My Night in Complete and Utter Darkness

...I don't mean that existentially. I mean that my electricity was out for most of last night.

When I got home there were two large ComED trucks hanging out below my window and, lo and behold, no electricity in my apartment. I'm no stranger to power outages - we used to have them all the time when I was a kid living in Clarkston, Michigan - and even living in Chicago up until a year ago a power outage wouldn't have worried me at all. A year ago at least we had steam heat in the building. However, since the building switched over to electric heating, last night's lack of electricity meant a lack of heat coming from the baseboards.

And, as anyone who was in town this past Sunday can tell you, Chicago has decided to be very, very cold again.

So I spent much of last night covered in every available sheet and blanket waiting for the residual heat in my apartment to slowly but inevitably disappear.

Eventually out of boredom I drifted off to sleep. I did not sleep well, though, and kept waking up every hour or so. As a result, I had some pretty wacked-out dreams. Normally when I dream I wake up and have the immediate "wow, that was a wacked-out dream" realization and then I forget about it completely.

Today, though, I have a vivid memory of one dream fragment stuck in my mind that I call the "Sexy Baby" dream.

The "Sexy Baby" dream was kind of a documentary-style dream. The narrative was completely nonsensical, but I understood the premise to be that babies (as a species, I guess) have evolved to the point where they can persuade people to get them things by adopting a sexy facial expression. As though this were an alternative tactic to crying and throwing temper tantrums.

The premise was followed by a bunch of images of babies giving one another smolderingly sexy baby-stares, babies seducing grownups into giving them milk bottles and pacifiers. There was a baby with what appeared to be streaks of blue paint on it posed on a carpet.

I can't tell you what a sexy baby face looks like. I can only tell you that it was a grotesquely horrible and yet slightly amusing thing to see.

Needless to say, I was disturbed. I know that some people, as Freud did, believe that dreams offer insight into the workings of your subconscious. Others think that dreams are a way of synthesising everything your brain has picked up during the day. Some people think that your dreams are effected by eating Thai food before going to bed or that they can help predict the future.

But "Sexy Baby" dream? Someone tell me what the fuck that was about.

I don't know if it was during that dream or another wacked-out dream (there were at least five others that thankfully I cannot remember this morning), but everntually the power came back on. It's return was heralded by the dulcet tones of a television snow blizzard broadcast at a high volume. Apparently, I had left the TV on.

This morning, lacking adequate normal sleep, I stumbled down the icy stretch of alley behind my house towards work. I passed by thick strands of black rubber, the type they wrap around electrical wire, strewn around and looked up to see a completely new electrical box on the side of the building.

So yeah, that was my night.