Dreams of R'lyeh

My wife sometimes talks in her sleep. Usually just a few mumbled words, but sometimes long strings of words that don't go together in any coherent fashion. The only time these statements are ever actual sentences, they're almost always some variation on "you need to wake up", even though she's the one whose asleep.  If she seems distressed I will indeed wake her up, and she always says she was having a weird dream, sometimes a nightmare. After a moment we go back to sleep and often have a good laugh about it in the morning. It's been going on for years and it's no big deal.

Last night, she says something or other that wakes me up. I'm not sure what the first statement was, as I was asleep for half of it, and what little I heard sounded like just random words in no particular order. I look over and see she's asleep, with a really serene and peaceful look on her face. I decide I'll just let it go, since she clearly wasn't having a nightmare. About thirty seconds later, still asleep, she speaks a full (but short) sentence. As she intones these words, she continues to look as though the dream that inspired her speech was relaxing and pleasant:

"I am Cthulhu."

I kid you not, that's what she said, with a big sleepy smile on her pale unconscious face. While we did indeed have a good laugh about it this morning, I find that I cannot shake the fear that either she or I might actually be a Lovecraftian protagonist who refuses to draw the obvious but mind-shattering conclusion until it is too late. To nip that fear in the bud, I assure you I'll be checking her very thoroughly for gills, tentacles and mysterious yellow glyphs as soon as she gets home from work.

So if you never hear from me again, assume I've been devoured by my wife.

If you never hear from her again, assume the whole point of us moving to Seattle a few years ago was so that she'd be closer to the Stygian depths of the sea whose sepulchral siren song nightly serenades the secret squamous stirrings of her sinister soul, and that she has gone thither to join the batrachian voices of the mirky deep once her inhuman and indescribable transformation was complete.