Night Sweats

Regrdless of your attitude towards planning a wedding, you will have massive moments of anxiety sometime during the planning phases. Being that this is my second trip on the merry-go-round, I thought I'd be immune. I was woefully mistaken.
During the planning for my first wedding, my main source of anxiety was my mother. A full SIX MONTHS before the wedding, she called me in a panic. "What have you done about a guest book attendant?!" I stammered out "I don't know" which is, it should be noted, the absolute WRONG answer to give my mother in any situation. She's a little...tense. And under-medicated. "WHY don't you have a guest book attendant?! The whole wedding will be RUINED if you don't get someone by SUNDOWN TODAY!" So, I called my friend Val and asked her to be my guest book attendant. That is, I asked her after my copious weeping had subsided. It never once occurred to me to say to my mom "What, my guests are gonna be too dumb to know to sign their goddamn names? Or is some dumbass going to steal the thing?" When Mom panicks, all you can do is go along with her and silently pray that New London, Minnesota starts to lace its drinking water with Thorazine. I won't even go into the argument we had about what was on our registry. Suffice it to say that the telephone conversation after that debacle ended with the immortal phrase, "You think this wedding is about YOU, Amy? This wedding is NOT FOR YOU! IT IS NOT YOUR DAY!"
This time around, Mom is largely silent and stress-free. This time, my own damn subconscious is the problem. The venue and dress were cakewalks, each coming in so far under our cost estimates that I began to get a little giddy. Then the nightmares started. One night, I dreamed that I was at the venue, waiting to walk down the aisle, when I realized I didn't have a bouquet. I frantically looked around for something that would pass as a bouquet and saw some wildflowers growing IN the restaurant (isn't that a health code violation?) and gathered a handful. Some faceless killjoy then told me that they looked stupid, so I threw them away and desperately searched for an alternative. Another faceless someone gave me a giant paper cone filled with cottage cheese into which I stuck branches I tore from a fake ficus tree standing in the restaurant's vestibule. I remember thinking to myself "I love cottage cheese, so it's totally appropriate that I include it in my ceremony."
By that time, it was HOURS past when the ceremony was supposed to start, and I practically sprinted down the aisle. The room was empty save for my fiance...even the officiant had left. My fiance blithely said "Everyone went home. A couple of people said it was the worst wedding they'd ever been to." I believe I started to cry into my cottage cheese bouquet then. "Hey, I'm here and you're here and that's all that matters, right?" Even in nightmares, my fiance cannot help but say the right thing at the right time. I think I woke up then, heart racing and bedclothes in a knot.
The second nightmare involved picking up my wedding dress from the store. It's only a fragment of a nightmare, but I vividly recall putting it on, only to discover that there was a new chiffon overlayer that hung down from the shoulders, printed with monstrous roses in various states of decay. I looked like Bea Arthur's closet threw up on me. "Oh well," I thought, "at least I'm not carrying cottage cheese for a bouquet."