Staying Cool

I had a horrible dream last night involving stabbing someone. This was not the first stabbing dream I've had, but I certainly hope it's the last.

The first part of the dream was pretty inoffensive. I was supposed to be going to something referred to as a "charity gala" (yes, really) for some organization my husband was involved with. Once again, I was trying to figure out what to wear. A coworker's husband called and just kept on talking and talking and I was getting frustrated because I couldn't figure out how to get him off the phone so I could get on with my charity gala preparations.

Then I was at resort/hotel with my husband. I think we were there for a convention of some sort (not a charity gala!). The atmosphere was kind of 1960s, which came in handy later. The hotel was on a hillside with a pool overlooking a valley. At some point we were in a sort of auditorium with very steep steps up to the exit. The auditorium was fairly empty, and I think we were among the last to leave. We suddenly found ourselves facing several young guys dressed rather snazzily, who wouldn't let us pass--not overtly threatening at first, then becoming more so.

I realized that we were in some kind of life-threatening situation and it was a matter of us or them. I'm not sure if I grasped the plot against us, but there clearly was one, and these young men were clearly its executors. One of them pulled out a knife, and I either grabbed it from him or somehow produced one of my one. *****Warning: rather graphic stabbing content***** Before I could really think about it, I plunged mine into his abdomen, and here's the worst part: I remembered that in such a situation one was to twist the knife for maximum effectiveness, so I did. It was horrible! Just the same sensation as in the other stabbing dream.

As expected, the young man crumpled to the floor, and his companions ran off, although I figured they were just going for reinforcements. My husband had also had a knife in his hand, one of those utility knives (dark red with stainless steel), and he let it drop to the floor (I don't think he had done any stabbing; maybe some light slashing, but nothing fatal). I thought it was very unwise of him to just leave the incriminating weapon like that, but didn't say anything about it. Instead I carefully wiped off my knife (a burnt-orange Swiss Army knife) on the dead guy's shirt and stashed it away in my bag.

We high-tailed it out of the auditorium and into the adjacent parking garage. We knew we couldn't take our own car and would have to steal one for our getaway. My husband said, "so which car should we take?", to which I replied, "our yellow one, of course". He nodded sagely with an admiring look at my presence of mind.

About then we realized that an even better course of action would be to fly somewhere from the airport (the airport was attached to the resort complex). Our first impulse was to fly back home. We were already at the parting gate, talking to the girl at the counter [this is where the 1960s-era vibe came in handy; there was no security to speak of--also, everyone had 1960s hair and clothes]. Of course I realized that flying back home was the stupidest course of action possible and managed to calmly intercept my husband just as he was opening his mouth to buy tickets and somehow indicate to him that we needed to go somewhere else without exciting the suspicion of the ticket-counter girl. He immediately saw my point and congratulated me for being so smart (!), and proposed that we go to Detroit instead.

So I think I woke up just as I was thinking that Detroit was a pretty smart choice, being somewhat of a modern-day Wild West. Also I thought that with the depressed economy it might be easier to start from scratch there if we ended up having to stay. And then as I was further waking up but not fully awake I moved on to strategies for changing one's appearance fast and convincingly and Staying Cool [I had resisted, in the dream, telling my husband to Stay Cool because I rejected the phrase as too hackneyed, no matter how appropriate to the situation].

oh boy (literally!)

My brain is definitely responding to my fear of having more adolescent dreams and/or dreams about young boys*. The very night after the washing-machine dream, I dreamed that I was in a church-ish setting. I think they were having church, but there were some other things going on too, garage-sale sort of things outside. There was an old wooden Middle-America church-ish building with a high porch, and the inside where the church service was actually taking place there was also a balcony in the entrance, where you could stay and look over the proceedings without committing yourself to going in and sitting down.

When I was still outside, I saw a very small boy with curly hair who appeared to be lost. I didn't see any corresponding adults around, so I thought I should try to help him find his people. As soon as I approached him he darted away and was replaced by an older boy, maybe 10 or 11, with straight dark hair.

