WILLY WONKA SHOWS US HOW IT'S DONE

Okay I had a previous post that mentioned sex, and even though I am not obsessed with sex, I am going to write about sex again. I hope you don’t mind.

I will put out the disclaimer like the one that they always read on This American Life, like: “This story does not describe the details of actual sex but it does acknowledge that sex exists in the world.”

That’s not exactly it but something like that.

Why am I up so early? It’s 5:49 now but I’ve been up since 2:30. Funny you should ask.

I just had a sex dream. It was so real. No, it was actually hyperreal. It was MORE real than very real and conscious sex.

You may imagine that this would be good but it wasn’t exactly.

It wasn’t bad either—well, not totally bad, because it’s always fun to feel real things, even bad things—but it WAS kind of like when I was pregnant and I would be all, “I cannot come to work today because I cannot possibly ride the train and smell people, like people’s hair or whatever. I DO NOT WANT TO SMELL THE SMELL OF PEOPLE, DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME? So I’ll be working from home.”

It was like that.

Here’s an aside: I have supersonic smelling powers. I was happy during my pregnancy, the pg hormones did positive things for me, but they made me smell everything SO MUCH. I get these powers when I’m really depressed too. I can practically hear the smell of things. It makes me want to jump off a bridge.

I’m pretty sure it’s a psychotic symptom as a result of the chemical disaster that can periodically be my brain.

St. Christina the Astonishing (coincidentally my confirmation saint namesake) was said to crawl up into trees to avoid the smell of people. One day she stood in a lake for three days to show God how much she loved Him. It must have worked because she became a saint. Now scholars think she was probably not that saintly, just psychotic, but sometimes that’s the way it goes with saints.

Religious fervor or insanity? It is a fine line.

Maybe less like a “line” and more like a “spectrum.”

I can’t stand when people do that, put everything on a spectrum. Note to spectrum lovers everywhere: These are pieces of candy. Candy is not crying out for a spectrum.

My sister has this too, this smelling ailment. She says people are jealous but what they don’t realize is how many things in the world smell like shit.

Sometimes when I was gone at my grandma’s as a kid, my sister would have a friend stay the night and they would sleep in our bed—yes, my sister and I shared a bed, all through high school, people did that in Michigan City, Indiana—and when I came back home from my grandma’s, I would be like, "Oh, god, did X stay the night?"

Let me tell you, my sister’s friend X smelled SO HUMAN, and not like body odor. Comparatively speaking, that would have been great. More like faint shit and stomach secretions and a pile of human hair.

It’s not just me. I mentioned this a few years ago to my sister and she was like, “Oh god, yeah, that girl did smell really weird.”

My friend Kathleen told me maybe I should join the carnival and instead of guessing weights or telling fortunes, I can tell people their smells and write them up on index cards. I think this is a great idea, and I am saving it for “retirement.” Other people have 401Ks and pensions but that's because they're boring.

Oh, another smell aside, one time when I worked at J.Crew this woman walked in and she was like this cute little waify blonde type with a pixie haircut and I was following her around and helping her, as was my job, and finally I asked her, “Hey, do you know Laura Such and Such?” And she smiles and looks at me all quizzically, like, “Yeah, she’s actually my twin sister. Why?”

And I looked at her stunned, because a) I worked with Laura at J.Crew and I had no idea that she even had a twin and b) because they truly looked nothing alike, like Laura was super curvy with dark long hair and olive skin. And I was thinking, “Uh, should I tell her why?” I decided to because I have terrible judgment and so I was like: BECAUSE YOU SMELL JUST LIKE HER.

The waif's face was ashen. She stepped back from me like I was breathing fire or had just ripped open my shirt, revealing my full-body dragon scales.

Anyway, back to sex. Usually when I have sex dreams they are with an invisible sex entity. Some faceless sexer. Like some abstraction is generating sex feelings and putting them inside my sleeping mind. Sort of like a Mystical and Majikal Secret Sex Santa.

This hypersex dream was with a real person, which, of course, makes sense, considering it seemed super real, and I don’t generally don’t have sex with abstractions in my waking life.

But I had this experience once that was rather mindblowing involving a sex dream with nobody. In fact, I’m pretty sure it was a full-on wet dream.

Can girls have wet dreams? I just checked and Alice says they can. I believe her.

The story of my life-changing dream goes:

I was just out of high school and it was summer, and I had gone up to Mackinaw (sp?) Island with my high school man at the time. The whole time I was there, I was miserable because I tend to feel encroached upon by nature and get very cranky when I am around a lot of it, and also, I have terrible allergies, so to stay alive on “The Island,” I had to take handfuls of Benadryl all week, which of course, made me so exhausted, I stayed in bed all day and slept while everybody else swam in ponds with snakes in them, and then a week later, we left.

Riding home in the car, I was sleeping in the backseat and I had the most phenomenal sex dream ever!

It started out like usual, with some kind of non-specified human or thing--like it was just happening, who or what the sex was with was not a consideration. And as I was having sex, I was floating up this tunnel. Again, logistics were not worked out--e.g., how one might float upward while having sex with nobody.

Actually, the tunnel was a little similar to that candy chamber in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Remember when Charlie and his grandpa drink that bubbly stuff but they’re not supposed to and then they start floating dangerously toward the glass ceiling with the fans waiting to cut them into shreds?

Just like that.

Except there were no ceiling fans in my dream, and, as you probably remember, in the movie Charlie and his grandpa don’t have sex while floating up the shaft of the candy chamber.

Anyway, I was floating up and up and up toward this glass ceiling and finally, there was this incredible SMASH and I smashed (painlessly) through the glass ceiling, just exploded through it—again, kind of like when Charlie and his grandpa were in the glass elevator at the end of the movie and the elevator smashes through the glass and is hurtled into the sky and floats above the city?

The sound of the smashing was really really loud, like “tinkle tinkle tinkle” but a million tinkles blasted through an amplifier, and then there was this--POOF--huge flash of white light like somebody was taking a picture with one of those old-timey cameras.

Then I woke up.

AND MY NOSE WAS BLEEDING!