and then i couldn't breathe

The pregnant lady

2012-02-02T07:05:00.000-08:00

In my dream, I am pregnant. I’m not exactly sure how faralong I am, but I know that my belly gets in the way of things like steeringwheels, tables, other people, and being close to anything.

Because ofthis, the outdoor café table at which I sit is far enough away that I have tolook up from the book I’m reading to reach for my cup of tea. I notice a man ina suit in the ironwrought chair across from me. His appearance does not stirany emotional response in me at first except for a mild surprise. I immediatelyunderstand why.

This man isthe devil.

He sitsstraight-backed and still in the chair, one leg cocked and resting on theother. His hair issleek, slicked, curly and dark. His skin ispale but not noticeably so; the crisp cream-colored suit he wears complimentshis strong, sturdy frame nicely.

The onlyinhumanity that betrays him is his eyes: they are bright bluewhite, as if hisbrain were an electrical plant gone AWOL. His face is no face and every face;handsome but indistinguishable. He does not blink. He does not smile.

I don’teither.

“Hi,” Isay, closing my book.

“Hi,” hesays in a rich, silky purr.

I know thisman well. We’re past small talk.

He reachesout an unblemished hand and picks up my teacup. He moves with a fluid, unbrokengrace that only exists for him. He sips, never taking his wild, lurid eyes offmine.

Later, aswe talk, I realize that there is steam rising from my cup where there wasn’tbefore. Every so often I check. The tea never cools. I don’t touch the cupagain.

“Your childwill have a good singing voice,” he says in his own sweet baritone that nearlydrove me out of my mind with need for him. “Your child will have good eyesightand gentle hands. It will grow wise and compassionate. It will love easily andbe loved by nearly everyone close to it.”

“Nearlyeveryone?” I ask, the answer dangling just out of reach on the hinge of mymind.

He nodsonce, slowly. For the first time since he sat down, his eyes stray from me. Ilook at him now in profile. As hespeaks, I watch with interest the words riding out of his mouth on a heatshimmer so intense it blurs the color of the space behind him into a waterygrey.

“Your childhas nothing to prove to you. But you won’t remember that.”

I cock myhead. I am not angry or defensive or even confused. I am curious.

The babykicks me high in the ribs once.

“I wouldnever ask it to prove anything to me. Unless I were teaching it how to argue.”

The devilsighs. Twin blasts of heat billow out from his flared nostrils. The airdistorted by the heat is mesmerizing. There is no breeze in the cool springmorning, but I catch a whiff of burning leaves.

He returnshis face to me, etched in lines of sadness. Those lines look foreign, alien, onthe plain white clay of his skin. His eyes spark with something that is notsadness. It is not greed or rage or lust or envy or hunger or pride. It is nothuman; it is not emotion. All I know is what it is not. His eyes spark andglitter, and the not-knowing is the water that urges the feeling of unease intofull, queasy bloom. It is never outright fear, not around him.

“What doyou gain from having this child?” He asks.

“The knowledgeof another part of myself,” I reply.

The babykicks me again, this time low.

The devilstands up, not even a whisper of silk on silk accompanying his movement. It isthen that I notice a song playing softly through the speakers on the café’seaves:

Time it took us

To where the water was

That’s what the watergave me

And time goes quicker

Between the two of us

Oh, my love, don’tforsake me

Take what the water gaveme

This song would be playing throughout the rest of the dream.

The devilrests a hand on my shoulder. My eyes trail up the length of his arm. The suitfits him so well there is barely a fold or a ridge. He’s got his eyes on me,those cold-burning blue eyes, those eyes that have seen the firstborn chaos ofthe universe, those eyes made of entropy. They uncouple me from the hook ofreality.

When Isurface from the moorless depths of disassociation, I am sitting at the edge ofa large lake at dusk. I breathe in the dimness, but my lungs cannot expand.

Partiallybecause the darkness is thick and sticky and it coats my lungs like tar. Partiallybecause the baby has grown so big that it presses against my diaphragm. I cough,but it does no good.

Darknessdrops fully like water from a bucket and I look for the source of myunease. To calm myself, I begin hummingunder my breath.

Layme down

Let the only sound bethe overflow

Pockets full of stones

Lay me down

Let the only sound bethe overflow

It’s a struggle to stand. I keep stepping on the gauzy,flowing dress I find myself in. It feels wonderful against my skin, but it’slittle comfort. With the smell of rotting lake all around me and cold mudsucking at my knees and feet, I am immobilized by the mire in my mind.

The moon isbroken and sickly, gives off a drunken yellow light that does not illuminatebut confuses. I grab at something near me upon which the light sizzles likesluggish oil. It’s an oar. I pry myselfout of the swamp by clawing up its length. My legs are rubbery anduncooperative, so I stand swaying for a moment, resting a hand on my belly andfeeling the mud squelch up between my bare toes.

I can’tcatch my breath. But years of dealing with asthma have taught me not to panicand gasp, so I don’t.

In, out,in, out, in, out.

There aresoft voices behind me. Familiar familial voices.

Oh no.

The thought sparks in my head andlights a flame of fear. I know what this means. When I dream of water, I dreamof drowning.

There is alog cabin set several dozen feet back from the lake. Lights burn fitfully inthe windows, casting shadows that leap like rabid things over the walls. The voicesinside are risen in song. I open the screen door and the flickering candlelightflays me. I cringe and squint and am assaulted by life, foaming at the mouth.My family, extended, adopted, all, is crammed into the cabin. They areexuberant, they are wild, they are loud and completely unlike themselves. Theydance as if there is nothing left for them in the world. There is gravity here,and it grabs at my chest, wanting me.

“Hey!” I scream into the light, the heat,the rush, the motion, the oppressing life. “Thewater is rising! You have to get out! Get out! Get out!”

I lean asfar in as my arms will let me, my hands holding onto the outside edge of thedoorframe for dear life. For a moment, the terror of getting lost in the pressof bodies overwhelms the sick, sinking knowledge of the water behind me.

Nobodyhears me. Suddenly, my feet are cold. I jump and look down. Water, ankle deep.Moonlight slathers itself on the little lapping ripples like rancid butter.Still gripping the doorframe with both hands, I twist my neck as far as it willgo. The grass is gone. The gravel path from the lake to the house is gone. Thecreeping fingers of the lake have taken it all. The darkness, I realize then,did not grow down from the sky. It grew up from the water like vines andinfected the world. The smell of decay, of murky, evil water, gets thicker. Ifeel it trickling into the hollow spaces in me, filling me, making me feelheavy and awkward.

I hear singing in my head:

They took your loved ones
But returned them in exchange for you
But would you have it any other way?
Would you have it any other way?
You couldn't have it any other way

I rend myself from the doorframe of the cabin and shut thedoor against the painful light inside, against the rising liquid darknessoutside. I pray that my family is safe from the water inside the cabin. I hopethat the energy they create will be enough to fight the water back. I cannothelp them now.

The wateris knee-deep. My dress is no longer gauzy and light but floppy and sloppy. Islog back toward where the bank of the lake used to be. My leg bumps something.I reach down into the freezing black, curving my back so that my chest doesn’ttouch the surface, and pull up the oar I used to help me stand. The water dripsoff the oar onto my arm and it’s not water but a condensation, a concentration,of the darkness. It leaves oily trails on my arm.

There is asmall wooden canoe to match the oar, but it’s way out on the lake. Yards away.To reach it, I’d have to swim.

I lay myhand on my belly. The baby has been quiet for a long time. I worry for it. Willmy heat be enough to keep it alive in the impossible cold of the water? Willthe weight of it, plus the weight of the darkness in my lungs and the weight ofthe dress drag me to the bottom?

Lay me down
Let the only sound be the overflow
Pockets full of stones
Lay me down
Let the only sound be the overflow

Thewater reaches lustfully for my hips. As I wade toward the canoe, I keep an eartrained back toward the cabin. The terrible cold rips the breath from my lungs.It swallows my belly. The baby does not kick. The water licks my neck. I fightthe air for breath.

In, out,in, out, in, out.

Kick.

I kick.

I’ve lostthe bottom; I float now, kicking to keep my head above the grabby little waves.Soon, my legs disappear into the numbing black. So I wave my arms and, despitewhat I’d feared the most, I reach the canoe. The devil is sitting in it. I knowit’s him because his eyes slice through the darkness like knives made ofelectricity. They seem to scream at me. He sings:

Oh, poor Atlas
The world’s a beast of a burden
You’ve been holding on a long time
And all this longing
And the ships are left to rust
That’s what the water gave us

I knowbetter than to reach out a hand to him. I cling to the side of the canoe. I ampast cold, past shivering, and I know that if I don’t get out of the water,both the baby and I will die.

“You remindme of Ophelia in that dress,” the devil says. “Or the Lady of Shalott.”

“The Ladyof Shalott didn’t drown,” I say.

“I’ll writeyour name round about the prow,” says the devil. “Then you can sing me yourlast song.”

With someuntouchable force that is brother to the darkness, the devil pries my frozenhands from the edge of the canoe. I swallow my panic, force it down into my gutto warm me, give me buoyancy, buy me time.

The sickyellow-grey moonlight wanes. Only the high edges of things are lit, and eventhen they aren’t lit but painted with light. It drips from the tops of thetrees and falls thickly onto the devil’s shoulders and head. He chuckles deeplyas he carves my name into the inside of the canoe. That chuckle finishes whatthe water started; it crawls into my ears and piles up at the base of my brain,sinking me.

I sing withthe last breath I have:

She’sa cruel mistress
And a bargain must be made
But oh, my love, don’t forget me
I let the water take me

It’speaceful in the deep.

Thearms of the water are no longer crushing. They welcome now; they curl around meprotectively as I curl around my belly. The fingers of the water no longergrope and want; they soothe me and smooth my hair and my dress.

I rest inthe black sanctuary. Now that I don’t have the sound of the devil or the cabinin my ears, I can hear the singing:

Lay me down
Let the only sound be the overflow
Pockets full of stones
Lay me down
Let the only sound be the overflow

It seems totake hours to lift my head far enough to look up at the surface. The last bitof moonlight is fractured by the waves and sluggish fragments float down atme. They never reach me because I’msinking.

I lookforward to reaching the bottom. I’ll finally have somewhere still and quiet torest my head.

Isthis what it feels like to give up? I askmyself.

The babykicks once, hard.

(Song: What The Water Gave Me by Florence + The Machine

Don't let the bed bugs bite

2011-12-19T16:26:00.000-08:00

I had a waterbed and in the dream, I had it in my mind that I set it up at 2am. I was sleeping and saw ants crawling on me. I got up and saw some blue frogs and another weird thing like a centipede but fatter. It was making screeching noises at me. I tried to get a picture of the frogs and they turned into kittens. I got up and pulled the mattress back, there was dirt and grass, leaves and all sorts of crap under the mattress. I was trying to figure out where the ants were coming from to get a trap set up. I had a broom and was sweeping up all the junk, blaming myself for setting the bed up in the dark not seeing all the dirt. My co-workers went by, stopped and asked why I was working so hard. Then I woke up.

