I had a nightmare last night so frightening that I actually woke up. That hasn't happened for years, though it used to happen with disturbing regularity. The dream involved Buffy (yes, the vampire slayer) making a very bad decision, and then me and a friend (unidentified in the dream) having to go along with the coverup.

Buffy needed a strip of human skin to help heal a friend of hers, so she pretended to be a doctor and peeled a long rectangle of flesh from an overweight, middle-aged patient who had been admitted for some minor surgery. And now the patient's wife and adult son (could have been a brother, it was unclear) were demanding to know what the hell Doctor Buffy had done, since the man was now lying on a bed in a side room, looking very gory and moaning and thrashing in pain (she had not sewed up the flesh, just left it open and raw). Buffy just kept repeating that he had some fucked-up venereal disease, and that doing this had been the only way to save him, and that it was all complicated doctor stuff they wouldn't understand; her attitude was, don't blame me, your father/husband brought this on himself. But the anguished man and his family would not let it alone, and kept hanging out in Buffy's big rambling mansion. We would think they had finally bought the story, and the lying could stop (it was excruciating, lying to them, when what Buffy had done was so utterly unethical, and she just could not tell them the truth, because what she had done was so awful) then they'd come back inside to yell and complain some more. I was questioned repeatedly but I kept claiming I knew nothing, I wasn't a doctor, and I'd walk up to my guest room and pretend to pack.

But then the man's family brought him inside the house to where we were hanging out, and he looked horrible, blood and gore bulging out of his side, moaning and looking pale and sick, and his family saying, look, clearly whatever you did is not right, look at him. And I fled to my room, but then the man was lying in the bathtub there, dead, with blood all over the shower curtain. Apparently the body needed to be saved so that an autopsy could unearth whatever faux V.D. he had. And so I had to go downstairs to the basement to take a pee, where I found my mom folding clothes, and my dad's cousin had filled the bathroom sink full of dirty dishes from her hummus recipe testing. And my sister somehow happened upon the dead man's corpse, and her very loud scream woke me up.

Let the psychoanalysis begin!