Stephen King would have been jealous

In spite of the icon (which is a picture of one of the two clematis vines in my backyard), I have had a horrific vine phobia all my life. Part of it is because I'm allergic to ivy (no, regular ivy, not just poison ivy), and part of it is because when I was a teenager, we had an ivy shoot get under the siding of our house and come out inside through one of the electric sockets. It only grew six inches, and it died almost immediately, but for some reason it really, really bothered me.

And it's not just ivy. We used to have a wisteria vine (at the same house) that liked to take shingles off the roof, and wound itself so tightly into our porch swing that it was impossible to swing it.

And when I drove cross-country a few years ago, I shuddered my way across the South because of the kudzu (kind of hard not to get plenty of views of kudzu when you're driving across the South), which I swear was trying to grow across the highways so it could trip the cars up and swallow them whole.

I don't mind annual vines like morning glories, because, well, there's only so far a vine can grow in one year. And I downright like clematis -- it's a well-behaved, beautiful plant that only grows about six feet long [g].

Anyway, the point of all this is that one of the highlights (so to speak) of my particular phobia all my life has been nightmares about being swaddled and strangled by vines. But I hadn't had one for a very long time. Until last night. When I did a very theatrical jerking-straight-up-in-bed at five this morning, in the middle of a dream that while I was driving down the highway, a huge, generic vine wrapped itself around my car, inserted itself around the edge of my windshield, grew teeth, and attacked me.

Ye godlings [shudder].

I did not get back to sleep for quite some time after that.