I've had a horrible nightmare. First, I dreamed that my dad (only it didn't really seem to be my dad) sawed our van in half, not vertically but horizontally. Basically, he turned it into a convertible without the whole "converting" part. But what was truly frightening about it was the enormous, heavy blades he was using to do this. Enormous, heavy blades that were for a few, unwarned moments held about my and my brother Zach's heads.

Of course, on top of this, we were greatly concerned about my dad's apparent insanity -- he'd just taken the top of our only car that could carry the whole family, and we don't exactly live in Florida. I think my intense worries about having to ride in that thing in the cold and snow were ironically justified when I awoke this morning to a great deal of snow having been dumped on the ground.

The second nightmare concerned death in a more obvious sense. I was attending rituals in a tomb for a dead, newly mummified pharaoh (although it didn't appear to really be in ancient Egypt), and as the priest or whoever was in charge was droning on and on with incantations, the dead man suddenly awoke, opening his eyes and starting to sit up. The person next to the corpse pushed it back down as if forcing a child to sleep and the priest droned on, but I was horrified. The mummy stayed awake (for some reason I could see his eyes open through the bandages), and when I asked how it could possibly live through the process of mummification it told me that it wasn't really the soul that should be inhabiting that body, but a passing spirit taking up temporary residence. It seemed to have a lot of trouble breathing (perhaps due to a lack of lungs), and I asked it why. It then countered by asking, "What do you think the air is made of?" It suddenly dawned on me that the air must be full of supernatural essences, spirits looking for a body to inhabit, like this mummy. This realization seemed to make me feel vulnerable to such an invasion myself, and I began to breath in gasps like the mummy did. It tried to provide me with some metaphysical calm, but had I not awakened when I did, I probably would have started to hyperventilate.