Guitar

2011-12-13T08:46:00.000-08:00

I was supposed to be playing classical guitar in a quartet performance of the Nutcracker,* along with a cellist, pianist, and... other musician? In real life, I haven't played my guitar in ages and can't really sightread.

In the dream I knew it was a bad idea to be sucked into this performance without having practiced with the group--let alone looked at the music--beforehand, but I hoped maybe it wouldn't be too noticeable. I didn't even have the music, so I had to read off the copy of the woman beside me, who was singing as a member of either the choir or the audience.

Naturally, I was terrible. Weirdly, it didn't bother me as much as it should have.

*Or perhaps the Messiah; it shifted.

Friends and pig heads

2011-12-04T15:35:00.000-08:00

I was visiting a friend, she has blue streaks in her hair and they were present in the dream. We walked up to a woman who was sitting poolside and I wasn't introduced. I said 'nice to meet you' and shook her hand, which felt like she had something wrong with it. Her hand was disfigured. It looked like a shopping mall with a pool and tables inside.

People started to show up and it became more like a dinner party. Everyone who came to sit at our table told my friend she looked fabulous. I felt uncomfortable and bored, I didn't know why we were here.

A man was carrying around a pig head on top of a bucket. I was uninterested. The head looked like it was alive with pink flesh. It had fake eyes that looked like blue human eyes. The man was making the eyes blink as he brought the head around to all the tables, as if it were on display.

An older woman started talking about what a long walk it was to get outside for a cigarette. She was going on for a while and I started to look around. I saw the pool and people walking on a cement walkway behind it. Then, an attractive and young black girl with a drink in her hand approached the pool. She had a black strapless ball gown. She walked down the pool steps and into the pool, seeming to go unnoticed and she was very casual about it. She held her drink over her head and went in until the water touched the top of her dress. I remembered thinking it looked refreshing and I wanted to try it. I pointed her out when people seemed interested in knowing what I was looking at. She started walking up the pool steps and had a white dress, like a wedding gown, with pearl beads and layered in front like an open style. Everyone in the place clapped and hooted when they saw her. She waved and walked on.

The pig was getting too heavy for the man to carry. He set it on a table and was going to carve it. Before he set it down I couldn't stop looking at the eyes as he made them blink. We then were served what was called garlic shrimp, but it was fried and overcooked. The women at the table said 'isn't it fabulous?' I nodded but didn't think it was. I thought it was dry. I looked at the sauces, red and yellow... I was looking for melted butter. Then I woke up. - GirlX

Back in high school... and anthrax?

2011-12-01T18:29:00.000-08:00

I'm new to this blog, but I found it fascinating to read about other people's dreams. I have a lot of my old dreams documented, so I thought I'd share one today. - GirlX

I was back in high school and I saw M in the line for lunch. (Side note: M is a girl who my ex boyfriend cheated on me with in real life, then left me for her and later married her.) She was talking to a girl that I know and have been trying to get a hold of lately. I hate M, so I didn’t want to talk to her. I noticed she’d lost some more weight, and grew her hair. She looked good (of course) and she was talking to someone else I thought I knew. I started wandering the halls trying to find something – my locker? Someone else’s? Then I felt I had to leave.

I was standing by a friend of mine while she was running a cash register, and I wanted to buy some things since she gets a discount. A guy was giving her grief in line, and she held up a button that said ‘can YOU do this job?’ Her mom was there and told her to stop acting like that. The friend freaked out a little and walked away. I was trying to grab the things I wanted to buy but was told not to worry about it and the friend would take them home for me.

I was driving home and saw an old guy friend in a car going past me. His eyebrows were raising, then lowering, and in the rhythm of the eyebrows raising and lowering his eyes were turning into a creature’s eyes – yellow in color, and he had an evil sort of grin on his face and he blew past me. In the dream I said to myself "that it was something I’d seen before in a Stephen King book or movie" I thought it was one of the characters. I laughed it off. I pulled into the driveway of a house where I lived, got out of the car and was checking the mail. I had a lot of mail from military establishments, a few of which were open and a powder was inside them that got on my hands. It was anthrax, I was sure of it. I quickly wiped off my hands and continued pulling mail out of the mailbox. The box was taller than me, and when I pulled out another envelope that was a bit larger, the powder fell out of it and into my mouth. I started to panic at first, then realized I’m going to die in a few days. I tried to figure out where the letters were from, and as I was walking up the driveway there was a strange man in a delivery truck waiting for me. He said he had a package to deliver. I started to shut the garage door, and then laughed and apologized – I was just in a daze from what had happened and wasn’t paying attention to the man. I started to walk into the house with him following, and thought it would be unsafe to let him in. He gave me a bad vibe. I turned and asked him what he had for me, and he replied "it's a package, but it's a little damaged." I was walking back to his truck, saw blood on a cotton ball on the ground in my garage. I asked him where the package was from, he said it was from a military address. I was afraid to see what it was, and asked him if he knew who it came from. He said no, and while he was digging in the truck to find it, I woke up.

weird combination

2011-11-29T08:08:00.000-08:00

In all this time I haven't posted, of course I've had a lot of dreams. Last night's were particularly impressive, though. First, I had a terrible dream about my husband getting shot in the head. We were somewhere with a group of very young people (I don't know if we were as young in the dream, or just out of place). We were hanging around in a semi-derelict house, and one of the guys had a gun. He started messing around with it, shooting out the door at something outside. In theory it wasn't supposed to be dangerous because he was just shooting at a target, but somehow he accidentally shot my husband in the back of the head.

I don't need to go on about how awful that was, because it's self-evident. He was still alive, though, so the awfulness just escalated. The kids freaked out and didn't want to take responsibility (didn't even want to call 911). Of course I immediately started to try to stanch the blood (of which there was surprisingly little) and call 911. I failed at first at calling because I kept getting distracted with my first-aid attempts. Then, every time I tried to dial I couldn't get it right. I accidentally entered the wrong sequence of numbers, an extra number appeared at the end, I accidentally erased all the numbers, I pushed the wrong button, I accidentally hung up on the dispatcher, etc. etc. I couldn't find my own phone, which had fallen down somewhere, and kept trying on a variety of phones that were lying around, none of which I could figure out how to use (usually it was the crucial "call" button that I couldn't locate). Finally I decided to look for help on foot, while simultaneously trying to prevent the kids from burying my still-alive husband to hide the evidence of their accident. I eventually ran into some people outside who seemed helpful and competent. I think at that point I must have woken up and realized that he hadn't actually been shot, because I don't remember how it ended.

The other part was considerably less harrowing. I was composing poetry, which is something that I think I've dreamed occasionally before*. Usually when that happens I can't remember any of it in the morning, but this time I remembered part of it. It was a medium-sized poem, so at least half of it is probably gone for good. The missing part was along the same lines. I think it was inspired in part by some recent thinking about my personality and priorities and how to deal with people with conflicting personalities and priorities; and in part by a book I've been reading about slowness. Anyway, this is all I remember:

Manifesto

We reserve the right to dawdle, to hem and haw, to hedge.

We write poetry in our dreams, and knowing that it was graven once in the gray folds of our unconscious is enough.

We are not waiting for happiness.

We know it when we see it.

I found the dream really interesting and amusing, because I remember the thought process I went through choosing the wording there, including a debate about whether the word "graven" was too stilted (I'm still very much on the fence about that). I think the lines that came more easily were the ones I forgot.

*In real life, I haven't dabbled in poetry since late adolescence, when I think one is contractually obligated to do so.

retail

2011-08-17T08:38:00.000-07:00

I haven't been remembering many dreams lately, although I know the group-living dreams are continuing, since I can recall a snippet of one from the other night (a friend was fixing a computer for me, pulled out a long, nasty string of mold/cobwebs, then carefully replaced it in the bowels of the computer).

Last night, though, or rather this morning just before waking up, I was having a different recurring-theme dream, a theme I like better than the group-living one. I was in an Anthropologie-esque store, looking at the sale section*. Actually, this store was a lot less attractive than a real Anthropologie store, resembling more closely a mall Dillard's or something like that. The merchandise, however, included some very cute clothing. I particularly remember a strapless dress made out of a linen-y fabric with multicolored blowsy roses printed on a deep rose background. It doesn't sound like me, not being either a strapless-dress or a cabbage rose kind of girl, but it was actually very appealing, and I was sorry it wasn't in my size.

The really great thing on offer, though, was a home fix-it book. It had simple, clearly written instructions on all kinds of things, accompanied by photos and drawings. The design was very well done, clean and attractive and just girly enough to be a good fit with the store (but not too girly; not festooned with pink). There were instructions on unclogging a drain** and rewiring a lamp, and I don't remember what else. It was quite disappointing to wake up and realize that I couldn't actually buy the book for $5.99 or however much it was on sale for.

*Not too far off from reality, since I often troll the sale room at Anthropologie, it being my "pass" to park in their parking lot so I can avoid the highly unpleasant Whole Foods parking garage. This particular retail dream differs from the usual, though, in that it's the first I can remember not involving secondhand merchandise.
**Also reality-based, since we've been having some bathtub drainage issues.

more celebrity appearances

2011-07-13T08:29:00.000-07:00

Well. I'm tempted to restate my lack of real interest in celebrities, but since they keep showing up, I guess it would sound like a case of "doth protest too much". Here are the latest two cameo appearances.

The other night I dreamed that I was transitioning to a group living arrangement (of course). I suppose I was in school, because it was rather dorm-like, but I don't remember the details. I was supposed to be sharing accommodations with Chloe Sevigny, which startled me a little--didn't she have enough money to live in a place of her own? After my initial surprise, I thought she might be an interesting roommate. She seemed interesting, nice enough, and I figured she would probably have interesting taste and introduce me to interesting people. Being an introvert who has a hard time meeting people, the idea of a built-in source of acquaintances appealed to me.

I was still in the process of beginning to move my possessions in when Chloe presented me with an itemized rundown of all the food that she estimated I'd consumed or would consume within a certain time period. This included groceries and eating out, and I was floored by her attention to detail. It was all listed by item, estimated serving size, and price--including estimated tax. The estimated-tax part rankled me a little, and I started to think that maybe her financial fastidiousness was going to be a pain.

++++++++++++++++++

I'm not completely sure who last night's cameo was. It was either Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler, or a hybrid thereof. My husband and I were in the process of establishing ourselves in yet another group-living arrangement* (sharing a house, I think; we had our own space, at least, but it was within a larger dwelling). We had pretty much settled in, and our dogs--our real-life Doberman and a dream German Shepherd--had too, making themselves comfortable on a top bunk that our Doberman would never be able to jump up on. Despite some climate-control issues (no heat?), it was a fairly comfortable arrangement, and we took a break with a movie.

