Last night I had the weirdest dream. You know, I always tell myself that having anything for dinner involving hot peppers is a really bad idea if I want to have a restful sleep� and then I always forget that later.

So the dream went as follows� at least, as far as I can remember. It was a little odd and some of it not all that clear.

I was at work and there was apparently some kind of hostile takeover by a Chinese restaurant. I know, that�s ridiculous� but in the strange, surreal world where my dreams take place, it made perfect sense. It actually seemed not at all surprising, as if we�d been expecting this for some time.

We still wore the same uniforms, except the words on the label now had Oriental-styled lettering in place of the words we wear now. We had a new chef, who said that the featured item on the menu was Chinese roasted chicken. We apparently specialized in extremely fresh chicken, and kept live ones in a pen out back where the staff area used to be. Whenever someone would order chicken, the chef would go kill one himself right then and there, and any and all who chose to could go back and watch. I declined, as I grew up in a farming community and my best girlfriend in high school lived on a chicken farm. I figured I�d had plenty of occasions to witness atrocities performed upon poultry. Every other person in the store (customers and staff both) went to go watch the chef kill the chicken, except me and one of our regular customers. He looked up, shook his head and went back to reading, as if people killing chickens in the middle of a restaurant was the most natural thing in the world, and so commonplace an occurance as to be beneath his interest. Then the chef came back with a naked, headless chicken carcass in each hand, and went to the back of house to prep it.

Now, the next bit was a little more unclear to me. This woman was trying to give me a really, really big hamster. I mean, had to weigh a half a pound, it was so large. It was in one of those cages with all the tubing and tunnels� only this was a custom-made job so as to allow room for the hamster�s excessive rodent girth. I didn�t want the hamster, I have plenty of pets� but I did think the cage was pretty cool.

I�m still not sure if the woman was trying to give me the hamster because she was allergic to it or if she was afraid the chef was going to cook it.

I also recall somebody threatening to gouge my eyes out with a tomato shark. (That�s the little doohickey we use to get the stemmy-core part out of the tomatoes.)

Tomato Shark

If anything else happened after that, I don�t remember it� but isn�t that enough as it is?