I haven’t had a non-migraine headache this bad in a very long time.

Today was a pretty chaotic and stressful day at work; not in a negatively stressful way that made me want to pull my hair out, but in a way that made me wish that things would just STOP for a moment and let me collect myself, breathe for about five minutes and then continue.

Alas, this did not happen. I ended up taking work home with me and doing that until about 30 minutes ago. Now I’m tired and I have to see the dentist at 10 a.m. tomorrow, so I’m going to call it a night now and see if I can get to sleep without having strange dreams about dying in a tidal wave like I did last night. I don’t know if it was a dream, actually. I was falling asleep… and I would start to drift off and then start thinking about standing somewhere along Fifth Avenue near 33rd Street, and imagine this HUGE wave of black water tearing up from downtown and curving up like that Hokusai print (Behind the Great Wave at Kanagawa) but deep blackish purple. And the water was speeding up towards a crowd of people and we were standing there and I was standing next to someone I knew because we decided that if we all held hands, we’d be OK. But we all died, and then I started to see it all over again and kept thinking about it over and over… which is unlike me. And I’d look up at the clock and go, “Damn… it’s 12:18 - enough with the stupid tsunami already.”

I flipped over to my other side since I thought a chance of “environment” might help me break out of this insipid thought pattern. So instead of the blackish purple tsunami, I had the blinding white avalanche that kept crashing the roof of a log cabin over my head while I was still in it. Over and over.

At some point, I turned on a CD of relaxing rainforest sounds or something and since I don’t recall dreaming about being suffocated by mounds of bat guano or having an entire forest of kapok trees crush me or a mangrove forest trip and strangle me with its roots, I think that went well.

Now, not having a degree in psychology and not being a big believer in dream interpretation (since I don’t generally remember my dreams or get enough sleep to have a meaningful dream cycle beyond dreaming I ate dinner) I won’t read too much into this, but being a student of literature, words, meanings and symbolism, I think I can hazard a guess as to what this might mean. When we feel there’s a lot going on, we might say, “the weight of the world is on my shoulders” or “things are crashing down on me” or at work, “it’s an avalanche of paperwork” etc.

I think I might be feeling a bit stressed. And that wouldn’t be crazy or bad or wrong. My boss is away, as is my co-worker, so I’ve been juggling some extra work.

So let’s see if I can do this sleep thing tonight. If nothing else, I want to go to the dentist, enjoy the pina colada flavored local anesthetic, and maybe hit up the bookstore to check out The Spiderwick Chronicles by Holly Black (a native Jersey chick - I think I may have met her back in the day when the books first came out… and I was working at the bookstore)and The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper. Those previews before Harry Potter did their jobs.