Sleeping In The Park

I had another strange dream last night.

In the dream, I woke up on a bench in the park in the early morning hours. As I was trying to figure out how I had ended up asleep at the park, I noticed that I was holding the dogs lead in my right hand, but there was no sign of our dog Mercury anywhere.

It was starting to dawn on me that I had fallen asleep while taking the dog for his late night walk when my 8 year old daughter Gabby ran up to me. Apparently she had been on the walk with me, and I had fallen asleep, leaving her unprotected all night!

The strangeness of all of this ocurred to me, and I tried to make sense of how any of this could have happened. I had been tired lately, but I would never fall asleep at the park, not while having my 8 year old daughter with me and not while walking our dog. I couldn't make sense of any of it. Why would I have my daughter on the walk with me when this walk was usually well past her bedtime?

My daughter Gabby told me that she had been throwing Mercury's ball for him and he had just run off. I still puzzled over the whole thing. Why hadn't Gabby woken me up? Surely she must have been scared during the night. Why wouldn't she wake me?

Regardess of how none of this made sense, we needed to find our dog, so Gabby and I started searching for him and calling him. At the end of the park, there was a cafe, so we went inside and asked anyone there if they had seen him, but no one had. (There is not really a cafe at the end of the park, but in the dream, there was one.) We walked and walked, looking for Mercury, calling his name out loudly. Several times, people brought dogs over to us that looked like him, but on closer inspection, none of the dogs turned out to be him.

Eventually, while my dream self was still out looking for Mercury and wondering why my husband hadn't come looking for me yet, I woke up for real and felt relieved.

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