I was asleep and dreaming the other night when my brain did something that amazed me. I was so surprised that I woke up and pondered about whether or not it could have been an accident. They say that those dreams that manage to incorporate your alarm clock, or whatever wakes you, with a full long back story can be formulated in the last second as you awake. If that's true, then we can't really be sure of the order of events that took place, but I will present them to you as I perceived them. A quick disclaimer to my loving wife: You know how sometimes, in your dreams, you're back in high school? Even though no one would ever actually want to be back in high school? Well, I was single in this dream. Also, I've never had a lucid dream and do not consciously control the events that take place.
Disclaimer to my loving friends: Very often in my dreams the characters don't represent specific people or the identities change from one scene to the next. All I can be sure about is the social relationship of the characters in this dream. It wasn't about anyone specific, I swear.
Okay, here we go.... [the curtain opens]
I'm at this party with a bunch of friends, having a particularly good time talking with a close friend and his girlfriend. My buddy leaves to go to the bathroom or get another drink or something, and his girlfriend starts flirting with me. She says, "Hey, I want to show you something!", takes my hand, and leads me into another part of the house. We come to a room that has one of those wrought iron spiral staircases (I hate those!) going up through the ceiling to another floor above. She starts to lead me up the stairs, but, before we make it up the stairs, she turns and kisses me. Even though it was only alluded to, like in a PG-13 movie, it's certain that, somehow, through the magic of dream-physics, we had sex right there on the spiral staircase. Frankly, this whole dream sounds like just about every PG-13 teen flick Hollywood has ever produced. Anyway, we return to the party, and I'm instantly beside myself with guilt. I feel terrible. How could I betray my friend in this way? What a huge mistake!
Except that, in my internal dialog, I didn't actually say "What a huge mistake!" No. The sentence that actually popped into my head at that moment, completely sincerely, was:
"Man, what a screw up!"