I just dreamt that I missed my own birthday party, altho I knew that it was being planned and knew of some of the guests in attendance. But my friend Vicky was nice enough to call and tell me that it went well. There was a white-frosted homemade cake on a clear glass plate and the candle was shaped like a big, pink microscope sticking phallically straight out of it (as tho the cake were on the Petri dish portion of a 2-foot tall microscope). There was a singular flame at the eyepiece. People oohed and clapped when it was brought in the door. In my dream, while on the phone with her thanking her (she, a pharmacist in reality, was responsible for the cake), it occurred to me that I probably should’ve been there, and I felt bad and stupid for it not occurring to me to attend. She assured me that it was fine that I wasn’t there, because “You know how many people needed you not to be there because they needed to ask who you are, and what to get you? We told them, ‘Oh, you know Cindy. She’s a really nice person.’ ” I wondered only briefly who attended who weren’t even sure of who I was, but I figured that maybe other people were invited by word-of-mouth after I had seen the still-developing guest list. I started to ask whether my friends who threw this party had photos of me to show these people so they could recognize who I was, and then I laughed, feeling silly because I knew that of course they had my photos there. It was a wedding shower so of course there’d be the engagement photos of me all over the place. And then I stopped. What party is this? Shouldn’t I have been there, no matter whether it was my birthday party, my wedding shower, or my bachelorette party? I started to get offended when I realized that no one had actually called and told me when and where the party was to take place, which is why I wasn’t there. And then I woke up.

I’m not exactly sure why I’m blogging this, except that I was told to, perhaps in a “go away and stop bothering my sleep”-motivated sort of way. I’m an obedient insomniac.