The movie was some kind of comedy featuring a gone-to-seed boys' band. They were singing a semi-choreographed song in which they wandered around a vacant lot. The lyrics included something about "until my hips get soft", which puzzled me--I wasn't sure if it was meant to be a sexy double-entendre or a wry commentary on their age (they were all 40-/50-something). They were dressed in either jeans/black leather getups or track suit/gold jewelry ensembles, and the Ben Stiller/ Adam Sandler hybrid sported a spectacularly ugly hairdo: slightly bleached (orangey) dark hair on top, curly but brushed out to fluffiness, and a darker, gelled longer layer (mulletlike but equally long all around) consisting of tiny, bouncy little curls. I was transfixed by its ugliness.

*WHAT is UP with this? What unconscious fixation keeps making me dream about group living arrangements? Am I going to have to join a kibbutz to exorcise this?

Tsunami

2011-07-03T16:37:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty sure I was reading some Lacan-esque French theory, something about a sea lion/regular lion and a polar bear, and recognizing the Other or some such business. I'm not sure if I was studying this while at the beach, or if the elaborate literary metaphor sort of just came alive for me, but at some point I was definitely being rocked by the waves.

The tide on this U-shaped beach was coming in, though, and I decided I was done with the water. When the waves pulled back, a whitish pebbly beach was revealed at the bottom of the U, and I ran across to get the backpack(s) and corkscrew (?!) that I'd left there on a ledge. Back on the other side, the door to the hotel/apartment/dorm was locked, so a beach employee (?!) kindly let me in. It was an odd sort of industrial-looking stairwell, so as she was in there with me, I asked her whether I'd be able to get out on my floor. She was assuring me that I would, just as she received a message, which I couldn't decipher, on her radio.

"Up!" she said to me. "Up! Run!"

"What happened?" I asked, as I started up the stairs. "What is it?"

"Up, up!" she shouted, pushing me. "Go!"

I was struck by the realization that we were trying to make it to higher ground, because a tsunami was coming. I tried to run faster, taking two steps at a time, but my legs were tired and then we started to run into crowds in the stairwell, also trying to get up to higher ground. They were quite orderly and not pushing or shoving--primarily just polite and a bit bemused.

Suddenly it got darker in the stairwell, and I realized the wave was coming. There was a window in the stairwell, separated by a gap of several feet from where I stood on the stairs. As I looked out, I saw a wall of water rising, in incredible colors--glowing sage-y green, then golden, then red. It reached up to a few inches above the window, and then sank, and I thought, with relief, that we were all going to be fine. But then came what I instantly knew was the Second Wave, higher than the first, and I could feel the foundations of the building shaking. This wave filled the window with incredible sparkling droplets of water, glowing red. I thought to myself that I might well die, but even if it did, it would be after seeing the most beautiful scene of my life--and that it would be okay.

I'm disappointed in you, George

2011-06-28T07:55:00.000-07:00

Here's another embarrassing one. Alert Readers may recall that I've had two or three dreams in which George Clooney shows up randomly and reveals himself to be a charming conversationalist and a good companion to kill a little bit of time with while waiting in public places (??). Unfortunately it turns out he has a darker side below the charm.

This encounter began with my needing to take one of our dogs to the vet. I had found a vet that was more conveniently located in relation to my house and work, and wanted to try it out (inexplicably, we were living in something resembling a poor-ish neighborhood of a third-world city). The building was a three-story concrete building, with parts of it in okay shape and other parts that either had never been completed or had been destroyed by some unidentifiable catastrophe. I was poking around trying to figure out where the vet office was located (not easy, despite a prominent sign on the roof indicating that it was somewhere in the building). At some point I realized that I had forgotten to bring the dog (??), but since I didn't have time to go back for him I decided to at least locate the place and see how it looked, and maybe try to ask a couple of questions.

In the midst of my pokings-around, I ran into George, who was sitting at a counter in a cafe/bar restaurant in the building, looking out a large glassless window onto the parking area (keep in mind that the whole atmosphere was one of picturesque third-world decay, almost post-apocalyptic). I decided to play it cool and ask him if he knew where the vet's office was (you know, treat him like a regular layperson). He was, as usual, charming and helpful, and gave me directions involving navigating the destroyed part of the building that looked "like Kosovo" (his words). He then invited me to sit down and eat something with him, an offer I accepted both because I was hungry and because who would refuse a lunch invitation from George Clooney? We had a pizza, which was quite good.

We got along famously over the pizza, although I don't remember the conversation. Nor do I remember how we got to his house, but the next thing I can remember we were in his house, which had a larger selection of chotchkes displayed than you'd expect. By this time I felt like I had known him for ages, and he was being very nice, in the manner of a guy that you're getting to know and fast moving toward relationship territory with (you know, very interested in what you have to say, doing all the right body-language things to appear interested but not creepy). I was enjoying myself very much, although I certainly wasn't thinking "I'm going to have an affair with George Clooney"; he was much too smooth to provoke thoughts like that.

This is where things started to go downhill fast. In an embarrassingly ham-handed bit of G-rated symbolism, my subconscious chose to indicate his wish to take things further by having a wrapped condom drop out of his pocket onto the floor (??!?). Of course I freaked out because I had just been basking in the warm glow of his charming company and apparent general regard for me. I backed away and started sputtering, at which he abruptly lost his temper completely. He started yelling that I had been leading him on, with the reasoning that I accepted his gift of lunch ("you took the first piece of pizza, too! You just jumped in there."), and that the logical implication of that was that I was agreeing implicitly to "pay" later. I was completely crushed--what I thought was a spontaneous meeting of minds (and, well, yes, I did find him charming) was actually, in his mind, a way to get some action. I was crying by this time (loud wails and hiccups, the whole spectacle) and said, "but I'm MARRied", which I figured would surely appeal to both his reason and what gentlemanly side he did have (although I was beginning to realize I had seriously overestimated his gentlemanly side).

As I was wailing and he was berating, a young brunette slipped out of a bedroom and left the house, obviously having been there all night. Of course that didn't help things either. I beat a retreat, having completely changed my assessment of Mr. Clooney.

But that wasn't the end, oddly. A short time after I got home, someone delivered a medium-sized box, from George. I opened it and found a wild assortment of things, heavy on the books but with other things like event tickets, information on the stock market, etc. As I started to look through it, I realized that this was George's identity encapsulated in a box, and that he had somehow, drawing on his celebrity status as bosser-around of assistants and obtainer-of-favors, to assemble all this in that short amount of time (there were documents that would have had to be obtained from businesses and agencies, for example). Despite my resolve to have nothing more to do with the nefarious George, I began to soften as I realized what an effort he had made to be understood and explain himself.

What an odd and embarrassing dream. Once again, I promise I am not obsessed with Mr. Clooney. The only times I think about him are when confronted with a bit of celebrity gossip and when I have these random dreams in which he shows up. I have to say, though, I'm curious whether his Jekyll or Hyde side will show up in the next one (I doubt I've seen the last of him).

Gandhi??!

2011-06-20T08:48:00.000-07:00

I've been having lots of really detailed dreams that don't stay around once I've woken up. Here are the two that I remember best--they're widely divergent in style/subject, as you'll see.

The first is kind of embarrassing, and I hesitated to post it, but it's just so surreal I couldn't resist. I'm not sure what the situation or setting was, just that it involved men coming out of the woodwork to reveal that they had all been coerced by Gandhi (!!?!) into performing sexual favors on him. It was alarmingly and gross-out-inducingly explicit (which is the embarrassing part). Obviously this was brought on in part by the recent scandals involving politicians, but why Gandhi?

The other dream was one I would rate as one of my best overall, for subject matter and scenery. I was taking a boat tour of a South Carolina swamp with my husband, and there were animals all over, a range from animals that would actually be in a southern American swamp (alligators) to real animals that live somewhere else (hippos) to completely made-up animals. There was a small fish/mammal/bird hybrid that I caught in my hand and kept holding onto because I wanted to take a picture of it. I don't remember exactly what it looked like, but I think it was bright orange, and very wiggly.

the mechanics of dream crying

2011-06-07T08:31:00.001-07:00

I had the saddest dream last night. So sad, in fact, that I woke myself up crying (or maybe the dog barking woke me up; it was simultaneous). My husband and I were living (with other people, of course--I couldn't possibly have a dream in which I don't live in a group arrangement) in a rooftop apartment. It was really just a small box-shaped one-room building with extremely low ceilings, on top of the flat roof of an older building. I think the building itself contained a mixture of offices and apartments, and it wasn't in great shape.

We had been out and about and were returning home, if you can call such a living arrangement "home". It had been raining, and as we neared the top of the stairs leading to the roof, I noticed water pouring down the stairs from the rooftop. I made a note to let the building manager know (incidentally, the same guy who manages the building at my real-life office). It didn't really occur to me to be worried until we came out onto the roof and saw that it was completely flooded, almost up to the wall around the edges, which was about six feet tall. We could still walk through the water easily, but it was threatening to fill up the apartment to roof level. When we went inside, everyone was confusedly trying to gather up their things to evacuate. I looked around for our dogs with an increasingly sinking feeling. I asked someone about them, and just as they started to answer I brushed up against what was obviously one of their bodies floating around under the surface of the water*.

Of course no one had thought or had time to rescue our dogs, and it was terrible to think about them struggling to keep their heads above water in the middle of the crowded bunkbed setup (the room was filled with bunkbeds like a summer camp). I felt terrible realizing that if we had been there we could easily have gotten them out of there, and terrible in a different way thinking that if the roof had had proper drainage this wouldn't have happened at all.

I've always kind of wondered about the mechanics of crying in dreams, in those cases where you wake yourself up sobbing violently--how long are you actually crying in "real time" (it always seems to me like I cry for hours in the dream), and are real tears coming out? I still have no conclusion, but found it interesting that I woke up with tears in my eyes (but not streaming down my face) after what seemed like ages of crying. I also woke up slowly enough to note that I was gasping, sob-like, but my sleeping partner is a heavy enough sleeper that I've never been able to get an outside observation of whether I'm actually sobbing or just gasping.

Anyway, it was a harrowing dream, and I was very glad to hear the dogs barking when I woke up from it.

*This seems like a weird detail, that they would be floating around at a 3' depth, but I don't know enough about the physics of water and dog corpses to say whether it's really inaccurate. Another weird physics-related detail was that after we had removed the dog corpses from the flooded rooftop I was carrying them around in a garbage bag, casually slung over my shoulder--all 170 pounds of them, which I would surely not be able to do in real life, especially if racked by sobs.

Which reminds me of another gorily specific detail: I was carrying the dogs around because I hoped to find someone to flay them and preserve their hides for me, and also to remove and clean up their skulls so I could keep them as mementos**. When my husband expressed dismay at this weird and excessive desire, I said, "but think, don't you know any hunters who could do it? It would be easy for a hunter who was used to processing deer!"

**I probably shouldn't confess this, but I have considered in real life (although purely theoretically) the possibility of keeping the skull of a dead pet as a memento (in my defense, the hide idea hadn't occurred to me), although I'm sure I wouldn't due to a lack of butchering/taxidermy skills/cast-iron emotional constitution, and the fact that I don't know any local hunters.

