This may sound odd…but I haven’t had a memorable dream in over a year. I often have trouble falling asleep, but when I do I pass out, never a dream to be had. I actually have a theory that I don’t dream because I don’t have the time to read the fiction that I love anymore, it’s all less interesting things for classes. So perhaps that is why I no longer have dreams, good or bad.

However, there is one dream from my childhood that I can never forget.

It went like this, I attended a babysitter for a good portion of my childhood, five days a week, from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m. One night I had a dream that there was not only a tornado ravaging in my babysitters back yard, but a Tyrannosaurus Rex rummaging around as well. My babysitter lived on a cow farm, with a huge back yard with a trampoline to the left, and an old swing set toward the back, near a giant oak tree. Where the worn grass ended a rock driveway began and an assortment of barns lined the road. Although us children weren’t allowed to leave the grass, the back yard was essentially, huge.

So what I remember from this dream was that I was at my babysitters, and I was on her screened-in sun porch. There were dark ominous clouds surrounding the farm and in the far back beyond where we were allowed to play a tornado was spinning around and around beyond the grass. I don’t remember any objects being hurled through the air, which is what happens in reality, I just remember the wind and the darkness.

Then the T-Rex shows up. It was a mix between the terrifying creature found in the old Walt-Disney movie “Dinosaur” and Reptar from the nickelodeon show Rugrats. I have no idea how these two images meshed together, but a horrifying creature they created. And the T-Rex and the tornado just spun and pillaged around the back yard, beyond what I could directly see, but they were huge, much bigger than the barns.

I stood on the porch in a trance, fixated on the ginormous objects until I was suddenly startled by my babysitter yelling at me to run into the basement, she obviously didn’t notice the dinosaur in the back yard and was only concerned with the storm. So run into the basement I did, and that’s all I remember.