Before I begin, please note that I have no plans to turn this into some kind of "dream blog" or anything; this is probably a one-time occurrence.
In the first dream, I was a Democratic presidental candidate. My campaign was in a good position; I had a killer blog and a hot wife (none of the candidates have particularly attractive wives, so no hyperlinks). I was also firmly in the election, but not the frontrunner.
One interesting thing about the dream was that I was certain that I was going to win both the primary and the general election. This makes me wonder whether the optimism of the candidates who are not at all likely to win is genuine. I am not sure whether that would be a good thing, or whether it makes them all the more pathetic.
The second dream was a hodge-podge of high school newspaper politics, a late-night convenience store (the scariest part of the dream was when I exited the store, which was fully lit and crowded with people, only to turn around and find it was dark and empty), my high school English teacher who looks like Christopher Walken whom I should have already emailed, the legality of homosexuality, and police brutality.
When I woke up, I immediately saw a round black shape on my pillow near my head. Having had an earlier experience waking up to a cricket (of course, the dream immediately preceding that event was about giant killer insects), I immediately jumped out of bed and looked for a flashlight. I could not find one, so I had to open one of my bags, pull out my penlight and put batteries into it.
After all this time, the "thing" had not moved. I flashed the beam of the penlight on it. It was obviously a ball of string (how it got onto my pillow is anyone's guess), but one of the pieces looked a bit like an antenna, which supports the original "dead cockroach" theory.