Dream Analysis

2011-05-24T12:29:00.000-07:00

I finished my first semester of school recently, which included a class in Psychology. We took part of one class to discuss dream analysis so I thought I'd share what I learned. Please keep in mind that these are all generalizations.

Water - Freud thought water meant sex

A loved one being hurt or killed - it's a way to let them go

Being on your deathbed - You need to be more up front with people

Falling and waking up when you hit the ground - the fall is stress about what you think you're responsible for, generally not emotional stress

Flying - seeking independence, freedom to go where/do what you want to

Animals - represent basics, these are simple dreams

Recurring dreams - your brain is compartmentalizing and organizing information

Guns - represent the penis

Guns not going off when you fire them- fear of not being able to reproduce

--Dream analysis only matters as to what the dream truly means to you.
--Dreams help us understand things.
--Dream analysis is different for kids and adults and for different cultures.
--Dreaming happens during REM. Those who sleep less than 6 hours don't typically REM. Those who REM regularly tend to remember their dreams better.
--If you can't remember your dreams, try keeping a journal by your bed and write down what you're thinking of when you first wake up. You should start to remember them better after awhile if you do this regularly.

I wish we would've taken a whole class to discuss this. The professor called on various students and analyzed their dreams but she never called on me, even though I raised my hand every time. I would have loved to hear what she thought of my tomato plant leg dream.

zombie apocalypse

2011-05-24T11:00:00.000-07:00

Last night I had a mixture of what I'd call a Classic Zombie dream and a home-renovation dream. The zombie part hewed amusingly to the basic zombie movie tropes*. I was in a house with a lot of other people [Group Living trope alert!] when we realized that there were zombies approaching outside and then milling around, true to form, outside the door. I don't remember any gore or anything, but there was a fair amount of panic before we settled down to divvying up domestic tasks after realizing we were stuck in the house for the long haul.

The house renovation part was, I think, in the same house, although I'm not sure if the plans were being made during the zombie apocalypse, before, or after. They involved putting skirting around a pier-and-beam foundation (like our real-life house), and we pretty much settled on using sturdy 2x4-like wood and painting it red, which seemed like a wonderful idea in the dream.

*I know this because I'm married to someone who has a fondness for the occasional zombie flick, not so much as to be fanatical but enough so that I got a good score on one of those "would you survive a zombie apocalypse" online quizzes.

On a Boat

2011-05-10T09:07:00.001-07:00

Of a series of varied and complicated dreams the other night, the one scene that stands out relatively vividly is this one:

I was on a boat--some sort of covered, but otherwise open, deck--with a bunch of other people. A thunderstorm came up suddenly and the lightning was beautiful against the dark clouds. The waves picked up and tossed us around a bit, but it wasn't a problem. What was a problem was that when a particularly big wave receded, it revealed that we were about to tumble over a narrow ledge that hadn't been visible under the large waves, and were going to fall maybe 60 feet to the surf below.

I crouched down into what I thought of as an emergency impact kind of pose, with my head between my knees, as we went over the ledge. We fell for several seconds--longer than I'd anticipated--and landed a bit jarringly, but safely, in the waves below. Then I woke up.

physically retarded and mealy-mouthed

2011-05-10T08:28:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning with the phrase "physically retarded and mealy-mouthed" ringing in my head. I don't remember the exact context, but I had been using it to describe the CEO of some large, nasty corporation. I was trying desperately to determine whether or not my terminology would be considered crass and insensitive to the actual disabled population. I decided that it was okay, since it was a figurative use (??). [This struggling over semantics happens a lot in my dreams, and I almost always end up hitting on some word combination that seems brilliant in the dream but which makes no sense on waking; or something that rhymes in the dream but that doesn't actually rhyme at all.]

I had also been dreaming about shopping for dress pants with my husband. Most of the men's selection of dress pants featured semi-flexible tabs sticking out all over, in various shades of gold and yellow. Once I was awake, I realized that they were modeled after the tabs that road crews stick on the center stripe. I have absolutely no idea where this could have come from, other than the seemingly endless road construction projects scattered along my daily route.

Day Eff-ay

2011-04-20T11:47:00.000-07:00

I had a very vivid dream the other night that, on a whim, I decided that we should go on a trip to Mexico city with my mom and grandma (undoubtedly influenced by their impending visit). Accordingly, mom, grandma, myself, and BNB headed off to Mexico City (in the dream I was thinking of it as Distrito Federal (D-F, "day eff-ay").

Upon our arrival, we were ferried to our hotel in a taxi. As we stood around admiring the exterior, which was very lush and tropical with an impressive waterfall, my mom's cell phone rang. It was my grandma, who had apparently mistakenly got back into a taxi and had ended up back at the airport.

I insisted on going to fetch her, pointing out that neither BNB nor my mom had the remotest grasp of Spanish, whereas I could at least stumble along enough to be understood. I snagged a taxi and as we drove away, I decided that the way to get the driver to hurry up would be to tell him the long, involved story of our decision to vacation in Mexico D.F., and how my grandma managed to get lost.

In the dream, I was attempting to do all of this in Spanish, but I noticed that my brain was working very slowly and I was having trouble with words and verbs that I know quite well.

With Grandma rescued, we returned to the hotel. I know there was more after this, included a trip to a rural area and a sojourn in the home of a tall, thin, very intense woman. But those details are hazy.

unsettlingly realistic

2011-04-20T09:09:00.000-07:00

All I can remember of last night's dream is an unpleasant episode at work that was disturbingly realistic. I've probably mentioned before that in real life I have a coworker who, while meaning well, comes off as pushy. In the dream I was trying to do some task that was going to require a document that was probably somewhere in one of two wire inboxes on my desk. Just as I was poised to start looking through them to find the document, this coworker (who was not specifically involved in this part of the task) came up to my desk and started flipping through the inbox contents to find the document first. With no warning (even to myself), I exploded. I picked up the tray, brandished it while yelling at her to back off and get her hands off my stuff, then flung down the tray hard on the desk. For good measure, I heaved the other tray onto the floor beside my desk (it should be noted that none of this physical outburst involved people, just the two inboxes).

She seemed taken aback (and rightly so, I'm sure), and I was immediately embarrassed at my loss of control. Although I was still annoyed with her, I realized that I had just come off looking bad, since she had been well-meaning in her interference. To make things worse, she started talking about how she was "just trying to help", and how another coworker and I were "always whispering together and gossiping". I tried to tell her that 1) I couldn't help it if this other coworker came up and started a conversation with me at my desk; and 2) we weren't "gossiping", just talking about random things of no import.

Ugh. Very unpleasant. I can't deny that I have some pent-up real-life annoyance about similar issues, but I certainly hope the outbursts stay confined to my dream life.

too much tabloid-reading

2011-04-19T11:25:00.000-07:00

I've been both distracted by other things and not remembering many of my dreams lately. That's too bad, since I know I've had some very strange ones--I just can't remember them. All I remember of last night's was that I was comforting a rather distraught Suri Cruise (??)*. I don't know why she was distraught or why I was there with her, but I felt very self-satisfied, like the Cool, Understanding Aunt. I have no idea what I said to her, but it felt like a very profound nugget of wisdom that every little girl should hear but that few were lucky enough to be told.

*I think this might have been inspired by having spent some time recently plunged down the rabbit hole otherwise known as The Sun**. They seem to have an unhealthy obsession with the little tyke's wardrobe and sleep/wake schedule.
**Follow that link at your own risk. Side effects may include schadenfreude, nausea, confusion, and disappearance of significant amounts of time.

Randomness

2011-03-25T09:36:00.000-07:00

i don't know why but i haven't been able to really remember most of my dreams in a very long time. these probably aren't worth mentioning but i'm going to anyways...

i had gone to the doctor for some reason, i guess i must've had some problems walking or something. the doctor cut into my heel and pulled out a comb! this procedure didn't seem to be in a hospital, it was all done in his office. i remember being quite surprised and apparently didn't realize there was a comb stuck in my foot. some time passed in the dream and i don't really know what happened, i was just very aware that some other things had occured that i wasn't consciously recollecting. the next thing i remember is walking along and thinking i needed to fix my hair. evidently, the doctor didn't stitch up my foot where he'd cut it because i stopped and took off my shoe. i then reached in and pulled the comb out of my heel and combed my hair. when i was done, i stuck it back in my foot, put on my shoe and went about my merry way. the oddest part of this whole dream is that the comb was never bloody or anything.

*****

in real life, i volunteer at a place that hands out food to the poor and homeless once a week. i dreamed that i was working there and had cut my pinky finger. it appeared to be a very deep cut but didn't seem to hurt. i went to one of the ladies that works there and asked for a band-aid. i showed her my cut and instead of being concerned, she told me where to find the band-aids and stressed very strongly that i needed to use a "size appropriate band-aid." since the cut was small, she wanted me to use only a small band-aid. another worker came into the room just as i was finishing up putting on the band-aid and she showed me she'd just cut herself too. her cut was small and she used a rather large band-aid to cover it, much larger than she needed. i wondered why it was ok for her to use a large one but i was instructed to use a small one.

recent snippets

2011-03-25T08:12:00.000-07:00

Some real-life stress/busyness has kept me from posting a lot of strange dreams lately, which is a little frustrating (they've mostly gone down the memory hole), so I thought I'd post a few random recent snippets that I do remember.

I was dating Bob Dylan. I had put him on a "health plan", for which he was touchingly grateful. He didn't say it outright (being Bob Dylan, his phraseology was great, though), but it was clear that he was happy about the improvements I was making in his life.

This one is hardly worth recording, it's so hazy, but it's a departure from my usual tropes. It involved very old people committing (or rather, admitting to having committed recently) heinously violent crimes. They indicated that they had gone off the rails after experiencing Nazi concentration camps. This was undoubtedly influenced by a spousal tv viewing of parts of a violent horror movie involving old people, so that explains the departure from the usual group trip/mafia pattern.

This one involved a coworker with which I have a little bit of interpersonal difficulty due to personality differences. In real life, she's a take-charge overachiever whereas I'm the exact opposite (I hate anything that smacks of taking charge or, conversely, being taken charge of). Our company had either been restructured or had acquired some very important new clients with whom we would be working very closely. Whichever the case, the new people showed up at our office, three or four older/middle-aged business types (I think they were all men). The coworker immediately turned on the charm full force, and her brand of charm had the desired effect on the new people, provoking grumbling and annoyance on the part of the other office denizens.

This is not my dream, but I made an appearance. Another coworker told me she dreamed that she and her husband, along with my husband and me, were on the run, being chased by unspecified bad guys. At one point I stopped, got out a slab of rock, and started preparing to do Korean-style "hot rock" cooking, saying that I was starving. She was startled but very accommodatingly told me that it was okay, she had to go into an adjacent business to use the bathroom anyway, so I had time to cook.

