Revenge of the neon echiladas

Have you ever had a weird dream? You know, the kind that doesn’t even make sense to you while you are dreaming it. A lot of dreams make perfect sense while you’re passed out in bed or on the sofa, but I’m talking about the kind of dream that leaves you wondering, “What the heck?” while you are still asleep.

That’s what I had last night. I’m going to blame it on what I ate for supper. We had our employee dinner last night, the evening before campus is once again covered by students crawling around the grounds and throughout the buildings trying to get set up for a new semester. This dinner, of course, was sponsored by the company that is contracted to provide our cafeteria services – meaning we had cafeteria food.

We had an international flair theme for the dinner to go along with our “passport to success” development days earlier in the week. The food service was to prepare a variety of dishes with a little international flair to them, which in West Texas means we had enchiladas. Of course, the cheese in my enchiladas had a slight neon glow to it and the sauce was like no enchilada sauce I had ever seen. It closely resembled mud. There were some other dishes too, such as something that resembled the beef/broccoli that you can get at the local China buffet and some chicken with a toupee.

For some reason, every time I closed my eyes last night, I was dreaming about death. It was all in a somewhat humorous light, not like a dream I had a few months ago that really freaked me out. The weirdest of these dreams, however, came to me around 4 a.m. I remember because I woke up thinking the aforementioned, “What the …..”

It took place on a harmless city street. A person (me I presume) sitting in a front yard, looking across the street in the neighborhood. Suddenly the area is covered with thousands of dead dogs who all start barking at the same time. I personally own cats because they don’t bark at the moon. We used to have one who would occasionally go into heat in the middle of the night, moaning and wailing at anything that came nearby. That was unpleasant so we had her fixed. Now she is just a little “female dog,” if you know what I mean.

Back to the dream… The dogs continued to bark until someone in the neighborhood decided to tell them to stop. So they did. Then they all disappeared. Althoug I watched as the two front legs of the dog directly across the street fell off while it was disappearing.

Next came the little old dead people who were suddenly walking around the neighborhood. This scene quickly switched to one of the little old ladies' living rooms where I watched her stand up and play the piano … something she had never done before … before falling over dead. The strangest thing was that I knew her name. I can’t remember it now because I failed to see the sense in writing it down when I woke up at 4 a.m.

Then came the weird part. Back in the yard, looking across the street at the same sidewalk where I had just watched thousands of dead dogs disappear, I saw none other than Michael Jackson break dancing with The Cat in the Hat.

“What the …… “