A Socksy Dream

Some people sleepwalk, some people sleep-talk, and I just take things several steps further. I thought that calling someone on the phone while sleeping once might be as weird as it got, but last night I actually acted out what I was dreaming and found the evidence to prove it this morning.

First, allow me to briefly explain the dream. Apparently, there was some massacre occurring. Some opposition party was killing everyone except for people who surrendered, which people indicated by displaying a white flag. I didn't want to surrender, but I didn't want to die. The next thing I knew I was being woken up (still in a dream state) by a man with a machine gun screaming at me that I was about to die. Terrified, I told him that I had surrendered. He told me that only people who were displaying white flags were considered to have surrendered. Thinking quick, I improvised a solution: I took my white sock off my foot and waved it around to indicate surrender. I then hung it on my wall. The militant man accepted this gesture as surrender and let me live. More importantly, I got to go back to sleep.

When I woke up (for real) in the morning, I remembered having the dream, it seemed especially vivid as far as my dreams go, so I tried to determine what it was all about. As I pondered, I noticed that I was only wearing one sock. While it's not unusual for me to remove my socks during the night, it is strange to take off just one - the lack of equilibrium isn't comfortable. Did I really take off a sock when I dreamt I took off a sock?, I wondered. I looked under my sheets to see if I could find the missing sock to no avail.

I did finally find the sock, however. A few feet above where I rest my head in bed, there is a poster taped to the wall. My sock was partially tucked behind this poster with most of it left dangling. Evidently, in the night, I had actually taken my sock off and hung it up as a "white flag" in an effort to save my life. There's no way a sock could possibly accidentally end up there. I'm going to assume that there wasn't actually a man with a machine gun in my room, but it's still crazy that unconsciously through the influence of a dream, I took those actions.