Soldiers and Ponies

2011-02-22T21:19:00.000-08:00

This is my first time posting on this blog, so let me warn you that I take absolutely no responsibility for what my pre/subconscious decides to make me dream about. I have stopped asking why I dream like I do. I just write the most detailed ones down. That being said, happy reading!

The dream began in the midst of a gunfight between two small groups of soldiers. It got a little odd when I realized the enemy had decided to occupy and fortify my childhood home in the middle of the North Carolina suburbs. Instead of the slightly rusted chain link fence that surrounded the back yard, I and my company of four were balked by a new glittering razorwire fence around the whole property. The front of my mind was occupied by the plan we’d come up with for infiltrating the “compound”, but a tiny mouse-voice in the back of my mind glanced around, tapped ceaselessly for attention and peeped “Hey, um. This shouldn’t be happening. Not in broad springtime daylight. Not in this neighborhood. Where are the neighbors?”

“They’re all dead, of course. These bastards killed them all,” my “rational sense” replied. “Which is why we have to get in there and neutralize them.”

My team and I approached my house from the west; from behind the nine-foot-tall screen of magnolia bushes my elderly neighbors had planted to protect themselves from our two loud, overzealous dogs.

The razorwire fence stood just on the other side of the bushes. We crept close to the heavily-guarded gate, our M-16s at the ready. There was no door, only a gap like a missing tooth in the run of the fence. One of my fellows poked his rifle through the bushes and shot blindly; he took out two of the guards. The remaining two watched their comrades flop to the ground like dead fish, then opened fire on the bushes. I broke cover and ran at the two guards. I pointed my M-16 and shot one guard in the chest at point-blank range. He flew back in a spray of blood. The last remaining guard turned his M-9 (handgun) on me and we stared down each others’ barrels for a minute or so until I shot him high in the belly. He made a whiny sound like he’d just been interrupted and did not appreciate it. I could feel my fellows getting antsy behind me; I told them to go take the house. They burst out from the bushes and ran screaming at the house. They were instantly mown down by several M-240 machine guns. The sound was earsplitting, like steel popcorn in a tin bucket.

The wounded guard staggered, moaning, and I realized that I had shot him in the worst possible place besides maybe the groin. With a preternaturally accurate sense of geometry (and anatomy) I only possess in dreams, I calculated that my bullet had hit his stomach, large intestine, and lodged in his left kidney. No major blood vessels were damaged, so he would not bleed out quickly.

So I dropped my M-16 and approached the soldier with my hands up in an indication of harmlessness. He, wild-eyed like a trapped fox, tried to point his M-9 at me but his hand was shaking violently. I gently took the handgun and shushed him like a mother. He quieted, let out a huge, relieved sigh and said, “My name is Geoff. I’m going to die soon.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I began leading him around the interior perimeter of the fence, (somehow) out of range of the M-240s at the house, toward the driveway, which leads to the backyard. He stopped directly in front of the house. “Hang on,” he panted bashfully, painfully. “I gotta pee.”

Does it have to be now? I thought, eyeing the multiple gun barrels peeking out of the boarded house windows like the black malevolent eyes of night animals. But I didn’t verbally protest, knowing this is probably one of the last acts this dying man would undertake. Nobody should die with a full bladder.

So I disentangled myself from him and held him steady as he unbuckled his ammo belt and unbuttoned his fly. After I asked him if he’s okay to stand on his own, I politely turned away and let him do his business.

Geoff whimpered and grunted like a baby animal behind me and I felt a pang of sympathy so profound I nearly pulled his M-9 from my belt to end his misery. But my sympathy was riven in half by a shriek so otherworldly I almost realized I was dreaming. I turned to see Geoff’s face contorted with horror and pain. His urine stream was a watery red, laced with ribbons of near-black. It wasn’t trickling out steadily like urine does; it was spraying out like water from a showerhead, so forcefully that a cloud of fine spray appeared around the head of Geoff’s penis.

As if to add flavor to my growing alarm, a wind sprang up and blew the blood-laced urine onto me. I was showered with it, soaked with it, drenched with it. I let out a screech of my own and immediately regretted opening my mouth.

I suddenly bolted up the driveway toward the house, still bristling with guns, prepared in the back of my mind to be blown away, and not entirely satisfied by dying covered in a dying man’s bodily fluids.

I burst through the gate separating the back from the front lawn and ran to the hose curled up there by the back door.

My mind at this point underwent a curious halving. One half, temporarily taking control of my body, was obsessed only with getting Geoff’s blood/urine off me. The other half, waiting patiently and quietly in the back, wondered why I wasn’t being shot at and planned how to get in and retake the house in my parents’ name. After all, it was their goddamn house.

I shed my helmet, ammo belt, pack, boots, socks, and tore off my fatigues until I was completely naked. I pointed the hose at my face, had a curious double image of a gun barrel and Geoff’s penis, then the painfully cold water hit me. I scrubbed madly at my face, my neck, arms, hair, hands, body. The water smelled sweet and earthy and I attempted to inhale it to get the acid tang of blood and urine out of my nose. This of course resulted in a racking spasm of coughs as I realized rather quickly that my lungs would not accept water as a usable source of oxygen. This broke me out of the panic-circle, and I turned off the water. Shivering, panting, sodden and naked (but clean), I stood there and let the halves of my mind swap places. Where were the soldiers? Why hadn’t they shot at me? The back door wasn’t barred. Could I get in?

I began to poke around the back of the house and found a small, newly overturned mound of earth beside the air conditioning unit. I dug like a dog and unearthed a gallon-size Ziploc bag full of magazines. Svelte women in various degrees of undress graced every single cover. I chuckled to myself. “Looks like I found my enemy’s porn stash.”

Suddenly I remembered Geoff. I had left him out in the middle of the front yard, pissing blood and screaming like a nine year old girl! I stood up and, with no regard for the soldiers and guns in the house, scurried out of the back yard and back down the driveway.

Poor Geoff was right where I’d left him, still holding his penis, which by now was just dribbling thick dark blood. He was barely upright; his shoulders and head sagged deeply. I approached him gingerly, eyeing his penis, ready to bolt if it were to start spraying again.

“I’m sorry I ran away,” I said softly, again at a loss for words. I was no good at dealing with dying people.

“’S okay,” he slurred and struggled to lift his head.

I stood there clueless for a moment, then remembered the stack of magazines in my hands. “Hey, look,” I said to Geoff cheerily, holding out a copy of Playboy. “Titties.”

He managed a small half-smile, his eyes resting on something that was not the magazine. “Yes ma’am.”

I struggled to follow his gaze, then realized why. He’d been looking at me. I had not reclothed myself after my hose-bath. Mortified and mortified that I’d been mortified by a dying man, I clapped the stack of magazines over my naked breast.

“Uh, I’m… I’m gonna go back up to the house to find clothes… and you some water.”

Without waiting for a reply from Geoff, I skittered back up the driveway.

At this point the dream shifted to a nighttime newly fallen. I remained in my driveway, but the house had reverted to its proper place as my parents’ house and childhood home. The chain link fence separating the front from the back yard was still intact, so I lifted the catch and opened the gate. At its familiar clink-chuk sound, my little sister turned. I smiled and waved; she waved back from her place sitting on the grass just beyond the driveway. I sat down beside her (fully clothed) and followed her eyes to a place cradled in darkness on the far side of our neighbors’ yard.

In waking reality, our neighbors to the left had planted the magnolias; our neighbors to the right had just used the portion of our fence that bordered their yard to start a fence of their own. In dream reality, the partition between yards was no longer there. Neither was the fence between our neighbors’ and their neighbors’ yards. Ours was the end of a five-house-long strip of fenced backyard.

As I realized what stood in that pocket of darkness, the purpose of this backyard strip became clear. It was a makeshift paddock to contain two horses.

My sister and I watched them move and graze. The adrenaline-soaked anxiety that had laced the first part of my dream (a very distant memory now, like I’d dreamed it and was now awake) was eased by the presence of family and animals, but not entirely abolished. What was left was a diluted sense of unease which is, if you’ve read accounts of my other dreams, the default setting in which I operate.

“It’s so cruel to keep them here like this,” my sister said and sighed.

I agreed. I wasn’t entirely sure which of our neighbors owned these animals, but nobody ought to be keeping two large beasts of burden in a tiny suburban neighborhood.

“Let’s get them outta here,” my sister said, the weight of conviction in her voice. We stood and gently approached the horses. They were both bay (which in Layman’s terms means their coats were deep brown except for their legs and the tips of their ears, which were black like their manes and tails). One was far larger than the other. The larger one had traces of Shire in its conformation (body shape). The smaller one, with feathered feet like its companion, was cutely ponyish, but not too small to ride. My sister ran her hands over the Shire’s glossy coat and cooed to it with something like reverence. It stood sedately, letting itself be talked to and caressed. The ponyish bay seemed to size me up and deem me worthy. Of what I wasn’t sure, but it allowed me to climb on its back once I’d helped my sister clamber onto the Shire. I leaned over and unlatched the gate and we rode the horses west down our street, away from the main part of town.

I noticed a tiny constant clicking slightly below the clip clop of hoofbeats on asphalt. I turned and saw three mongrel dogs, all the same shade of mutt-brown, all low, quiet and frightened. The clicking was the sound of their claws as they trotted. I smiled warmly down at them, mentally inviting them to stay; we’d find food for them soon.

My sister yelped.

“What?!”

She pointed; I looked. Several men were running toward us, guns leveled.

“Run!” I called to my sister and wheeled my pony around, but my sister had trouble turning the Shire without a bridle, since she was smaller than me and it was bigger than my pony.

A single roaring shot ripped the night-quiet apart. The Shire shied, stepped back, wavered, snorted, and fell. Like a stone monument. Agonizingly slowly. I prayed that since my sister had no stirrups to tangle her feet, she could jump clear of the falling ton-and-a-quarter of horse without being crushed, but instead of jumping, she froze with fear and watched herself fall with her horse.

I vaulted off my pony and began to yell for my sister. I reached the part of her that wasn’t trapped beneath the massive horse just as my wake-up alarm began to chime. Her eyes were closed and a pool of blood began to seep out from behind her head. Then I woke up.

stressful heist

2011-02-17T09:05:00.000-08:00

I had a very stressful dream last night. My husband was working for some industrial company (mining? petroleum refinery? chemicals?) in a lower/middle management and/or possibly security capacity. For some reason I was there with him at the main office. No one else was around, so it was just the two of us. I'm not sure where the office people were, but it was clear that they would be gone for a while.

In the middle of our uneventful office visit, there was a loud explosion from the direction of the factory/mine/refinery. From the sound of it, no one was going to make it out of there alive. I asked him what it was and he replied "kryptonite" (??). He then sprang into action, although I couldn't determine whether this action was premeditated or a spur-of-the-moment idea. Apparently there was a huge amount of the company's capital just stored in cash in the office (??). He filled up two or three paper Whole Foods bags (again, ??) with what supposedly amounted to 400 million (billion?) dollars.

