NOT a good thing
A dream I had: I dreamed that we moved to some small little neighborhood (maybe in Dallas) that didn't really have a phone, but we had everything set up and I could get online and everything. Anyway, sort of as an extension to our IM conversation, I called Joe on the phone but it wasn't a real phone, but a phone made out of two pieces of small notepad paper stapled together and folded in half. Somehow that worked, and we could talk and everything; it was fun. However, as the kids were playing outside and I was kind of walking around talking on this portable "phone", some big creepy guy Hispanic came to the door. He asked, with unnerving preamble, whether we had seen a knife that he was missing. He seemed to stutter and stumble quite a bit. At the end, I asked him his name again, and he seemed to stumble over even that, making him suspicious. When he walked away (he claimed to be a neighbor), I ushered the kids inside and tried to lock the door. As I was locking it, though, the man came up again and I knew what he was after--robbing the house. The door fell at his feet (I don't know why it did, but it might have been a dream metaphorical thing), and he stood there and said, "Bring me your valuables." "You won't believe this," I replied, "But we really don't have many valuables. You see, we just moved here and..." My voice kind of trailed away and I looked around, catching a glimpse of my dad's laptop case on the floor nearby but knowing that i didn't want to give the robber that. I said, "The most valuable thing in the house is probably...hmmm..." and my mind drew a blank so I asked the guy naively, "What do you usually get?" He just came inside and we started going through things. At this point, I tried to yell into the phone to Joe, "You won't believe this, but we're getting robbed! Isn't it insane?!" I don't know if he heard me, though, because the "phone" was a little crumpled and wet--I'd probably been clenching my sweaty fists out of fear. Then somehow we ended up in a back bedroom, where I emptied an old duffel bag for him, saying, "You can use it to carry the stuff you get." When I looked over at him, though, he was pulling on a red pajama top that belonged to one of my siblings. He was just a little boy, about ten years old! So I picked him up (he was heavy, a little too big to pick up) and carried him into the front room. Then my parents came home (don't know where they'd been) and I pointed him out to them, saying, "This is our thief...I mean, he's not a thief...robber...whatever." I was a little giddy from relief, I suppose. Then I tried to shout into the ruined paper phone again, but Eric replied. I don't know how I could tell it was Eric, in retrospect, but it was. The connection went dead, though, so I threw the phone away. Then it dawned on me that I'd probably not saved money by using this paper phone trick, as it probably just tapped into the nearest phone connection, so our parents would have a large bill coming. So I went back to my computer, where Joe was on and had three screen names or something, and Eric was on too. Eric had left me a long string of messages. Some of them were something like, "Such and such person (I don't remember who Eric mentioned in the dream) called Joe and made him cry; Such and such other person called Joe and made him angry; you called Joe and relieved him of solitude (or something). Thank you!" It was a really bizarre line of messages, but somehow in the dream satisfied me.

I know this isn't the type of dream that normal people have, but I suppose that's what makes in interesting. Such symbolism, such realism, such...strangeness. In any case, this dream occurred between the hours of 5 and 7 in the morning, and was followed by another dream, nearly as strange, in which I met some of my real life friends after a party they had been to, and one of them was...maimed or something. I asked him, "Que paso?" but he retreated into the bathroom. I think at this point I finally woke up. Let this be a lesson to you: no matter how much you are tempted, don't get up at 3 O'Clock and get online---it will only cause an anomaly in your sleep pattern which may have side-effects of nausea, shortness of breath, and exceedingly bizarre dreams.