...and all I have to do is Dream.

Chatting with a friend this morning about dreams -- not our grand hopes and dreams -- but those that occur whilst sleeping. While I have perfect recall of my dreams - in vivid Technicolor with full details (...and honey, you were wearing your blue shirt with the white collar...), my friend has the ability to decide in advance what he'd like to dream about, and then go to it!

If only I could do that! Or at the very least program myself to not dream about spreadsheets and forecasts!

But the conversation stirred up a childhood memory for me...

I believe I was about seven and my baby sister was about three. We were staying with Granny in Ohio, and Baby Sis came skipping down to breakfast one morning and announced, over her Sugar Smacks, that she'd "had a movie" the night before while sleeping!

She described her "movie" to us in the kind of detail only a three-year-old could -- "pretty colors, and me and Lolly were playing by the pond and eating cookies..." I can clearly remember her delight -- her little green eyes dancing with joy.

Why I felt the need to ruin it for her isn't clear to me to this day. But, being the older, wiser sister, I explained the full dream phenomena to her -- emphasizing the fact that if she didn't behave during the day, snakes and alligators would be in her "movies" at night!

Imagine my excitement, when later in the evening, the entire household was awakened by my baby sister screaming in her sleep -- having nightmares about the snakes in her bed.

Oh, the power I felt!

The next day I taught her all about monsters that ate little children who mis-behaved. I don't think our family slept through the night the entire summer.

I did finally own up to my 'experiment' some years later (like when I was in college).

And I don't think I was really an evil child. But I was really smart for my age (regardless of the age) and I knew it. And thought it was fun to play "Great and Powerful Oz" with my sisters.

It's a wonder they still speak to me. Between the ages of 4 and 8, I:

-- Terrorized Baby Sis by making her 'bow to worship a wooden spoon' -- yes, imagine the worst - I had her face down on the kitchen floor while I waved the spoon and forced her to pledge eternal allegiance to it!

-- Pushed my slightly younger sister into a sharp-cornered coffee table, resulting in her getting 16 stitches in her face (up her nose and into her mouth). Later I told her friends that she had a cleft palate.

-- Hid their toys constantly -- I recall specific incidents with Mrs. Beasley and the laundry chute, and burying the sock monkey bunny rabbit she couldn't sleep without in the back yard (in a thunderstorm, no less!)

-- Talked Baby sister into seeing if she could fit into the abandoned refrigerator in the alley behind our house...she couldn't -- but the neighbor girl could -- I even got the door shut! Learned that folks really freak out about that sort of thing.

I am, to this day, the only person I know who got suspended from Kindergarten - twice. The first time involved cutting off a classmate's long braid with safety scissors (in my defense, I did warn her three times to get her nasty hair off my desk!). And the second time involved me and another child having a verbal disagreement. I won the war of the words, but ended up with 72 stitches in my head (I had the words -- he had a brick).

I don't think I landed in an ultra-strict Catholic school by accident.

And Sister Maria Deloris straightened me out BIG TIME.

But that's a blog entry for another day.