I found this sudden turn of events disturbing in the extreme. First of all, the idea that he was going to try to make off with this enormous amount of money was alarming both on an ethical and a practical level. How did he think we would ever get away with such a thing? And then there was the disturbing question of whether he had known about or somehow been involved in the explosion, which was such a terrible idea that I didn't want to dwell on it.

I guess my hesitation and nay-saying cost us some time, and we didn't end up leaving right away (I also argued that skipping the country at the exact time of the explosion and disappearance of the cash would make us look way too suspect and that it was better to stick around for a while to lessen suspicion on us; I think I was also hoping to talk him out of his scheme). I also pointed out that any business who kept large quantities of cash would be foolish not to mark the bills somehow, and that the first bill we attempted to spend would get us caught.

I woke up around the time that the police were starting to swarm around the place (amazingly, they didn't nab us immediately; I don't know what became of the paper bags full of cash, but they were still somehow in our possession). Then I kept drifting in and out of sleep, anxiously concocting strategies to keep us from getting arrested--plant a bill or two on an unsuspecting passerby? Drop a bill in a place where it was likely to be picked up and spent by someone else (I was very preoccupied with the whole marked-bill scenario)? I was afraid we were condemned to a fugitive life and would never actually be able to spend any of the money--so it was obviously better to just abandon the whole idea while we were still somewhat uninvolved.

squalid group living

2011-01-21T08:28:00.000-08:00

I guess this dream was prompted by our recent housekeeping woes (as in, lack of) and our attempts to find a leather couch that the dogs won't dirty up so much. We (my husband and I) were sharing a house with some other people, a couple of different parties consisting of two or three people. All of them were Asian (I think one party was Indian and the other, with more members, was Korean). All were either students or had "knowledge economy" type jobs*.

Anyway, my husband and I had the living room as our area, and we had never properly moved in so everything was a huge mess (you know what happens when you've run out of steam in the end stages of a move and haven't found a proper place for everything). To make things worse, we had our two dogs with us--I think they were in an indoor-outdoor living situation, and the doberman had been inside.

[At some point in the middle of this dream, the dwelling curiously transitioned into a huge construction-parts warehouse; even while dreaming I was aware that this was my subconscious's way of voicing its displeasure/overwhelm at our real-life messy house.]

Back in the actual house (not warehouse), I was trying to tidy up while my husband, who had a cold, was lying on the couch watching TV. I wasn't really upset by his lack of help because he was sick**, but I was completely overwhelmed and questioning the utility of my endeavor. I had just discovered that the dog had thrown up in several places after chewing on a rawhide (so it was that whitish, milky post-rawhide throw-up that will be familiar to dog owners).

I was trying to find something to clean up the mess (and not finding a rag, of course). In the adjacent kitchen, a couple of the Koreans were eating their breakfast, like perfect little robots: get out the food, dish it into one dish, eat it all quickly in a focused manner, quickly rinse single dish and single glass. This only increased my feelings of inferiority, since I have never been able to eat so neatly and with such little production of dirty dishes.

Breakfast tidily put away, one of the Koreans grabbed his backpack (without fumbling, of course) and started to very quickly navigate the piles of junk on his way out the front door. I panicked and tried to warn him about the dog-vomit piles, but couldn't get it out fast enough. He landed in the biggest one with his clean be-socked foot***. He was too polite to register more than the briefest expression of surprise and discomfit before he whooshed out the door, sweeping up his shoes in one smooth motion.

I never did find a rag to clean up the vomit, I just sunk into self-recrimination and amazement that the tidy Asians hadn't already kicked us out, then woke up.

*Yeah, my subconscious hews closely to racial stereotypes.
**This does at least show a departure from the trope where I start yelling at assorted family members because I'm doing all the housework.
***Because, being clean, he didn't wear shoes in the house.

weird miscellany and zombie shooters

2011-01-14T08:22:00.001-08:00

I had the weirdest and wildest dreams last night, but I won't be able to do them justice, partly because my memory is a little hazy. Of course there was a group trip, a rather epic one involving travel on a giant bus with my mother and various random people from my past. I tried to find a seat, but each option presented problems. There was a very back row facing backward, which I thought would be okay although I don't like facing backward in a vehicle. But when I tried to sit down I discovered why the seats were empty: it really only worked if you hunched over or lay down across several seats, because of the combination of window and ceiling heights. Then my mother pointed out that there was a row of seats running up and down the left/driver's side, facing out sideways. I didn't like that option either because I thought it was dangerous. I was worried about the lack of seatbelts and what would happen in the event of a side collision*.

I finally sat down (in a rear-facing seat, but in the middle of the bus) next to a guy with a baby. The guy looked vaguely like Sean Bean, and I didn't really interact with him because I was distracted by the baby, who was dangling in front of me without any apparent support (although this didn't seem odd). Acting on reflex, I took the baby and set him on my lap, at which point I realized that he was actually a small freckled boy, maybe 6 or so**. I started talking to him rather animatedly, which surprised me since I'm not normally one of those people who makes over small children (not that I have anything against them, I'm just not the one who runs over and starts talking baby talk to them).

I'm not sure if this was the trip destination, but the next thing I remember I was at a house on a very steep wooded hillside. This was surely inspired by watching several historical British dramas recently featuring those long-term (by modern standards) visits in which a group of random highbrow people would descend on a manor house. There were a lot of people around, a few of whom I knew but most of whom I didn't, and I was trying to navigate the bathroom-use system because I wanted to take a shower.

I had laid claim to a bathroom (one of a pair in an odd layout: they were on a stair landing near the entrance, and had white louvered Western Saloon type doors) and was just about ready to take a shower. I don't remember all the details, but the owner of the house (who I think was the Sean Bean lookalike from the bus) arrived and made it clear that his routine was to use this bathroom at this exact time for his ablutions. So I apologized, gathered up my stuff, and went to wait outside.

I don't know if I ever got my shower, because the next thing I can remember was being outside. I realized that something odd was going on, but it took me a while to grasp the basics (I never did understand the details). In a nutshell, there was a shootout between some people, at least one of whom was a doppelganger of the host. This doppelganger had been activated by some action or event, but was apparently a chronic presence who appeared every so often--locked in semi-permanent conflict with the host.

The most fantastical moment involved a zombie-like young man propped up against the exterior wall. He had appeared to be dead, actually nailed to the wall by a gunshot. It became clear, though, that this was just a disguise to hide in plain sight--as the doppelganger (or maybe the host, I couldn't straighten out their identities) rounded the corner, the young man practically exploded from his position flat against the wall, shooting the doppelganger/host. I finally realized that this was a dangerous situation, and I started running/rolling down the hill. I'm not sure how I managed to avoid all the huge conifers, but the pine needles made a forgiving surface on which to roll, and when I had gotten to the bottom of the rather deep ravine I looked around and appreciated how beautiful it was, even though I didn't know how I was going to get out of there.

At some point a couple from my parents' church made a cameo appearance. In real life, this man has very straight, wiry hair that grows straight out from his head in all directions, and he favors a buzz cut of varying length. In the dream, he had curled his hair in a foppish late-18th-century/early 19th-century style***, and had caused some kind of unnamed scandal of medium-level seriousness. In real life, his wife has a rather old-fashioned haircut styled in a way that might be described as marcelled. In the dream, my sister informed me that he shared her husband's hair woes and that was why she always wore it quite short and curled in a standard "old lady" helmet style.

*I don't want to delve too deeply into this recent dream concern for vehicular safety.
**Nor am I going to meditate on the recurring theme of small boys.
***Thank you again, British historical dramas.

Bits and Pieces

2011-01-11T14:16:00.000-08:00

These are brief and vague but it's alls I've remembered lately.

i had worked really hard at putting together some kind of party, putting in lots of time and money to get it ready. after sending out lots and lots of invitations and doing my best to get the word out about it, not a single person showed up. i sat around the empty room looking around at all the decorations for a long time, feeling sorry for myself that no one was bothered to come. i woke up feeling much the same way.

********

i was outside with a group of people at a park or something. i don't know if i knew who they were or if they were just random dream people. it seems like we were attending some kind of art faire, although i didn't really see any art or vendors anywhere. it was really hot out and i was thinking that i should've brought a hat because i tend to get really vicious headaches from the sun (IRL and in the dream apparently). i also remember being really thirsty but didn't seem to have any money to buy a drink.

mr. clooney makes a reappearance

2011-01-11T08:19:00.000-08:00

I've been lax lately about recording the dreams that I've remembered (which haven't been many), but I couldn't neglect this one, since I find repeats amusing [although, note to subconscious: group trips/group living arrangement repeats are no longer amusing!].

Anyway, my situation alternated in the dream between being an 8th-grader (??), being an older student (as in, I was my age or maybe even older and returning to college), and being on a trip with my husband. I switched back and forth between these situations as they seemed to make more or less sense within the context*. There was a lot of rather tiresome back-and-forths involving being in a younger classroom (a first-day-of-school atmosphere), finding my college classes, and making travel plans with my husband. I should add that at times I was in Paris and at times I was in New York.

Anyway, there was a lot of low-level stress and interaction with peers of various ages, but the noteworthy part of it was another conversation with George Clooney, in which he proved just as agreeable a conversationalist as my first [dream] encounter with him**. It started in the 8th-grade classroom, although I have absolutely no idea what he was doing there. He seemed slightly bemused, and I made a little small talk with him before asking, "Honestly, what is it like to be constantly assaulted everywhere you go by eager females? Doesn't it start to get annoying?" He seemed slightly amused but very deftly answered in a way that wouldn't get him in trouble with his female fan base. Then the situation shifted and I was in college. I turned around to talk to him again, but he was gone.

Other recent snippets that I remember:

I had gotten myself roped into knitting a rather complicated light blue lace scarf for a coworker. I had gotten about 8 inches of it done and was showing it to her when she said that she might really rather prefer a cowl. I was proposing various ways in which what I'd already done could be converted to a cowl format, trying to be nice while at the same time annoyed at her presumption since I didn't really want to knit something for her in the first place.
[I was living in a group situation when] while walking home one day, I was accosted by a developmentally disabled man. I couldn't find a way of avoiding him, although I didn't want to talk to him because I was afraid he would ask me for something. He did, although not what I expected: he wanted me to look over a book on jewelry making and do a (positive) review of it online. I tried to be noncommittal, but he wouldn't take no for an answer.
I had been on a semi-long visit somewhere (living in a group, of course), and was ready to go back, or maybe go on to another destination. I was traveling with my sister, and there was some miscommunication all around as to the time/place of departure. When one bit of confusion was cleared up, another one cropped up, and when we finally cleared up where and when we were supposed to be leaving, it was almost too late and our luggage was still with our hostess. She finally came running up with it, in a weird, construction-tunnel-like part of the airport, and we made it on the plane. Once on, though, we were informed that because of our lateness we had been relegated to "the upper deck". This turned out to be a small balcony in the back of the plane, overlooking the rest of the seated passengers. There were no seats on this balcony, and not even any railing to prevent us from falling on the heads of the passengers below during turbulence. I was really worried and annoyed that the airline*** would think this was acceptable, but finally discovered a few seatbelts coming out of the back wall. I figured that we could strap ourselves in with those and lounge on our luggage (which had stayed with us), and thus be reasonably safe. The other "upper deck" passengers didn't seem worried, and spread themselves out near the edge, looking very comfortable.