This older boy also claimed to be lost, and although I didn't have quite the same urgent feelings of concern for him, he was still young enough that he should know where his parents were, and vice versa. So I walked around with him a little outside, and we didn't find any parents. We then went inside and stood on the balcony, and I started to get the distinct impression that he was sticking around more because he had a crush on me than anything else**. I wasn't sure what I should do, whether I should continue the [somewhat fruitless-seeming] search for his parents; whether I should just stand there and listen to him talk, thus encouraging him; or whether I should just start completely ignoring him and hope that he would go away. In the meantime I realized that he seemed older than he had outside, and that, indeed, his voice had changed from preadolescent to adolescent. This freaked me out a little.

An unrelated but interesting detail was that there were food vendors in the back of the church. Someone had converted an old chicken coop to a portable stand for selling what they called “oeufs caillés”***. They were eggs cooked somewhere between soft- and hard-boiled, in the unbroken shells, but when one got to the yolk it had been transformed into soft little spheres the size of the big tapioca pearls in bubble tea. There were two versions, just plain lightly sweetened, and chocolate (although the white in the chocolate version was still white). The operators of the stand had set it up so that it was self-service, thus cleverly avoiding offending anyone with compunctions about buying and selling in the church building. I thought the whole thing was very clever, although I wasn't sure how much I liked the eggs in question.


*Not that kind of dream. Really.
**Wait! This is the second dream I can recall dealing with underage boys having inappropriate crushes on me IN CHURCH. What is going on?
***I don't think such a thing exists. Literally it would be "curdled/clotted/coagulated eggs", and a search doesn't show up anything. However, there are "oeufs de caille", or quail eggs; but the eggs in the dream were definitely chicken, not quail****.
****Wait! Eggs. Is this whole thing really about my biological clock? Is my brain really that twisted that it's presenting me with these weird parallel themes of pursuit and procreation? Does my brain fancy itself a controversial Italian movie director from the 60s or something?

regressing

I hesitated all day about posting this because I think it's an embarrassing thing to dream, but it's so random that I'm going to go ahead and do it.

I don't know what the occasion was, exactly, but I was at some kind of big event being held in a school gym. Whatever the event began as, it was transitioning into a dress-up social occasion of the sort held by religious schools that can't hold a dance. I was somewhat younger in the dream than I actually am, and not married; and there were a lot of people from my old high school, although most of them were just faceless extras (all older than high-school-aged, like me).

When I found out that the event was going to turn dressy I turned my attention to what I should wear for it. Although I don't remember the creative act, I found myself in a dress that I had whipped up on the spot*, out of peach-colored silk, floor-length, and late-80s style (fitted bodice with a "v" at the waist, puffy sleeves--it should be noted that I was skinnier than my actual self in the dream and such a dress actually fit me properly). I was surprised at how good it had turned out, but once I tried it on for fit I kind of ran out of steam on hemming the sleeves and skirt, and was just wearing it unfinished and over a pair of pants.

That's not the really embarrassing part, though. Around that time I started talking to a guy from my high school class who I apparently had a crush on**. He was being very cute/funny/charming, and he put his arm around me as he made silly comments about a washer and dryer we were looking at. What he was saying wasn't even registering because I was so excited that he had his arm around me. Then he made a comment about how we could have that washer in our house if we got married, or something joking-but-not-joking in that vein. Then he mentioned Oklahoma and I realized with a start that he was a big family person and that if we were to get married I would have to spend a lot of time there, possibly even live in Oklahoma, which really gave me pause.

Anyway. The embarrassing thing is, who has such adolescent dreams? The whole thing reads like a 7th-grader's diary! ("And then we were looking at washers and dryers and he put his arm around me! I think he likes me!") And I thought admitting to the Johnny Depp dream was embarrassing. I'm not going to be surprised if in tonight's dream some boy gives me a note saying, "Do you like me? Check yes or no."


*The event was in a cross between a gym and a Best Buy store, complete with merchandise in random places, including sewing machines and other home appliances.
**Thinking about it this morning, I realized that there may have been an actual mutual crush at the time, but I was too clueless to pick up on either side of it.

Dogs and Blood

I had another nasty dream last night. Lately I haven't been remembering my dreams, but this one was vivid.

