: our mundane nightmares. By which I mean those weird little dreams you often have where the stakes are low yet terrifying. No killers on the loose, no monsters under the bed, but you look down and realize you’re not wearing any shoes as you walk through the mud and think, with outsized dread, “My boss isn’t gonna like this.” Or something like that.

Here are my top three, in descending order:

3. Slipping

There’s no real situation at play. It might not even qualify for the designation of ‘dream.’ Still, it’s upsetting. Here’s how it goes: I’m in that liminal space between wakefulness and sleep, and out of nowhere, I experience the sensation like I slipped and am falling for a moment before jerking awake, perplexed and uneasy.

2. Forgotten class

This one isn’t unique. I know many people who suffer from some version of it. The gist: I’m in school (maybe high school, maybe college) and realize that there’s a class I haven’t been attending all semester that I’m almost certainly failing/going to fail. What’s odd is that the intensity of these dreams hasn’t diminished as I get older. If anything, there’s something about the dim knowledge that I’m too old to be there that makes the idea of prolonging my schooling all the more stressful. (And yes, this was what inspired the write-ups for the back-to-school Meh-ration last week.)

1. Dental trauma

By far my least favorite dreams are the ones in which a tooth breaks off. Making matters worse, the dream rarely foreshadows the impending loss. It’ll seem like just another mundane dream, but then one of my canines will crack loose. Making matters even worse than that, these dreams have the longest recovery time. When I wake, I often spend whole minutes checking and double-checking that all my chompers are, in fact, still in place before the tension releases.

Those are mine. Now, you share your mundane nightmares in the comments. And don’t you dare say, “microfiber sheets.”