I always have the weirdest, most intense dreams when I wake up for a bit in the middle of the night and then try to go back asleep. I awoke at 4 and didn’t really get back to sleep until around 6 or so. What made this dream so realistic, I think, was the fact that I was dreaming inside of the dream and then woke up.

The dream inside the dream was a full-sensory, super realistic sexual dream. I really thought I was having sex. But then I woke up into this other dream where I was in a new apartment. I was really freaked out by the sex dream and was really disoriented. I kept seeing this strange pattern,a network of black, shattered lines against bright white. It is something I could probably make in Photoshop. In the dream, I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and saw the pattern in the veins in my right eye. It was bloodshot, but just in one spot, like a blemish on my eye. Then the pattern glowed out of my chest, like there was a flashlight under my skin projecting it. It throbbed out of my forehead too. As I moved through the apartment, the pattern shone out from the dark corners. I looked out the window and tree branches against the moon formed the pattern. I went outside to get some air. I saw the pattern in the shrubs backlit by low lamps.

Back inside the apartment, I got hungry so went to check the fridge. It was loaded with food. Then I remembered that a bunch of people had been there earlier today while I was gone at work or school or whatever I did in the dream. I grabbed some pizza and began eating as I walked around the new apartment. It was actually a small house. The details of everything were so fleshed out. Two of the rooms looked like they were under construction, with piles of debris in the center. I heard something in another room, so I went to investigate. The floor was covered with mice and ants. My cats were flipping out, chasing the mice around. Three of the mice were balanced on each other’s shoulders, doing some kind of circus trick, when Kallista leapt at them, spinning in midair to grab the top one and run off with it. Moriarty was trying to swallow one whole. The scene was so incredible that I had to get a picture of it. I found my cell phone on the kitchen counter, but when I flipped it open, I realized it was someone else’s phone.

Then I remembered that I was sharing the house with someone else. The shadowy house suddenly grew light and began to populate itself with the family I was staying with. Eddie Cibrian, an actor from a movie I watched last night, walked in and began to chastize me for leaving the kitchen in such a messy state. All of his (I can’t remember the word for really fancy food) had grown a thick mold over it because I had left it out on the counter. I tried to explain that it had been the people here before and that I hadn’t had time to clean the house yet. Later I startled his wife who still wasn’t used to me living there. I kept referring to Eddie as “Russell,” his character on “Invasion.”

And that’s all I remember.