*I'm not sure this situation-switching has happened to me before, although surely it has.
**Although I can't deny his attractiveness, I feel I should specify that I am not, nor have I ever been, obsessed with Mr. Clooney.
***The airline was African, a detail I'm sure was due to my recent thrift-store purchase of a blanket from Kenya Airways.

more ugh

2010-11-30T13:49:00.001-08:00

[Another "ugh" to go along with the previous post.]

I don't remember what led to this, but I was settling into an educational institution. It must have been a co-ed dorm*, because I was in a restroom with a couple of guys I had known at various points in my real-life educational career. They're both fair-haired, and they were wearing similar but not exactly-matching plaid western shirts, lending them the air of a hipster comedy duo.

I was trying to find a toilet suitable for use, but, as so often happens with public restrooms, they all had issues. I finally settled on the one with masses of waterlogged toilet paper covering the seat. I brushed it off into the bowl and tried to flush the toilet (which was fortunately free of unpleasant matter as far as I could see). When I started to flush, it began to spew water all over**, on the walls and--more importantly--on me. It was a spectacular geyser made up of both larger solid streams and fine spray, and it got all over my face and even in my mouth, which I suppose was opened in astonishment and alarm. Of course my thoughts immediately turned to e. coli.

This awakened the sympathy of my two friends, who, it became obvious, didn't remember me at all. They said, "aw, what a bad start to your freshman year!" I was taken aback, realizing that they had mistaken me for someone a good 15 years or so younger. On one hand, it filled me with glee that I (apparently) looked young; on the other hand, I felt like an impostor due for a fair dose of embarrassment when they would inevitably realize that I was not, indeed, an 18-year-old and that I hadn't corrected them. My feeling of fraud increased when they very kindly offered to show me around (it also didn't help that we would be exchanging the relative obscurity of the restroom for the less forgiving sunlight outside).

*Really, WHY do i so frequently dream that I'm moving into or living in a dorm?
**I'm sure this was prompted by my intense hate of those odious auto-flush toilets that start to flush with excessive force right as you're sitting down, spraying your backside with a fine mist of water containing microorganisms I'd rather not think about.

ugh and ugh

2010-11-30T13:23:00.001-08:00

I've had several unpleasant dreams lately. Here are a couple (breaking them up so as not to overload the tag limit).

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I was on yet another group trip, this time to Hong Kong, with a group made up largely of young and youngish Asian women. We had just arrived, and our first stop was a large park on the top of hill so high it might better be called a mountain. There was a spectacular view, and the mountain/hill itself was covered with green vegetation. The park was very touristy, with a gigantic parking lot, a bus station (we came by bus), and lots of touristy amenities.

Instead of confining ourselves to gawking at the scenery, we were supposed to doing a craft activity. It was one of those very specific, structured projects with little room for individual variation (I think some kind of paper folding was involved). I had been vigorously reproached by the tour guide for my clumsy American lack of politesse, grace, and social nicety, and I was trying desperately to prove my worthiness by perfectly executing the craft project. This backfired on me, though, since as a result of my care I took too long and was still working on it when the rest of the group had finished. Of course the guide was unhappy about my slowness.

After the craft fiasco, we all went to a restaurant to eat lunch. Because I had been so focused on my project, I hadn't changed my money at the nearby exchange kiosk like everyone else had, so I had no Chinese money. Since the whole place was so extremely touristy, I was clinging to the hope that they might accept payment in dollars. On entering the restaurant, which was cafeteria style, I realized that wouldn't be an option, but the extremely nice girl in front of me in line offered to pay and I could pay her back later.

So all seemed to be going reasonably well, until I tripped with my plate of food and spilled it all over. I was confused at this unexpected catastrophe, and went to get a refill. I was so shaken by my showy accident (food went all over) that I didn't stop to think that they would want payment for my replacement food. I guess I consumed it, because the next thing I remember was a confrontation with a cleaver-wielding chef who demanded payment (and not in dollars). He insinuated that I would be pursued by gangsters if I didn't pay up.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

In another unpleasant dream, I was working as a secretary in a large and somewhat weird building. My boss was the woman who in real life is the boss for the business occupying the first two floors of my real-life office building. We all have the impression that she's much stricter than her predecessor, although that's not based on a lot of data.

I was working away, although my job (like my actual, real-life job) didn't require a whole lot. I wasn't actively loafing, so I had no reason to be on the lookout for a scolding of any kind, but the boss came looking for me, extremely angry. She started ranting and raving about how I couldn't "control the infrastructure". I finally realized that she was referring to some cars that were parked illegally downstairs, one in an actual space and a couple in a grassy area next to a sidewalk. None of these cars were in places where I could have seen them from any of the windows--I would have to have been outside, and thus not inside doing my job. I tried to tell her this, but there was no reasoning with her, and she insinuated that I might lose my job over not having called a tow truck*.

*In my real-life job we have limited parking space, and it falls to me to call the tow truck, which I must admit I sometimes do with relish if the car is expensive and parked directly in front of the very visible "no parking" sign. There has been some hinting on the part of a coworker that I'm mean for calling the tow truck (I actually have only called a very few times, and never for very battered, run-down cars that, to my mind, indicate someone operating on less than a full share of resources); other people are perhaps more strict than me regarding cars that don't belong there, so I feel like I'll be seen as not doing my job if I don't deal with it when a car is parked in one of our spots. Apparently this car-towing thing causes me angst than I might have thought.

Brits in drag

2010-11-17T07:48:00.000-08:00

I don't have time right now to describe the other night's extremely trippy dream featuring a gigantic moth man (yes!), or the movie/crime mystery dream loosely inspired by The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. In the interest of not falling behind again, though, here is last night's dream.

I was in school, although "school" was vaguely defined and included some of my coworkers* in vague capacities as fellow students and/or instructors. We were supposed to be putting together a paper/presentation, and the first group was going to start presenting later that day. Of course I still hadn't even settled on a topic. I had been fairly sure of a topic I can't remember now, involving serving food as part of the presentation. Then I decided that a topic involving Japan and serving sushi (which I'm not an expert on) would be better.

I was feeling okay about my presentation (although I didn't have any material), until I started to deal with the sushi-making. I looked at my raw materials (leftover long-grain rice with bits of carrot), and realized that it was all wrong and I would never be able to pull things together. After some desperate thinking [during which there was a mini subplot in which a boy I had a crush on in elementary school was now divorced with a kid or two and expressing interest, which was kind of flattering even though I thought he might just be looking for childcare], I came up with an idea. My topic would be "why do men in drag feature so prominently in British sketch-type comedies?"**

I thought this was a great topic because it was something I was personally curious about, but I had the wind taken out of my sails when I asked around and none of my fellow students had even seen Monty Python (not that I'm a huge Monty Python fan, but I figured everyone would at least know that reference). I then started doubting once again my choice of subjects, which brought on a full-blown crisis regarding inability to focus and commit to a decision. I hate it when my subconscious has to bring up and rub in these real-life character flaws.

*I've been having an inordinate, and annoying, number of coworker dream sightings.
**Prompted, no doubt, by my recent viewing of said British sketch-type comedy.

in which I dabble in the Albanian underworld

2010-11-12T07:56:00.001-08:00

Well. After yesterday's extremely mundane dream, last night I had a pretty wild one. Following a bit of conversation about the Balkans yesterday, I dreamed that I was in Albania. Not only was I in Albania, but I was--wait for it--dealing drugs.

I'm not sure how I came to be in Albania, but I had our (real-life) old Jaguar with me (this will come up again later). Despite having transportation, though, I was stuck because I didn't have enough money to leave the country. So, logically, I turned to dealing drugs to make a quick buck (or lek, as the case may be).

I don't know how I made the acquaintance of the local underworld figures, but I had ended up as sort of a freelancer, only dealing with them in an off-hand way. I think I was obligated to turn over some kind of "tax" to ensure that they wouldn't meddle in my affairs. I also got my drugs from them. Of course they fit the exact mental image you'd have of a small-time Albanian Bad Guy: greasy hair, gold necklaces, track suits, unfortunate choice of headwear.

At one point I was in the lair of my drug provider to get re-supplied. There were several young women/girls in various states of intoxication and undress--it was obvious that they were working in a state of semi slavery, serving both as prostitutes, sex slaves, and drug customers. One of the gangsters was beating one of them up*, and I was trying to think of a way to get these girls out of the situation, while realizing that most of them were too addicted to participate in any way in their extrication.

During this same visit, while the guy I was dealing with was otherwise occupied, I started idly examining some of the wares on the table. I wasn't sure what it all was, not having any experience in that area myself. There was a pink package with some pink plastic objects resembling short pens (the labeling and packaging style was very Feminine Hygiene Product**). They had a little hole near one end, which I deduced was supposed to be sucked on or inhaled to get a hit. I tried it once, and got enough of an indefinable sensation to remind myself that rule number one was always that a successful dealer didn't consume the goods.

One of the most noticeable things about the dream was the feeling of being in a dangerous situation but of being tough and "bad-ass" enough to not be worried about the gangsters trying to mess with me (where this came from, I don't know, since I'm not exactly a toughie in real life). The scariest moments were two encounters, while in or near my car, with a group of young knife-wielding Roma boys intent on carjacking my car (I put that down to a stereotype about them favoring Mercedes and Jaguars). They were significantly scarier than the grown-up gangsters, but I managed to evade them both times.

In the end, the dream wound down in a fairly tiresome way. I had met up with some random young-ish American(-ish?) dream acquaintances, and we were all hanging around waiting for something undefined. I think we were waiting to be able to leave the country, although I don't know what specific event was going to allow us to leave. I finally got tired of them and their uninteresting and stupid conversation and went off by myself.

So there's another one to add to my collection of dreams dealing with unsavory themes. In my defense, I don't actually remember selling any drugs to anyone, and I remember having a philosophy of not introducing new users to drugs.

*In an interesting twist, I'm positive that this brutalization was inspired by that recent video of the guy stomping on the moveon.org protester's head. He used the exact same foot action.
**I was surprised to note a manufacturer's name and address in China; I hadn't thought that a manufacturer of illegal drugs (in my mind, this was some new exotic form of crack) would label their products as if they were, say, something you'd buy at Wal-Mart.

hmph

2010-11-11T07:30:00.001-08:00

This is just to say that I am officially mad at my subconscious: just before waking up this morning, it saw fit to present me with a dream where I was both at work and on a group trip. The coworker that I have some personality incompatibility with featured prominently, too, jumping in and doing something that was really my job [that's half the crux of the personality incompatibility right there].

