I had a horrible dream the other night and that’s weird. It’s weird because I rarely remember my dreams and when I do, they’re usually about school or odd pairings of people. Feel free to refresh your memory here. I don’t have action dreams where I’m a superhero or a commando chick (although that would be cool and terribly cathartic). Nor do I have scary dreams and that’s good since I’m a wuss.

This was a dream about bugs. Really it was a nightmare. Yeah. Lucky me. I abhor bugs and insects and get quite irrational about them. One time when I was a kid, I decided to sleep on the deck of the cottage my parents had rented in Guerneville, up by the Russian River in Sonoma County. Before I could even get my sleeping bag down, I spotted the banana slugs slinking their way up through the wooden slats. I was back in the cottage before you could say “Ariolimax californicus”. (That’s what banana slugs call themselves on dating sites to fool other lonely creepy crawlers into not knowing that they’re disgusting slugs.)

Anyway, back to my nightmare. All I remember was that I came back home to find my bedroom wall covered with tiny black bugs. Some flew, some just crawled. For some stupid reason, I decided to not run screaming like a girl but to confront them. (Maybe I was trying to be a superhero after all.) What impressive weapon did I use? Tear gas? Water cannon? My Smith & Wesson 9mm? No. I whipped out the bug zapper. That’s right, boys and girls. I was going to electrocute the little buggers with this:

I’ll admit that it is kind of fun to zap an annoying bug and hear it go, snap, crackle, pop. And I do enjoy exclaiming, “Die, you little bastard, die!” when I nail one. Nevertheless, the bug zapper was highly ineffective upon thousands of bugs. In fact, it seemed that the electrocution of their little bug buddies just pissed the rest of them off. All of a sudden they began to turn on me and soon I was covered by buzzing, biting, belligerent bugs. It was horrible.

Thankfully, I woke up before I was the featured course at the all-you-can-eat Bug Buffet. After calming down and carefully looking behind me to make sure my bedroom wall was bug-free, I did what I always do when I want an answer to something. I looked for symbolism and this was the general consensus of what I found:

What’s Bugging You?: Bugs and insects can symbolize irritation. Is someone or something irritating me? With the emotional and physical roller coaster of a year that I’ve had, I’d say that irritated is an apt description of my general state of being most of the time. Yup. I’m a laugh riot, people.

Sometimes a Bug is Just a Bug: In other words, since I hate them so, that discomfort could have invaded my dream state. I do partially blame an episode of Ghosthunters I watched before going to sleep. The team had made a trip to Hawaii to investigate some old plantations and they came across a moth that was the size of a dinner plate. It’s called the “Black Witch Moth” and it’s one of the main reasons why I’ll never go to Hawaii or anywhere tropical.

See my point?

It’s bad enough that in our waking lives, disgusting creatures appear on the scene and creep us out. (Be they bugs or candidates for political office.) Is no space sacred? Why can’t our dream lives be full of fun, adventure, and romance? And if we can’t have that, could we get something more effective than a damn bug zapper? Is that too much to ask?