I have two dreams which recur in varying forms, and which have been recurring for years.

The first of these I call my Banality Dream™. My alarm clock goes off, I get out of bed, shower, dress, go to work and begin my day. Then I wake up and I live the very thing I dreamed. It's horrible. The mornings I have that dream, I have to go through this banal routine twice--once asleep and once awake. Sometimes in the dream I stop and buy a coffee. Sometimes I walk to work. Other times I get out of the shower then the scene changes and I'm at my desk in the office. But nothing special, never anything out of the ordinary. Just the drudgery of a working class stiff getting up in the morning and getting himself to his job. A very irritating dream to awake from.

The other dream has much more variation for each recurrence, but the basic premise is always the same. Again, I dream my alarm clock is sounding its alarm. I hit the snooze button. Nothing happens. I hit the off button. Nothing happens. I repeat these actions, furiously trying to hit turn off the alarm, hitting the off button over and over. I begin to get frustrated. I pick up the clock, shake it, really pound it now with my fist. Nothing. It will not turn off. So I unplug it. Amazingly, it keeps ringing. How can this be? I'm perplexed, absolutely confounded, astonished, simply shocked. How the hell can this be? I carry the unplugged clock into another room. It won't stop ringing. The frustration level in this dream in unbelievable. I often cry in this dream because I'm so frustrated by it. The circumstances change each time I have this dream. Sometimes it's really my bedroom and my alarm clock. Sometimes I'm in a hotel room. Once I was in my childhood home--after struggling with the clock for a while I carried it out to the kitchen where my parents were sitting at the counter drinking coffee. "Can you believe this?!" I asked them, holding the ringing alarm clock up. Sometimes I start to break the clock, pound it to the point of destruction, throw it against the wall, smash it to floor so it shatters into pieces. Nothing--the alarm just keeps ringing. Eventually I wake up. My real alarm clock is ringing. I turn it off and go back to sleep.

This week I had a new variation on the second dream. Instead of an alarm clock, I had a telephone receiver--a big black old fashioned receiver. It was ringing (sounded like my alarm clock). Couldn't get it to stop ringing. Try to answer it, tried to turn it off, tried to hide it under the covers of my bed. Nothing. The phone would not stop ringing, and the ring was the exact same sound of my alarm clock. I eventually awoke, and turned off my alarm.

Ladies and gentlemen, this man hates getting out of bed in the morning.