Last night I had a dream. In the dream, I had some friends come visit us from out of town and we went to a casino to play. The night went something like this:

Slots: We were waiting for one more person to join us so we went to go play some slots. I chose an older school, pull the lever style of slots. For some reason I had a stack of CD’s from my car with me and had set them down in front of the slot machine. I kept losing and all of the sudden I realized that not only did I lose my money every time I lost, but the machine would also eat a stack of my CD’s. I kept trying to grab them before the machine did, but by the time I was done, all of my awesome mixed CD’s were gone.

Poker: We were finally joined by the last person in our group and it was off to play poker. Except for “poker” was a lot more like bingo. We had a time schedule to be in a big room to play and I told everyone we still had 30 minutes to wait before our time. We sat and chatted for a couple, but when we looked at the time, we were already 5 minutes late and missed the beginning of the game. Everyone was mad at me.

Back to slots: I didn’t (and don’t in real life) know how to play the poker game so I left to go back to the slot machines. This time I chose a different machine that wouldn’t steal my CD’s. This particular machine didn’t pay in money. You either got stickers or tokens to redeem later. I won a round and instead of just retrieving the tokens I won, I decided I was going to try to grab some of the stickers too. As I tried to maneuver my little fingers into the machine, out came casino security… 3 of them to be exact. They were yelling at me that I was stealing and needed to be punished. One of the guards looked no older than 16. He pulls out a whip that looked something like this:

And starts whipping my hand with it to teach me a lesson. Next came a lady security guard. She had giant clippers kind of like this:

She used those to pinch each of my fingers. I kept trying to pull my fingers away from her because it hurt so bad. At this point, I realized a crowd had formed around me. People were pointing and whispering about the pregnant woman who was trying to steal from the casino. I was in physical pain from the torture that was being inflicted upon me and emotional pain from the embarrassment of it all. I kept insisting to the guards that I didn’t steal anything and that I had “thought” I won the stickers too. They didn’t believe me.

Then the third guard steps in. This guy had absolutely no mercy. He pulls out his own set of clippers, and proceeds to grab my pinky. He tells me, “This will always remind you not to steal,” and goes for my nail. I suddenly realized that he was about to pull off all of my finger nails. I started crying, was able to free myself from his grasp, and turned to run away. My friends (who had just finished their poker game) were walking in my direction as I sprinted towards the parking lot sign. They quickly realized what was going on and stopped me to calm down.

I woke up crying in real life. I mean real crying, with tears and gasping breath. All of the panic and worry was still heavy on my shoulders and I couldn’t calm down for a good 5 minutes. All along I knew this was just a dream. Yet I couldn’t shake off the anxiety that I felt in the dream. It took a drink of water and a few more minutes before I was settled down enough to be able to fall back asleep.