The Problem with Peeing

What’s on my mind? Dreams. The sleeping kind - not the “If only I had a million bucks” kind.

My dreams tend to have … Dialogue! Action! Color! 

The post immediately below discusses (in a scientifically anatomical way, with diagrams ... Don’t all stampede to read it at once) the complications of peeing while camping. I find the very idea of peeing + camping unnatural. Hell, anything could come along in the wilderness of a campsite - like pee-loving bears or skunks or a whole mess of slugs.

So traumatized was I by the Pee Problem (the communal bathroom being a 984-mile hike from our tent) that we agreed our camping days were over. We’d blown our entire vacation budget on a six-night, no-refund campground reservation where we stayed just one night. Such is life. 

Home again, we snuggled into our comfy bed and fell asleep. Which was when the horror of my latest dream began unspooling. Himself wasn’t in the dream, perhaps because I feared he might propose: “Let’s go camping again, for old times’ sake.” If he’d done that (even in a dream), he’d be in traction.

In my dream, I decided to buy a fly-speck of a unit on the top floor of a 31-storey Big City apartment complex: I must have won the lottery in some previous dream I’ve forgotten.

To my shock, on the day I moved in, I discovered that a realtor was sitting at a desk where the bathroom had been when I signed the purchase agreement.

“Where’s the bathroom???” I shrieked.

“Didn’t you read the contract?” he asked. “It clearly said that as a condition of sale, we’d be removing the bathroom and replacing it with our sales office.” 

“But how can I go to the toilet?” I mewled.

“Just take the elevator to the basement. Unlock the room where we keep the dumpsters (appropriate term). You’ll find a toilet there. Here’s the key.”

“B-b-but that’s 31 storeys down!” Technically, it was 32, but who’s counting?

He shrugged. 

“Where can I shower?” 

“You agreed to the contract!” he said, airily. “Surely you have friends …”

At 3 am, when I usually rise to pee, I donned my dressing gown, rode the elevator to the basement, unlocked the dumpster room door, relieved myself, and attempted to unlock the door to return to the elevator. That’s when I learned the key to let me IN wasn’t the key to let me OUT. The realtor had neglected to give me that particular key. 

And that, dear friends, was when claustrophobia entered my dream like a bear and a skunk and a whole mess of slugs, and I began to scream. The storage room for the dumpsters, you see, looked precisely like our tent.

© Nicole Parton, 2019