Try Explaining Your Way Out of That One

Confession: I talk in my sleep. Anyone who's ever shared a room ~ heck, even bed ~ with me has several stories to tell, and if it isn't cuddling up and curling myself around an unwitting sleeping partner (like Supe when we shared a bed in a motel for days before my wedding in Halifax), it's blurting out random and disturbing blips from dreams. Or moaning in my sleep from a lower bunk while at summer camp with the prissy girls from my Sunday School class. Or having full-on, seemingly one-sided conversations for minutes at a time. While these chats rarely make any sense, they do tend towards the amusing... or at least, amusingly puzzling.

So I'm not a boring bed partner. Is that SO bad?

One memorable instance was when I was pregnant in Vancouver, and dreamt we were walking across a pretty landmark bridge in Montréal. Stopping to admire the view from our picturesque standpoint on the wooden pedestrian portion of the bridge, who came strolling along but Mitsou, Québec's answer to Madonna in the late 'eighties. (She famously released some videos banned for nudity and overt sexual behaviour. In Canada, this actually does mean something, as nudity is often not edited out of regular evening television programming.) Clad in cowboy boots, an open fur coat, a cowboy hat, and nothing on underneath but a skimpy red latex bikini, she got closer to us and I stopped her, asking her for directions somewhere; we ended up having a giddily animated conversation about who knows what. She coveted my coat, I admired her confidence, and we found a million things to talk about. There was a lot of giggling involved.

And I was speaking out loud ~ in French ~ the entire time. Aside from being in a francophone place and being slightly inebriated or in class, it was perhaps the best French I think I'd ever spoken. This kind of went on for a while, and I eventually had the subconscious wherewithal to wake myself up to see if I was actually dreaming. I opened my eyes, only to see Boy laughing as he watched me with his head propped up in his hand. "Wow, you were going for like, half an hour... after you woke me up!"

"Well," I responded, "it was an awesome dream; you didn't seem to mind staring at her boobs while we chatted. And it was Mitsou! Who would turn down the opportunity to have a cool conversation with a socially-discarded Québecois sexpot, anyway?"

(In case you were wondering who this chickie is, here's her first video, done when she was eighteen years old:)




Mitsou ~ "Bye Bye, Mon Cowboy" (1988)





Anyway, this topic comes to mind afresh because just the other day, as we were showering, Boy asked if I'd had any crazy or strange dreams lately. "No, not that I can think of. Why?" I asked, soaping up. "Well," he said, "I think you said your best line ever last night. How did it go? Give me a sec, I'm going to try to remember exactly.

"Okay. I got it. You asked, 'What do you do with the oil between customers? Do you just change their condoms?'"

Whoa. Don't look at me. I have no idea. I honestly don't. And I can't be held responsible for my dreams, or I'd be in serious trouble. And Boy's still wondering what that was all about. Danged if I know. Whatever it was, it sounded mighty saucy.

And really, who can complain about saucy dreams?




(photo credit: the image of this condom-shaped hot air balloon came from this blog, and was apparently "spotted at a festival in the Dutch city of Lichtenvoorde, eastern Netherlands on July 27, 2007. The balloon, with the words 'Vrij Veilig' (Safe Sex), which organisers hope will enter the Guinness Book of Records as the world's largest condom, was commissioned by local public medical services to increase safe sex awareness." Gotta love the Dutch.)