Spiced and Stumped...

I don't have any idea what my dream was about this morning.  First off, let me tell you about my dream cycles.  They pretty much suck.  I don't dream in the middle of the night.  No...I am one of those unlucky ladies who doesn't start dreaming until around 7 AM so that, when it is time to wake up for the day, I come crashing out of a dream into the harsh light of day.  Ever done that?  It hurts.  Not in the sense of "ouch, I stubbed my toe or got a paper cut" kind of pain.  In the sense of the discomfort one feels when their bladder wakes them up in the middle of the night and they stumble and drag their incredibly drowsy body from the bed, to the bathroom and back to bed again.  So, when I wake up in the morning, it isn't gradual.  It is basically like getting up at 2 AM and staying up for the rest of the day.  It hurts and it sucks.  The only decent thing about it is that I tend to get to remember most of my dreams.

So, here was the dream I woke up from this morning.  It was weird and has me stumped.  I don't know what in God's name is in my head that conjured this craziness up.  In my dream, I went through something traumatic.  I don't recall what the trauma was.  No idea.  All I know is that it was something that caused me to have panic attacks in my dream world and, the only thing that would calm me down was pepper.  Yes...that kind of pepper.  I would eat a little bit of it in my dream and my panic would subside.  Now, I like pepper.  I don't love it and usually only cook with it maybe once or twice a week. But, I don't love it.  Don't use it on a salad or whatever most people sprinkle pepper on at the dinner table.  In fact, it was only somewhere around 2 years ago that I decided that I did like to use it in cooking.  Until then, I stayed away from it entirely.   Now that you know my background relationship with pepper, allow me to delve a little further into this weird ass dream.  Near the end of my dream, something triggered a panic attack, again...no idea what triggered it or what traumatic incident happened earlier in the dream but, I started having one.  And, upon being questioned by some people in my dream, I revealed to them that the only thing that would calm me down was some pepper.  No one would give me any.  And, I seem to recall that people in my dream had little supplies of it.  What?  Who carries around pepper wherever they go?   One guy did.  Would you believe that?  But, back to that in a moment.  The group of people that I sat down with in the midst of my panic attack implied that I was an addict.  I think one girl suggested that I was faking my panic attack.  And, none of the girls in my dream were comforting or at all helpful.  But, the guy that came up to our table said he had some pepper to spare and offered to give me some...then I woke up.

What do you make of such a crazy dream?  It is, without a doubt, one of the most bizarre dreams that I have had in my entire life.  I don't know what pepper has to do with anything.  Perhaps a good cup of coffee would be something I would understand better.  Maybe a piece of banana flavored Laffy Taffy? Even a sip of water.  But...pepper?

My unconscious mind is a mysterious place.