Panda Dream

Last night, after my mom got off work, we watched the movie version of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, which was pretty good, but I'm glad I read the book first. This afternoon, after we take a bike ride, we plan to watch the newer A&E version of The Great Gatsby, as my mom just finished reading the book for the first time herself; I was surprised when I learned that neither my mom nor my dad had ever read the book.
I had trouble getting to sleep last night for some reason; we each got to bed around 1:00, but I stayed up a bit later to work on a melody that I was developing on the piano, which I finished this morning. I think that it will be titled "In Fiction," though I'm not sure if I want to add on anything else to it yet, so it really isn't complete. It's sort of short, so I probably will end up adding on to it. But this isn't the point: I got to bed myself around 2:00, and didn't really get to sleep until 2:40.
I dreamt that I was at my dad's house, and that our whole yard, front and back, was flooded by about five feet of cloudy water, except for the driveway and a small portion of grass that clung to the perimeter of the house. One day, as I was edging my way carefully around the side of the house to the back, I noticed that there were multiple large panda bears swimming around in the deeper water. They were like the polar bears at the exhibit in the zoo, except not as lethargic; they paddled their way forcefully through the water with great speed. After I first noticed them, I would come out to the side of the house to watch their progress through the water, and they never bothered me. Then, one day, my grandparents came to visit in the dream, and I wanted to show them the panda bears. I took them around to the side of the house and pointed out each of the four or five panda bears that were in the turbid water. "Aw, they're cute," my grandma commented, and my grandfather stood, his brow furrowed in worry, and said, "You do know that they're dangerous creatures, right?" To which I responded that they had never bothered me before, and that I never went into the water to bother them.
Suddenly, the panda bears chose to reveal their dangerous potential. The one nearest to me began to swim toward us and claw its way up the little grassy shore to our place against the house and above the water. It pawed at my bare feet, and left deep red scratches in them; then, after a second in which I thought it would retreat, it dragged me down into the water with it. My grandparents ran inside to inform my father of my predicament, and I struggled to escape the clutches of the strong panda bear. I could barely touch the bottom of the flooded area, and as I thrashed about with my numb arm trapped inside the jaw of the panda bear, I inhaled a lot of water and felt it burn my lungs. I tried to swim with my one free arm back to the shore, but was unable to make much progress due to the strength of the jaw that was clamped down on my arm. I saw my father run out of the house, panicking, with his cell phone in one hand and some rope in the other. He tossed the rope out to me and was eventually able to drag me back onto the grassy shore. Shaking, we went back inside the house and I woke up.
I suspect that I had this dream because we used to have bamboo growing in our backyard. My dad had a long and furious battle with it in his attempts to cut it down, as it grows very fast; I kept telling him that the solution would be to simply invest in a pet panda bear. After this dream, I'm not sure whether I will ever make a joke like that again.