Have an AWESOME Day!

When I was in high school, I used a clock radio as my alarm.  I would set it to play music which would calmly sooth me out of my nightly slumber.  Unfortunately, the noises from the outside world sometimes make their way into my dreams which could cause a lot of bizarre "plot twists".

One of my first memories of this was when I was having one of my reoccurring nightmares of being chased by Barney.  For some reason, that purple dinosaur scared the hell out of me and in my dreams he would chase me down trying to become my friend and turn me into one of his mindless minions.

Creepy stuff.  But this one morning when my alarm went off:

The strangest thing happened in my dream:

That's right, Barney stopped chasing me and we started singing together.  To this day, I still have trouble listening to Motley Crue's Home Sweet Home without a chuckle (or a shudder).

While turning a bad dream into something sort of freaky and funny was fine, I knew I had to make a change when it started to interfere with my good dreams.  When I was 17, I was madly in love with Alyssa Milano (as were many teenage boys my age at that time).

One day, that stupid radio alarm ruined it all for me:

And here comes the alarm:

That was the end of it all for me.  I have never used the radio as an alarm since.

So here we are in the present day.  Alyssa is now a distant memory and Barney no longer haunts my dreams with cruel intentions of brainwashing or duets to rock ballads.  But I am still hearing noises in my dreams.  It's usually Adler since he's still getting up several times a night to be swayed or adjusted or someone to rub his head and assure him he's not abandoned or alone in the Universe.  On one particular night recently, he was having a hard time with things.  Not sure if it was his ears or his teething or he was growing and hungry or what, but he was getting up more often than usual. 

The strange part of this night, was somewhere hidden within his pile of toys came a message I had never heard before:

It's not uncommon for toys to jump out of their restful state and come to life with one of their programmed movements or recorded messages (my friend Sean calls these "random toy encounters"), but I had never heard this one before.  I had no idea which one of Adler's toys was even making this confidence boosting comment, so I just decided that it was meant to be.  That this night (knowing it was going to be a rough one) was actually supposed to be AWESOME and I should give thanks to whatever toy it was that was making it so.

Unfortunately, as Adler continued to wake me up, my enthusiasm starting to ween as the night/morning went on:

So where am I going with all of this you may ask (or maybe you're not, but whatever).  Well, going back to my previous part about noises interrupting my dreams, it happened again with this toy.  Since I had AWESOME on my mind apparently, I had a dream about Chuck Norris (for those of you new to the internet, Google "find Chuck Norris" sometime).

In this dream, we were playing lots and lots of table hockey:

When suddenly this happened:

Strangely enough, I have yet to find which toy it was that was speaking up that night, and even stranger, it has stopped talking altogether.  But for what it's worth, I definitely did have an AWESOME day that day.

-Cheers!