the kinds of dreams you have when you're sleeping in somebody else's bed

i am housesitting for two friends i see almost every week so it feels both strange & not strange at all to be using their shower, cooking with their pans, playing their piano, sleeping in their bed.  while i sometimes forget where i am as i go about daily activities, at night i am all too aware.  i had one dream where i was attempting to rearrange furniture, another where we had permanently traded beds, and a third where i struggled to cook an egg, cracking it directly onto the burner of the stove rather than into the pan which sat a few inches away.  in this last dream, my friend charlie flawlessly cooked an omelette right next to me as i made the unconscionable gaffe.  

in general, my dreams are far more likely to err on the side of domestic, laborious, believable, etc. than fantastic.  i often dream i am at work writing emails and answering questions or at home struggling with large loads of laundry.  these dreams are far more nightmarish & exhausting than ones where i'm falling off a cliff or committing a great crime, since they extend the monotony of my day into my precious hours of sleep.  that said, they have nothing on the ones where i'm fighting with an ex or being emotionally destroyed by my mother.  

my favorite type of dream is one where i've created an artwork i can replicate in real life, though it also falls--complicatedly--into the category of dreams that i cannot stand (which is also, unfortunately, most of the dreams i've already mentioned): dreams which play out real-life scenarios and leave me with a sense of confusion about their reality upon waking.  sleeping in someone else's bed seems to make me hyper-aware of the fact that i'm a person in a house--i fall asleep knowing i am in a room, in a bed, going to sleep, physically immersed in the spatial & sensory differences.  my dreams are then almost inevitably set inside the house, it all makes sense.  but i'm a person who cannot always determine what is real & what is not, easy to lure into a different reality & ready to live there interminably.  i wake concerned i'll be spending all day cleaning the stovetop or moving my own bed back into my house.

it's maybe a little different when you're sleeping in someone's bed with them.  you feel protected from the strangeness of the room, or understand it better.  though sometimes it's amplified.  the last person i dated was a restless sleeper and her whole bedroom seemed to absorb this energy, radiating it back into whomever inhabited the bed.  certain things, too--the bay of windows that sometimes meant we awoke naked and in perfect view of a woman in the garden, or the fact that there was a large loom in the dining room which i would bang into every time i went to the bathroom--kept me very alert of my surroundings, in spite of spending so many nights there.