Attn: Mr. Sandman. That's DREAM. Not team.

I usually awake tireder than when I went to bed. Five hours of sleep is about my average during the week. That's plenty. As long as I don't exert myself too much in my dream life.

For the past month, I have been playing Big Brother. The people in my dreams are different than those on the show. But I am still involved in scheming and skullduggery. Now that the finale has aired, my Big Brother dreams have settled down. Fallen by the wayside. Evicted themselves right out of my head. Until next July.

Before those Big Brother dreams, I had the school dreams. I'm sure they will start up again. Many years ago, when I was a coach, and still single, I dreamed that two of my basketball players broke into my townhouse. They banged on the door until they broke it down, ran up the stairs to my bedroom, shook me awake, and demanded, "Who's starting tomorrow night?" It was quite vivid. I could have sworn they were really there. It was probably my crazy neighbor's Navy SEAL son home to visit who made all the thumping noises to start that sleepytime scenario.

Last week, I had a doozy of a dream. I wasn't doing much of anything. Just looking at a diagram. A black and white diagram printed on a fold-out, rectangular piece of paper. It was a schematic drawing of a 1950s style long canister-shaped vacuum cleaner. The schematic did not show all of the attachments. Merely a hose with a standard flat end, a handle on top of the canister, and lines with labels pointing to the main parts.

I tried to Google canister vacuum cleaners. The first image that came up was how my schematic looked. But Google showed way too many parts. And the shape of the vacuum was all wrong. Why would I have a vacuum in my dream? I surely wasn't using it. Am I meant to clean up after Mr. Sandman? Get rid of the dreams before I wake, so I feel refreshed? Or is it something more sinister?

I think, perhaps, my subconscious is trying to tell me that I suck. And I'm old.