The exhaustion continues.

I was awakened around 4:30 a.m. by the comings and goings of our landlady and her sister, who is staying downstairs, and I never quite got back to sleep. Instead, I drifted in and out of shallow sleep and vivid dreams until I got out of bed around 8.

I was in a sort of Iron-Chef competition which took place at various locations. I remember seeing Mike and E.Bess in my dream, but I couldn't really see my competitors while I was cooking. There was an outdoor kitchen in our back yard, as well as remote locations in what looked like a school and in a Midtown high-rise. The secret ingredients I was working with were, ironically enough, pork and duck, and I had to use as much of each protein as possible. I was having particular trouble with the duck's organs, for some reason, and it was frustrating me.

While cooking in the outdoor kitchen, I was also dealing with cats - Junie was once again outdoors, as though she had never transitioned in, and she was caring for TEN tiny kittens. Four of them were black/grey tabbies with white like her; the remaining six were orange tabbies. Kali kept running out into the yard and trying to take the orange tabbies away from Junie and the other kittens, so while trying to prepare and plate my courses, I also had to retrieve the kittens that Kali had moved into the closet and return them to their mama outside.

At one point I looked down and noticed tiny snakes crawling around. One was moving toward the kittens, so I reached down to pick it up and toss it aside, but it coiled around my hand and bit me. I didn't seem to be injured, so I shook it off and kept cooking, juggling kittens, etc.

Toward the end of the dream I realized I was in the kitchen which overlooked the city, and it was dark out so I needed to get back home. I went down to the street and walked around in the rain looking for a cab to take me into Brooklyn, but the streets were fairly deserted. I wandered a bit longer, and I kept saying out loud "Why am I here? I don't understand how I got here."

And then I woke up. And looking back over this, I'm a little freaked out by how much of my reality was present in some guise in that dream.