I slept fitfully last night.

My dreams were filled with clogged toilets, snarling dogs and curiously large rabbits that could leap like kangaroos cranked up on steroids.

Most nights when I have weird dreams, I head to the kitchen to drink a glass of milk and eat some gingersnaps. That usually does the trick, and when I go back to bed I practically hibernate.

That didn’t happen last night.

When I dozed off after my gingersnap fix, I immediately began to have visions of plumbing problems dancing in my head.

At one point in my dream, I pulled a telephone out of the commode. Not a tiny cell phone, but one of those old timey black wall phones with a rotary dial.

What made it worse was that it was ringing. Even in the depths of the weird-dream marathon, I didn’t dare answer it.

I have a feeling that some of my dreams would have left a competent psychiatrist scratching his head.

“You say the phone was ringing? I’ll have to look that one up in the manual.”

Around 4 a.m. I awoke again. This time I dreamed that my truck was being repossessed by the finance company.

I kept trying to convince the tow truck driver that both my cars had been paid off several years ago and in fact I was debt free. But he kept popping his chewing gum as he said, “Tell it to the judge.”

This time I didn’t bother trying to sleep any more. I got up, put on some coffee to brew, and sat out on the back deck for a while looking at the sky.

The waning moon left plenty of room to see the stars in the southern sky. I found myself wishing I knew more about astronomy and the names of the constellations.

Until recently, my old rooster would begin crowing about this time of morning, but last month I was carrying gallon jugs of water to the pen and he flogged my leg with his sharp spurs.

I bled like a stuck hog, as the old saying goes. I called an old friend that has chickens and asked if he’d like a new rooster. Now Speckles the rooster lives in a different zipcode.

The lesson he never learned was, “Never spur the hand (or leg) that feeds you.”

When the coffee finished, I poured a mug and added some honey. Quietly I worked in the office filing papers and sorting magazines.

We are fairly good house keepers, but when I flipped on the lamp on the top of my desk, I realized there was a layer of dust thick enough to grow carrots.

Since I wasn’t sleeping, I might as well be dusting. All in all, it was a productive way to spend a few sleepless hours.

I really don’t want to make it a habit. So tonight, if I dream of big bunnies or hear a ringing phone in my commode, I’m gonna look for a shrink.