I dreamed that my boyfriend and I were sitting on the ground, watching two dogs playing. As we watched, it became clear that it wasn't really playing anymore, but was turning into a fight. One dog looked much smaller or weaker than the other, and seemed to be losing the fight, but suddenly he just launched himself forward and grabbed the other dog's paw in his jaws.

He set his legs, and shook his head a bit, but didn't let go. Suddenly he growled loudly, and I knew that he was going to rip the paw off. BNB and I were really freaking out and we both turned away just before he made one massive effort and tore the paw off.

Somehow I knew what had happened without seeing it in the dream. The smaller dog was standing there in a pool of blood, holding the paw in his mouth and panting. The other dog was shivering on the ground, lying in his own blood.

I was shaking in the dream and a bit shaken when I woke up.

extreme changes of mood

I woke up in a great mood yesterday after dreaming several pleasant things (I don't think any of them involved Johnny Depp). The only thing I can really remember was that I had made a lot of headway on a freelance translation career and had been engaged to translate a real book, and a work of fiction at that! I was hopeful that this was going to be a launching pad for a specialization in translating fiction and that I would end up being one of those translators the merits of whose versions get debated in scholarly papers.

Last night's dream was awful. My husband and I had decided to take a little jaunt to Paris. I don't know where we were, but Paris was within driving distance. The only problem was that I wasn't dressed appropriately and couldn't figure out what to wear. I was very flustered and nothing was coming together, although I was pretty sure that my rose-colored turtleneck* needed to figure in somewhere. He got really annoyed really quickly and stormed out to drive away in the car because I was taking too long, ignoring my tearful entreaties to wait.

It turned out that he had only gone for a short drive because he was feeling antsy and didn't want to sit there while I had a closet meltdown, but it was still pretty harrowing. He came back after about 15 minutes, not mad at all, but I think I woke up before we could get to Paris.

*Notable because this is one of the very rare occasions when an item I actually own shows up in a getting-dressed dream.

how could i forget johnny depp?

I guess the most astonishing part of last night's dreaming is that I realized later that I had dreamed about {adolescence alert!} kissing Johnny Depp and forgotten about it. I always thought that was the sort of dream that should be more memorable [glossing right over it being pretty embarrassing to admit to having such a boilerplate Romantic Fantasy bit in a dream].

The very last part of the dream was pleasant too. I dreamed that I made an almost-instant friend at Target. We bonded over gentle mockery of Helicopter Parenting. Either the new friend morphed from a middle-aged woman with dark-rimmed glasses and short dark hair, or there were two people at first and the woman disappeared, but the friend turned out to be a tall nordic-looking guy with a beard. He mentioned that as a child he was given a "farthing" every day and told to go buy a dairy-based treat with some germanic-sounding name. In the dream I recognized the brand name as something distinctively Swiss, so I got excited and asked him if he was from Switzerland. He said, "no, I'm from grmphshmumblemumble". I kept asking him to repeat himself, and every time I had no idea what he was saying. It was so frustrating, since I was really curious about where he was from.

The part of the dream before that was less relaxing. I was driving with a lot of other people on an elevated roadway. It's hard to explain, but the impression was akin to caravanning with tiny little go-cart-like vehicles that resembled shrunken 1950s and 60s cars. We came to a point in the route where we had to jump, with or without vehicles, to exit the elevated highway. There was water below, contained in a series of lock-like walls of various size. The first couple of people revved up their cars and successfully made the jump, but my car fell into the water. It turned out to not be a big deal, since the water was shallow. Someone else left her car entirely and jumped over the side to land on her feet in the water, saying that her mother had warned her the water was shallow here and she shouldn't try to jump in it with her car. Throughout this scene, the perspective was very weird, almost like the perspective when you're playing with dolls as a child. That's really the only way I can think of to explain it.

jane austen

I had the oddest, most unaccountable dream last night. I don't remember it all, but the odd part was an episode that was straight out of a Jane Austen novel, complete with flowery speech and English accents. There were--surprise!--a bunch of people in a drawing room, and there were a lot of unspoken emotional undercurrents (also big surprise). There was an apple-cheeked young girl who was being praised for her sturdiness and "good spirits" by some other young people (in flowery 19th-century language, of course), on which she blushed and giggled. They were referring to a scene that was briefly shown in flashback, wherein the sturdy girl was performing some kind of very active acrobatics.

