Dotties and Dreams

When I was an infant, I got extremely sick with the croup. If you have ever been confident enough to watch Anne of Green Gables with someone (or by yourself), you may or may not remember when Anne saves the day by nursing back Diana's little sister from the croup while her parents were away. That painful cough/groan that she experiences sounds just as uncomfortable as it actually is. Even though I must have been only 2 or 3, I still remember parts of the experience.

Because my croup was so bad, the doctor gave me some steroids to help fight off the obvious sort of virus I had. Luckily for my parents, I was unknowingly allergic to some component of that steroid and hallucinated. For 8 hours strait. In the middle of the night.

My poor parents would take turns trying to calm me from my inexplicable fear of imaginary "dotties". What are dotties? No one knew.

I don't remember any dotties walking around but I do remember the wallpaper animals coming to life. It was like an acid trip for a 2-3 year old. This was probably partially due to the allergic reaction and my lack of sleep from the hallucinations.


Months later, as my family was doing yard work, I knelt down, pointed and said "dottie!" in my barely understandable 2-3 year old voice.

It was a toad.


Now, 19-ish years from then, I had a similar disaster.





Yesterday night, my husband and I were studying chemistry on the bed. It was late and I was pretty tired; my eyes were heavy and it was even hard to talk.
Out of nowhere, a bug fell from our ceiling and landed on our bed.


GROSS!


It was only a rolly-polly bug to everyone else but to me, it was my dottie! I hate bugs in all forms and even the bugs that people dub as "cute" such as butterflies and ladybugs freak me out. So when this potato bug decided to crawl on our ceiling and land directly by my foot, one of my worst nightmares was coming true; it was raining bugs!!





That night I had only a slightly hard time going to bed thinking that any minute, a bug would fall on my head. However, I eventually fell asleep and my troubles were over....

...or so I thought....



At about 4:45 AM, I woke up to see a huge spider dangling from the ceiling only about a foot away from my face. I sat strait up and maneuvered my body around the beast to turn on a light. When I turned around to face my dottie, it was gone!

It must have fallen on the bed, retracted back to the ceiling or landed on my head. I quickly brushed my hair about 20 times and began to look for the spider but it was nowhere in sight. I climbed back in bed and studied the ceiling some more, but as my brain was waking up, I started to think about it logically.

To me, it looked as if it was inches from my face and the size of a dinner plate. Obviously, a spider that big couldn't just scuttle off somewhere in a matter of seconds.

False alarm!


I wonder what my husband thought I was doing when I suddenly sat strait up, said, "What the f, that is so disgusting!", moved out of bed in a contortion like manner, turned on the lights to brush her hair out and go back to sleep.

Once again, my dottie had proved to be only a figure of my imagination. Nice to know some things never change.