What do you know; I'm writing this on the following day. Perhaps something like consistency is going to sneak in on me here…
I remember two dreams from last night. In the first we (myself, some friend, some unknown woman, and that girl from school who I'll call Alice, because it's a nice name that begins with A) were in some sort of store -- I don't remember why -- doing something. There was some sort of accident and my friend (let's call him Jim) and Alice were disfigured by it. The other woman (uh, how about Sue?) was some sort of surgeon and was going to fix them. She fixed Jim and then pronounced Alice's disfigurement too ugly to live. We all argued against that but she refused to operate. Eventually we found she was involved in some plot to kill Alice; the place was going to blow up (Sue may have set that up as well; I don't remember) and she had Alice cooking something on the stove in the back room (She was a cook or something like that). With the gas stove making all the noise (?), Alice couldn't hear the place burning down around her. I was the only one who knew about her plot, but we still all ran out of the store like mad to avoid the explosion. Then of course, being the hero of the story (why not? It's my dream) I ran back in and got Alice. She was really burned up from the heat of the stove (why she didn't notice that and get out I don't know) and so was even more disfigured when she got out. Mainly she just had all sorts of blood vessels showing through her skin and was swollen all over. That led to the corny let's-lighten-things-up-at-the-end-of-the-episode comment from Jim that "They plump when you cook 'em." For some reason we all laughed. How odd.
At this point my alarm went off, and I shut it off. Still feeling sleepy, and knowing that I had four hours until my first obligation, I went back to bed to see if I could finish the thing.
Instead I got a different dream. I and some other student (for simplicity, let's make him Jim) were headed to one of my professors' house for the evening. When we got there we were to watch a movie or something. His entertainment center (or whatever it is one calls that set of shelves and cabinets which stores the television) was set in the northern side of a fairly large rectangular room that served as both family room and kitchen. The sink and countertops were on the southern side; the sink itself and a stovetop were in the western corner. We watched a movie, and then played some video games. However, the console wasn't working properly; we thought there was some sort of malfunction. We checked around and found that there was an oven and stove in the same cabinet, and that there was a pot inside the oven (on a burner; I suppose my mind got a little confused on the conceptualized unity of the appliance). One of the burners was red-hot and the pot was empty. I touched the pot to see if its burner was on, and it was very hot; I received a light burn on my right pinky and ring finger. The dream professor suddenly became some sort of bumbling idiot character; he touched the red-hot burner to see if it was on, and of course received a rather nasty burn for his curiosity. I went to the cabinets, drew out a rag, wet it, and wrapped it around my own mild burn as I walked across the room to give it to him.
Later Jim and I were looking outside at the beautiful snow covered backyard. The professor came up behind us and pointed out the giant squirrels. He and his wife adopted them, he explained. Something about being shanghaied into the war in Africa and then forgotten, or something. I suppose this was my mind's way of explaining how they had become so large. I remember his commenting on it as well, saying something like "Golly! -- that's something!" One was wearing sneakers and a sweatshirt that I somehow understood to be his wife's old discards.
We decided to go outside to see them. Somehow Jim disappears around here. Also the giant squirrels turn to bears. Yes, my professor has a family of bears living around his backyard. We went out to see them for a while, and then the professor announced that he was getting cold and went inside. I watched him go, and a bear tried to follow him in. His attempts to get inside and close the door without the bear following him were very much like the way one acts around a dog in the same situation. After he got in I decided that I should head in as well, and went through similar antics. It was then that I noticed the back-door neighbors watching us in laughter; apparently the troubles we had with this bear were very funny. I was a bit insulted by their laughter (thinking, I suppose, that they were laughing at some perceived fear of the bear) and went outside again. I sat on the deck and waited around while a small cub left its mother (who was a short distance from the deck) approached me curiously. When it reached me, it bit my left arm; it wanted to play -- I have no idea whether bear cubs really play like this, but I know that dogs do, and this bear obviously had similar intentions. I, however, did not like the idea of playing let's-try-to-pin-each-other with a young bear, and, following my pattern of behavior with dogs, I growled at it to signal my disapproval. The mother bear did not like my attitude toward her cub. As the mother bear approached me, time froze (rather nice of the dream-mind to do that for me) as I pondered the stupidity of growling at a bear cub whose mother is nearby. At this point I woke up, and decided that I was no longer sleepy enough to justify to myself another foray.