Then there was a young rake who was plying a shy young girl with a box of almond-shaped sweets. In a sort of voiceover, it was implied that he took her acceptance of the sweets as something more *ahem* significant: "here, he could see, was a young woman with appetites".

It never fails to amaze me what my brain comes up with, completely un-prompted. I have not been reading or watching anything vaguely Jane Austenish lately.

gross and racist?

I had the most weirdly detailed dream the other night. I was planning a trip to New York with my parents (weird in itself), and arranging everything beforehand online. I had arranged for several nights of lodging and several meals, and going back through and rechecking things to be sure everything was taken care of and made sense.

I realized that I had gone a little over budget and decided to pare some meals and just plan on eating them from street vendors. The one planned meal that I was really scrutinizing was a charity thing. It was a meal/presentation that demonstrated all kinds of elements of a program for poor kids in some African country. It was run by a very friendly looking middle-aged couple, and the more I looked at their website the more confused I got. There was a "menu" breaking down the experience into all possible components: actual meal, appetizers, craft session with children, presentation, etc. etc. etc. It was all itemized and I realized that if you went for the whole thing you could end up spending a fortune. Also, I wasn't sure my parents would want all that interaction instead of just a plain meal.

Another very weird thing is that twice lately I've dreamed of being confronted with scarily aggressive young Hispanic guys. I have no idea where this came from, not having had any scary encounters at all lately, much less with young Hispanic guys.

In the first dream I was in a "bad" section of town late at night. I was at a grocery store or something (I don't know how I'd gotten there) and learned while in the store that this part of town was reputed to be full of aggressive young guys and wasn't safe for single females. I more or less shrugged it off and went out a back entrance into an alley, where I was immediately set upon by young Hispanic guys. I don't know if they actually said anything, but they were doing threatening things like staring and fingering knives. It was really rather like a zombie movie in the way they converged out of nowhere.

I guess I made it out of there unscathed, because the next thing I can remember is being in a decrepit large building, something that seemed like an abandoned institution that had been taken over by squatters. I think part of it was a rundown YMCA. There were still some vaguely threatening young men, but there were also non-threatening people around too. One of my coworkers was there, showing me a large room she had bought. It was really interesting: very long and narrow, with some round columns holding up the ceiling, and tiled all over with square tiles of all different colors. She was planning on taking out the columns, and I wondered if that was a good idea, because they might be load-bearing.

In the next room over there was a bathroom, with sinks in one area and showers in another. The sinks had been [sorry, extreme grossness warning] crapped in, for lack of a more delicate term.

Then last night I had a rather confused dream in which I was trapped in an institution. I think it may have been loosely based on a 70s science fiction movie we saw recently. There was also an element of those thrift store dreams I have every so often, with a couple of rooms full of old stuff. I don't think it was a store, more of a giveaway with free old things. I was trying on some clothes when I realized that there were glass windows into an adjacent room and I was being ogled* by a bunch of very short Hispanic guys of varying ages**. I was really annoyed and embarrassed, and hunched down to finish my changing and got out of there quick.

I think part of the reason for the changing of clothes might not have been just an interest in old clothing; there was a subplot involving escaping with a fellow internee, but it's all a blur. It was fairly exciting, though I wish I could remember if we had made it out successfully.


*I mean really ogled--think of the most extreme stereotypical Ogle expression/sound effect, and you'll get the picture.
**What is with this? Am I a closet racist or something?

let is snow?

Weirdest thing. I live in Florida, and last night I dreamt that it had snowed. I was literally walking around my back yard amidst the snow drifts, marveling that "wow, it snowed in MY backyard! It's not supposed to snow here!"

And lest you think I woke up freezing, the next morning was like the entire week. Hot, humid, with temps in the 90s.

