Recently, when I wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom or tell the dog to stop whining or to discover that the cats have stolen all the covers, I have a clearly formed thought in my head.
Last night, I got up to go to the bathroom and I don’t remember what I was dreaming right before I got up, but there in my mind was this thought: "And that’s why we don’t put mustard on Steve."
What the fuck?
They’re all like that. These weird little resolution-thoughts right before I wake up. "And so I never did get to Europe." "That’s how come no one in your family eats blackbird pie."
Am I being visited in the night by a ghosts who tells preposterous stories? If so, why can I only remember the ending of them? Or am I telling myself stories I don’t remember as I sleep? Or do certain dreams have structure and I’ve just been having the "stories get resolved" dream over and over again?
I don’t know. It’s strange.
Tiny Cat Pants 
Ha, those are some good ones! Now I want to know why we don’t put mustard on Steve. I would definitely save them, perhaps they are lines that will be in your book someday.
"And that’s why we don’t put mustard on Steve"! That is awesome! The way I see it, the only plausible explanation is that your dream-self is a writer of nonsensical, didactic children’s book.To contribute with my own personal experience, (although this is not exactly in the category of story-resolution-thoughts): The other morning when I woke up, the only thing I remembered from my dream was yelling at somebody: "I want you to leave! Why? Because your singing attracts poultry, that’s why!" /marie (who loves this blog, by the way!)
My sleep-self is always trying to see shapes in the clouds that pass through my brain at night. Someone explained it to me in this way: the brain has a lot of deleted or irrelevant stuff that builds up during the day (sort of like a data dump). As we empty our byte bucket at night, our rational conciousness still attempts to craft narratives out of these incoherentdetails. When the juxtapositions are particularly interesting, troubling, or useful to your waking self, you might remember them. Likewise, when you awake midstream, you might hang on to the images that present themselves.
My husband leaves out that intermediate waking up step. He is a sleeptalker. He once woke me out of a sound sleep of my own, saying "I will eradicate you, you reprehensible feline." This would, of course, have been a perfectly sensible thing for him to say (though a strange way to say it) if we had a cat. But we don’t.
Truly, with lines as awesome as, "And that’s why we don’t put mustard on Steve!", I don’t think you need anything else.Just state them firmly as deeply profound truths, and let everyone else make sense of them for themselves :)
My mom is also a sleeptalker, which is unsettling when one is driving a long distance with her and she nods off and continues to talk. I know she’s phased out when she starts muttering something along "I suppose I’m the one who will have to feed the goddamn tigers. Again." The first time it happened, however, I thought she was skipping a groove.
And that’s why we don’t put mustard on your mother, Bridgett. We don’t want the goddamn tigers to lick her to death when she feeds them.
Never…ever, question *my* mental status again.:p
you are waking just quickly enough to glimpse the tail of the dream lizard as he scurries away. Honest
Do you watch TV as you fall asleep?
Maybe Steve knows the woman in this video:http://youtube.com/watch?v=udLiiJFLL4g(Starts at 1:06)