I woke up last night in the wee hours. If you are wondering why people refer to the hours between midnight and 5 a.m. as "the wee hours," well, then, you are obviously not over the age of 40. At any rate, before I embarked on my nightly task of staying awake until five minutes before the alarm clock's drone, I thought: Be sure to remember at least this part of the dream you just interrupted, because it is hilarious.

In my dream, I was walking along a highway and came upon one of those official historical marker signs with the words: "Nicolas Cage, 7 miles."

All right, so this is not exactly hilarious. But that is the way it is with dream recollections. In the middle of the night, you always think your dream is astoundingly funny, frightening or prophetic; furthermore you can't wait to tell someone about it. When you wake and recount your dream to the dawn's first poor unwitting victim, it turns out to be just an odd, pointless story that is so tedious it could, ironically, induce slumber.

Fear not: You will not be subjected to a tiresome litany of incongruous dream scenes here. Instead, you will be participating in an official test of the Janet's World Dream Institute, wherein our scientists -- provided they have had enough coffee -- measure whether columns about dreams are as boring as the live retelling of them. So let us get on with my Nicolas Cage dream.

But first, this just in: The Janet's World Dream Institute researchers have confirmed the worst dream-retellers are children younger than age 5.They leave every detail in, and what's more, they sometimes forget where they are in the middle of telling you their dream, testing your listening skills.

Here is an excerpt from a typical preschooler's dream, if you can stand it:

"And then the giant rabbit -- the one that was rolling down the hill, not the yellow one or the old one who kept singing 'Happy Birthday' -- well, he had these really big lips that were really soft, and I know because he was nibbling my arm but it didn't really hurt. And guess what? He was made out of the cushions from that couch we used to have before we got this one. Remember that smushy couch? It was mostly green, and you wouldn't let us eat popcorn on it. So where was I?"

It's anyone's guess in dreamland, where everything absurd makes perfect sense. In my dream, it seemed entirely plausible that there would be helpful signage to indicate my proximity to Nicolas Cage. And I do like Nicolas Cage, in the weird superficial way that we are all permitted to like celebrities we really don't know at all, such as Oprah Winfrey and Paula Deen and Michael Jackson before he became so peculiar, like a character in a dream.

Which brings me conveniently back to this week's subject. Unfortunately -- or thankfully -- the signage is all I can remember now of the Nicolas Cage dream. I might have remembered more in the wee hours, had I not been actively engaged in such productive tasks as reflecting on my day and wondering whether I should have said something when I didn't or should have not said something when I did.

I remember being vaguely disappointed that I didn't reach Nicolas Cage. But then it occurred to me that it was probably for the best. It would have been a disappointment to finish the seven-mile trek only to find someone preposterous in his place -- perhaps my enthusiastic fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Stephens, standing at the blackboard identifying the divisor, dividend and quotient over and over and over.

Wake up! This concludes our test of the emergency dream rebroadcast system. Feel free to send me your dreams. I promise to read them the next time I have trouble falling asleep in the wee hours.

Contact Janet at janet@janetgilbert.net.