Wishful dreaming perhaps?

movie dream

I had a weird "movie" dream last night (one of those where the story isn't really about you and seems to be like experiencing a movie instead of watching it). All I really remember was a marital-infidelity storyline. A woman with heavy eye makeup and almost-80s-style braided hair had discovered her husband having an affair when they both [husband and wife] happened to be in the same hotel in Vietnam, unbeknownst to each other. The husband questioned how she could have found out, and there was a flashback to the wife (still with very heavy eye makeup) swimming in an infinity pool at a hotel. Then the camera panned to the man, cavorting with a January Jones lookalike. The wife slowly swam over to get a better view, practically next to them, but the dallying couple was oblivious to her presence. Then she went upstairs to her room, visibly disturbed. There were some interesting interior decoration/architectural details like openwork walls/screens, and the lighting was moodily done.

Then there was another storyline that was no longer a movie, about a neighboring house burning down. We lived somewhere in the deep south, and everything was very soggy, so I'm not sure how the house managed to burn down so completely while wet.

More crying

I had a night full of nightmares last night. One involved someone following me through what was ostensibly my building at work, but was much larger and more echoey. I was walking as fast as I could without appearing to walk fast, but he just kept gaining on me. I hurried to open my locker (we have to leave our stuff in lockers at work) and as I was closing it, he was behind me. I just hissed "get away," and ran out the doors onto the steps, which were much longer than my real workplace. More like the US Capitol building. I was running down the stairs, hoping I wouldn't trip, but he was behind me.

The other nightmare was more definable. At one point, I was working in a store when guy came up asking for help. He placed his hands on the counter and leaned over to ask me. He told me he was Canadian, so I made some kind of inane joke, all while noticing that his fingers were blunt appendages with pale skin and a light coating of fur.

Later, I was sneaking into a movie late and there was some confrontation over the placement of my head. Apparently I was being difficult and placed my head directly in front of a woman's view. Every time she tried to move, I also moved. I didn't think I was being difficult.

Eventually, I ended up back at my apartment, where my boyfriend was frantically writing in the office (as he's been doing for the last week, working to a deadline). He was clearly angry with me, but I didn't know why. I noticed that the office was totally empty except for his desk, chair, and computer. The walls were bare, the rug was gone, and all of my stuff was missing. I was afraid to ask him about my stuff, but I was worried about it.

He snapped that he needed to reduce the distractions, so he threw away all of my stuff. He also managed to convey that I had done something really stupid and he was very angry at me. I couldn't understand what I'd done. I tried to ask him, but he just said he had to get his work done.

I went out into the hallway, but I didn't know what to do. I was very upset and was starting to cry. I kind of wanted him to hear me crying, so maybe he'd feel sorry about being angry with me. He came out of the office and started shouting at me that I was just pretending to cry, and that I was being distracting. This naturally made me cry harder, and I woke myself up by sobbing out loud.

My sweet boyfriend, who has never done anything like his dream self, was understandably freaked out.

Not Like Christmas

I got a call from D late one evening. She wanted to go to dinner or hangout. I had already eaten dinner, but told her I would keep her company while she ate. I could hear a man's voice in the background of the phone call, which I guessed was her new husband. He just got home. She asked him to take care of the kids while she went out. We were still on the phone decided where we wanted to go, whether we wanted to meet there or have only one person drive. I was in the car anyway, driving over to her house; I figured it was the half way point to anywhere we wanted to go. I told her I was on my way. She told me to go back home, she would pick me up since it was her idea to go out.

I got of the phone and took a quick left to see if I could turn around. I drove through a narrow driveway between two buildings and came upon an open field. You couldn't quite see this area from the street since the buildings shrouded it. In front of me I saw a very tall tree decorated with Christmas tree lights on one side - even though it was far from Christmas (felt like September/October). There were other trees in the clearing; they moved like people. I could tell I wasn't the only one looking at the trees. Other people were watching from the windows of the surrounding buildings. I got out of my car and took a few pictures with my cell phone of the trees standing around a campfire. Then I think they noticed me. I quickly snuck back into my car and closed the door quietly, though it didn't close all the way (open door symbol on the dash was lit). I saw a tree coming towards me, so I decided to slam the door and make a run for it. I drove very quickly down another alley between the buildings, making a right turn back on the street. I wanted to call someone and tell them what I had just seen, but decided I could only tell someone face to face.