'Tapioca!' And now, the rest of the goofy story

Lots of things change as I grow older. And older.

Bad news: I don't jog anymore. Wouldn't even think of it. Good news: My knees are in pretty good shape. At my age, you take what you can get.

For a couple of years now, I have noticed -- and so has my wife -- a change in my sleep pattern. For lots of years I would go to bed and wake up eight hours later when the alarm went off.

Now, of course, I am scourged with the Old Man's Complaint, and I have to get up at least twice during the night.

But something else has changed, too. I have started talking in my sleep. A lot. And while my talking in the dead of night is disturbing to my wife, it can't hold a candle to my shouting in my sleep.

Sometimes I shout because I am protecting someone. Can't say who, for sure, since I don't remember the gist of most dreams once I wake up. Sometimes I shout because I am being threatened. For example, my limited dream memory bank contains one scary slumberfest when I was being threatened by someone with a shotgun. A loaded shotgun.

I have done a lot of highly scientific research on the Internet and have discovered that talking and yelling in your sleep is rather common. It even has a name:

Somniloquy.

I'm not sure I feel better knowing that. But there it is.

My talking/shouting in my sleep are of little concern to me, but my outbursts are quite another story for my wife, as you can well imagine.

One night last week she woke me up to tell me I was shouting. She said I was shouting "Tapioca!" This time, I distinctly remembered details of the dream I was having, and I knew exactly why I was yelling.

Now, folks, you know that unreasonable embellishment is the spit polish of any good story, but what I'm about to tell you is exactly what happened. No revisionism for the sake of a better tale. This is what my dream was all about.

OK, there are some fuzzy bits, like why I was riding in a 1950s convertible driven by a public relations hack from Hollywood. I can't tell you his name. I only know that we had a very special passenger who had to get somewhere (fuzzy bit) in a hurry. During the course of my dream, we traveled over highways and across bridges, mostly in the countryside.

Our passenger was Lucille Ball.

Yes, that Lucille Ball. The redhead star of "I Love Lucy."

As we drove and drove and drove, never seeming to get any closer to our destination, Miss Ball -- from the back seat, hair twirling in the wind -- kept saying she was hungry. Quite frankly, the dream had lasted so long that I felt a few hunger pangs myself.

The driver and I would see a restaurant, a drive-in burger joint, a cafeteria, a roadside stand, and we would suggest to Miss Ball that we could stop to get a bite. "No, not here," she would say. "Let's go on a bit farther."

Finally, we arrived in a city and wound up in a parking lot surrounded by apartment buildings with fire escapes tracing up and down five or six floors.

Exasperated, I said to our passenger, "What, exactly, do you want to eat?"

"Tapioca," replied Miss Ball.

The driver and I looked at each other. Where in the dickens were we going to find tapioca? Even most restaurants don't have tapioca waiting to be served.

So, I yelled at the apartment buildings: "Tapioca! Does anyone have some tapioca? Please!"

Almost instantly (or as instantly as dreams go) a woman leaned out of a second-floor window holding what looked like a pudding cup. "Here's some tapioca," she said. "You can have it."

And with that she threw down the plastic cup of tapioca, which I caught. Just as I was handing it to Miss Ball -- who, by the way, was smiling for the first time since the start of our trip (fuzzy bit) -- my wife shook my shoulder and said, "Joe, you're yelling in your sleep."

"Yes, " I replied, half awake, "I had to get some tapioca for Lucille Ball."

I have no idea what my wife's immediate reaction was to that bit of information. I was already asleep again. Miss Ball had left my dream.

She had her tapioca.

I had my column for this week.

Joe Sullivan is the retired editor of the Southeast Missourian.