And then they all turned into fish and swam away.*

I just had a completely surreal experience.

As I mentioned, I've had a cold for a couple of days; last night, it migrated from head to chest. This, of course, FEELS like a huge relief, being so much more pleasant less vile than dizziness, drippy nose, itching on the insides of one's eyeballs. But it does mean I actually have to work on getting better. Chest colds, for me, do not always go away by themselves.

So I left work early and came home to sleep. Husband and son came home a while later - the timeline is rather fuzzy for this whole day - and darling Ian stood by my bedside, stroking my cheek gently and saying "Momma? Are you not feeling so well?" He and his friend Heather had made me a get-well card, tracing some plastic bugs with markers on a shirt cardboard. "We Hope Your Bug Goes Away."

(Hahaha! Bite that, Hallmark.)

So moved was I with tender affection (and so addled from a low-grade fever) that, when Husband tried to remove Child from my bedside, I must have stopped him. "Oh, no, honey," I must have said," I'll take him for a while. You go relax."

And then I fell asleep.

And then I woke up - was it 3 minutes later? A half-hour? Longer? I truly have no idea - I kind of blacked out.

And you know how occasionally, when you fall asleep in the daytime, you wake up not knowing...anything? What day it is, or what part of the day, or why you're in this room, or if you're supposed to be somewhere? All I know is, I woke up, tangled in dampish covers, lying on my side, with a child hopping back and forth over me. I didn't recognize him.

I could not imagine how I had fallen asleep in my calm, ordered life and woken up in someone else's, being tortured by someone else's preschooler.

Plus, he was talking, telling me a story of some sort, in a conversational tone that indicated that we'd been doing this for a while already.

I moaned.

He lay down on his side, facing me, and gazed into my eyes. Oh, right, I thought. Ian. He's mine. That's right.

"Aw, momma," he sighed. "You are not feeling very well today. You are as sick as a penguin." **

"Daddy.." I bleated pathetically. Ian took over summoning Husband, who was mortified. Turns out that he had stepped downstairs for just a second, intending to come right back and collect the kid, but sat down and...blacked out.



*This is the way all my dreams used to end.
**On an episode of Go, Diego, Go!, a show of which I mildly disapprove,[1] Alicia needed a rescue boat to come out to an iceflow and get some sick penguins. The penguins indicted they were sick by giving the tiniest, more ridiculously fakey penguin coughs imaginable. A delicate, milquetoasty penguin cough. I found this to be freakin' hysterical, and so occasionally we daintily cover our mouths with our wings and make a tasteful little penguin cough.

[1] It's not that I mind Diego that much. I just think he's horning in on Dora's gig. Respect, people. (Besides, it's not just the pengion cough - I think all the amateurish fake animal noises are ridiculous.)