After a very early start and a full-throttle, pedal to the medal kind of day, I was up till after midnight last night scanning 150 pages worth of dead tree back to our finance company in the States. So I hoped that when I finally crawled into bed and curled up next to the hubby, it would be a deep and dreamless sleep kinda night. I should have known better. I don’t know the last time my brain just shut off and let me sleep peacefully through the night; Alice’s Wonderland’s got nothing on the wackiness between my ears when the lights go out. If the tendency toward crazy, colorful dreams is genetic, I blame my grandfather–my mom says he was always recounting screwball tales conjured in the wee hours by his supposedly sleeping brain.

Last night I dreamt of puffer fish. Dozens of them. I was standing shin-deep in the clear waters of a shallow ocean cove. A few yards out, the sandy sea floor dropped off sharply, but that did not cause any waves to break as they rolled in…the surface just undulated gently. Puffer fish rode the currents from deeper waters into the cove, and when they reached the shelf on the sea floor, they rolled over onto their backs and drifted upside down, barely fluttering their pectoral fins to maintain a course that would bring them within my reach. Whenever one was near enough to touch, I leaned down and stroked its belly, just once from chin to tail, before it righted itself, grinned at me appreciatively, and swam back out to the deep. I repeated this over and over, as the fish ignored the other waders in the cove and headed only for me, like I was some kind of fish whisperer.

Needless to say, I’ve been thinking about puffer fish all day today, so I finally broke down and Googled their meaning on a dream interpretation website. In someone’s expert opinion, “To see a puffer fish in your dream signifies suppressed or unexpressed anger. You are holding something in that is on the verge of erupting at any moment. Alternatively, the dream indicates that others tend to underestimate your abilities or misjudge you.”

If anger is going to erupt at any moment, it’s going to be a surprise to me as much as anyone else. I am not currently aware of being angry at any person or situation, much less suppressing a boiling cauldron of wrath. Sure, I have a peevish moment every now and again, but it takes a lot to make me truly angry, angry enough that I’d summon an army of puffer fish. As to the other interpretation, it wouldn’t surprise me if people underestimate me, especially if they don’t know me well. But again, I’m not aware of anyone misjudging me or my abilities recently, and even if they had, I don’t feel like it would have troubled me enough for my subconscious to rally a school of puffers. Besides, the fish in my dream were all as laid-back as the Hawaiian one in my photo…not a single one of them was “puffed” and ready for battle. It seems that the so-called experts may have gotten this one wrong; I think I’ll just chalk it up to weird family genes. Thanks, Granddad!