Gimme a man after midnight, take me through the darkness to the break of the day.

I occasionally have "script dreams", which is essentially me playing a part in a movie or television show, and they are marked as being highly enjoyable and satisfying, even if occasionally I feel fuzzy about my exact lines. The dreams also shift between my own experiences and then me as the cinematographer/director, watching shots from the outside and doing interesting visual edits. A favorite dream from this genre several years ago involved me being in an episode of Will & Grace and we all went to the Kraft Macaroni and Cheese theme restaurant at Navy Pier.

This morning, near the end of my epic 11 hours of sleeping, I had a movie dream, starring Mary McDonnell as the mother, who is also the sister of Karen Carpenter and keeper of the family's estate, and she lives in a small town and battling developers taking over her family's house to convert them to some garish casino. I played The Outsider who comes in and isn't trusted initially but ends up proving myself as worthy and someone who helps the fight. (The dream started with mintwaster and I having a scary interaction with some creepy tall blonde CTA dude while trying to catch a bus and me preparing to move because I'd just learned the identity of my sexual assault assailant was my own partner, which is what started me off into the movie and the new town.) Mary McDonnell had a teenage son and his best friend was Jake Gyllenhaal and we slept together in the beginning of the movie when I first came to town, and then we kept it a secret because no one knew he was gay, plus he was only 19. In the middle of the movie, I busted in on the Developers while they were drunk and gave this impassioned speech about what they were doing and it involved the sentence "your time in hell has already begun and even I can feel the flames start to lick around you." I had no idea what it means, but was proud of my dramatic rendering of the screenplay. Then I found Jake and he picked me up and we started kissing and I said I was scared when I heard gunshots and that I think I loved him, and the next scene was Mary McDonnell seeing us through the crack in a door, naked in a bedroom.

I'm not even really into Jake, but the dream felt really nice. Not just sexy, but good. I would go back to bed but I woke up with a headache from sleeping so much.