just had a bizarre dream involving a lot of weirdness that’s hard to even express in the language of waking life because the way everything seemed to work kept changing so much from one moment to another and none of it was ever quite how anything works IRL

but the one part I can clearly describe was that I had a bucket full of my favorite quick hunger-satisfying no-time-for-real-food eat-at-my-desk-at-work trail mix (goldfish crackers plus chocolate chips plus M&Ms)

and a creature that appeared to be a large bloodsucking leech.

on a leash. A leech on a leash.

At least, for part of the scene it was being held back by some sort of string or cord that was fastened to it in some way

And it was pulling at that leash, diving deep into the bucket of trail mix and clearly seeking out specific ingredients in it

And at least once, I pulled it out for a second and found that its mouthparts were fastened so hard onto an M&M that it was like trying to vacuum the thing up with a slightly-too-small vacuum cleaner attachment

Which, in the dream, made some sense to me. Because it occurred to me that the leech’s natural diet is blood, which is high in iron, and chocolate can also be fairly high in iron, which I’ve always suspected is part of why it’s a common menstrual craving (makes sense to want iron-rich snacks to make up for lost blood)

So I woke up with some confused thoughts in my head about vampires discovering that chocolate can substitute for blood if you’re desperate…

and then, at some point, the connections fell into place and my pattern recognizer went “Count Chocula backstory”