Hmph.

zombie lambs

2010-11-10T07:50:00.001-08:00

I had a really weird and disturbing dream just before waking up this morning. I wasn't clear on all the details, and I think there were some double meanings/significances that I barely caught at the time but now can't remember.

It started out nicely enough. I was in a beautiful open field that sloped up on three sides to more wooded areas (there was a road in the distance at the uppermost point). I was just walking slowly and enjoying the scenery when I noticed a deer. At first I thought it would run away as I approached, but it didn't because it was very intently searching for something. Rather creepily, it almost brushed me as it went past in its quest.

I was a little alarmed and hoped that it didn't have some kind of dangerous rabies-like illness that was causing it to throw caution to the wind, but I soon realized that she (it was a she) was looking for her fawn. Just when I realized this, the fawn hopped into sight, but kept on going after something further up the hill.

It turned out that the fawn was going toward what looked like a group of lambs. All very idyllic, right? Almost syrupy-sweet? BUT. When it got to the group of lambs, I saw that they were writhing around on the ground in various zombie-like states (I guess my fears of a malicious infection were well-grounded, if misplaced). Some were motionless, apparently having died from their malady, others were wriggling around weakly, and still others were aggressively jumping at the fawn and trying to bite it.

As if that weren't disturbing enough, I suddenly found that I was responsible for either a small child or an animal (a dog? a kitten?). I really can't remember what my child/pet was, exactly, but I suddenly had to protect some sort of relatively helpless being from the zombie lambs. The whole thing was extremely creepy. I think some of the animals may have had speaking parts too, but I can't remember what they may have said.

Cinderella Not Invited to the Party

2010-11-06T11:40:00.000-07:00

I had a disturbing dream the other night which brought to the surface one of my little hang-ups.

I dreamed that I was in some kind of gift shop/tourist shop/tattoo and piercing place. I was wandering around from room to room (it was almost as though it had been added onto as it grew). In the building were M (a work acquaintance), my sister E., and my ex-husband.

I was killing time because somehow I knew that the other three people in the dream were planning to either give or attend a big party and I was kind of lingering around to give them a chance to invite me. At the same time, though, I wanted to play it cool in case they weren't planning to invite me (this is where my hang-up comes in...I'm often not invited to social events for whatever reason).

I wandered through the tattoo/piercing place, where my ex was getting a really gory and weird piercing somewhere on his neck. I was grossed out, so I wandered on. M was leaning against the wall in another room, so I gave a vague smile and passed on. I looked around a room full of tourist knick-knacks, and decided to give it one more pass-through.

I started to go back to the rooms with the people I knew, but through the cracks in the door, I saw one of them donning a costume for the party. It was a Sideshow Bob costume, and the hair/wig was enormous, easily larger than the person wearing it. I realized that they'd decided not to invite me (or had forgotten me), so I went out to the parking lot and got in my car. It turned out to be a rental car, so I thought, "Well, since I'm not busy tonight, I'll just get this returned early."

Sarah Palin's National Geographic Cameo

2010-11-05T08:25:00.000-07:00

I've gotten woefully behind at reporting my dreams, but I couldn't let this one go unchronicled. This was night before last, and I couldn't have avoided the all-day political reporting even if I'd tried, so I'm sure the overdose was what caused this.

I was reading the National Geographic, which is one of my favorite real-life pastimes, and had gotten to the Letters to the Editor section. A woman was writing in about something they'd mentioned in an article or blurb that I had missed in a past issue. The missed article had apparently mentioned and quoted a man named Lewis, who had predicted that Sarah Palin would have a major political win in the future. The woman writing in was extremely excited about this, saying that she knew "the Lewises" in real life, that they were just wonderful people, and how had National Geographic gotten ahold of this "revelation" (!!??!!?? [punctuation marks taken from the letter]). Had National Geographic intercepted an e-mail from "Pastor Lewis"? This was wonderful news (!!!!). "Can you tell us more??!!??!!??"

Last night I returned to form with a tiring dream about group travel featuring an altercation with my sister after she told me that my underwear (when clean; this was all about the state of my overall stock of clean underwear) smelled bad. I think this may have been prompted by my realization the other day that it had been years and years since I've had any kind of disagreement with my sister and that it would seem very strange.

A few nights before that I had another dream in which I was traveling in India, first with my husband and then with my parents. The part with my husband followed our usual real-life pattern of him wanting to take things at a faster pace than I did ("yeah, this is nice, but we can't hang around too long or we'll miss such-and-such other place"). There were a lot of really neat aesthetic details in this dream.

rahm and his medium-size domestic animal

2010-10-04T14:05:00.000-07:00

The backstory is very confused as to how I got there and why, but I dreamed that I was attending a fancy party in an extremely expensive French apartment. Picture high ceilings, historic details, fancy stuff all around in a rococo style. At one point I drew a curtain back and was embarrassed to realize that I had unveiled a sleeping area composed of a gigantic bed. The hostess (random dream hostess*) was very nice about it, though.

The table had been partially set already, and then there was some shuffling around and we had to switch our seating arrangement. For some reason I was really agitated by the fact that people were no longer sitting in front of their preferred drink (all were very G-rated beverages like milk and orange juice, although one of the guests bore an eerie resemblance to Karl Lagerfeld, and I thought I read somewhere that he subsisted on Coke Zero).

At one point I looked out the window to check on a mild commotion below and saw Rahm Emmanuel a couple of stories below in the courtyard. He was throwing something (a treat?) to a medium-size domestic animal who was perched on a ledge about 15 feet off the ground. Unfortunately I don't remember if the animal was a goat or pig, but whatever it was, Rahm started scaling the wall to reach it. I was impressed at his climbing ability, but wondered what had gotten him and the animal into this unusual situation.

*Although I'm pretty sure that the fancy apartment was influenced by a blog I was perusing the other day, the hostess was not the blog's writer, just a random subconscious invention.

group trips, and my subconscious attempts to hammer some sense into me

2010-09-30T08:14:00.001-07:00

First of all, I had a very stereotypical group-trip dream last night. It was actually a bus tour (of where, I don't know). About 20% of the group were Chinese, and my seatmate was a Chinese girl. It was a pretty structured thing, with the tour guide telling us when to get off the bus, how much time we'd have, when to take pictures, etc. I really have no idea why I keep having these dreams--I haven't been on a group trip in years.

The other dream requires a little real-life background. I have a co-worker that I have a little bit of a personality conflict with. The only really objective problem I have with her is that she's kind of pushy/very sure of her opinions, and very quick to jump in and do things that are other people's jobs (for example, my job involves answering the phone, but she has a habit of picking it up micro-seconds after it's rung if she has the impression that I'm not at my desk [her impression is often wrong, and I'm actually at my desk, or close enough]--this is something that's persisted despite my politely requesting her not to do this). Anyway, thanks to the big difference between her personality and mine, and thanks to a tendency to paranoia and neurosis on my part, I've developed the idea that she disapproves of me and would like to be able to complain about me but feels she can't for one reason or another (certain things she does or says come across to me as veiled criticisms, even if they're not intended that way).

So that's the real-life background. In the dream, which was very realistic, I was at work. I was up doing something, and came back to find a sheet of paper on my desk. The paper had several receipts copied on it, with some specifications and instructions written on afterward by her. On looking at it briefly, I thought it was dealing with something that she wouldn't ordinarily have needed to be involved in; it looked to me like she was jumping in and assembling things because she felt like I hadn't taken care of it fast enough, and this was her way of shaming me for not being quick-quick-quick.

I was pretty angry, thanks to all that bottled-up resentment. I took it to a couple of other coworkers and waved it around, ranting about how passive-aggressive this was on her part (she wasn't around at this point). One of the other coworkers looked at it closer and pointed out that it was just some receipts she was submitting for reimbursement--so it wasn't something I had known about, or something that anyone could have possibly expected me to deal with yet. I was a bit deflated, but relieved that it wasn't actually a case of passive-aggressive criticism. Of course it was a little embarrassing to have ranted about it, but there was some solace in realizing that maybe I'd been too paranoid all along, and that it was possible that she wasn't constantly wishing for an opportunity to express just how awful (lazy, incompetent, backward) she thought I was.

I don't really know whether to be happy at this evidence that my subconscious is more sensible than my conscious, waking self, or to be annoyed at it for having this "I told you so" dream.

war of the gender stereotypes

2010-09-23T08:15:00.000-07:00

In one part of my dream night before last, I was driving in a nice, leafy urban neighborhood. Suddenly there was a loud explosion not too far in front of me, and I realized it was a car exploding. The explosion was very dramatic, with lots of dark gray smoke, and it completely vaporized the car--no subsequent burning car, practically no debris, nothing. There was an object where the car had been, and I realized with some alarm that it was the woman who had been driving. She was in remarkably good shape seeing that the car had been destroyed, but it was obvious she was seriously injured (although there wasn't really any blood; there hardly ever seems to be any blood in even my most violent dreams). Several passersby ran up to her, and I guess I did too, because I remember looking down at her feebly moving her arms and whispering, "help me!". A couple of proactive types were hovering over her, so I figured the most useful thing for me to do would be to call 911 (not being a proactive type myself). I went back to the car and started dialing, but my hands were shaking so badly that it took about 10 tries to get to the operator; each time I would either mis-dial, accidentally hang up, accidentally press the button for the internet browser, etc. It was very alarming, a new twist on that dream where you can't lock the door against the pursuing Bad Guy.

The next thing I remember, I was in an unfamiliar house where I lived (temporarily, I think) with my parents in addition to my husband. Things are a little hazy here, but there was some yelling between me and my mother and/or my husband--I can't remember who was yelling at who, although I think I was giving as good as I got.

Apart from fighting with family members, I was making some kind of concoction of onions, corn, canned beans, and some other miscellaneous ingredients. I went off to take a break while it was cooking, and ended up watching the ultimate chick flick on a tv in a spare room. Diane Lane, or a reasonable facsimile, was the female lead, and Viggo Mortensen (or, again, a doppelganger) was the male lead. She was falling into his arms (of course), and there was some of that requisite chick-flick music-less slow-dancing around the room. She got very emotional and started talking about how lonely she had been, and he said something totally unrealistic (but very chick-flicky) about how now she would never have to be lonely again because he was there to love her. I was simultaneously enthralled and disgusted, and also a little disgusted at myself because I realized that I wouldn't, in theory, at all mind a world in which people said that kind of thing to me (Viggo's line, not Diane's); although I could do without the slow-dancing-around-the-room stuff.

After the chick flick, I saw an iphone-like cell phone lying around and started messing with it (I think it belonged to my husband, who was off at work). There was an animated movie on it, and I guess I figured it would be a palate-cleanser after the extreme romance-novel thing I'd just watched. The drawing style was interesting, very stylized and a little more hand-drawn and raw than typical anime style. I don't remember the story line at all, but Calvin and Hobbes made a cameo appearance.

handsy old pastors

2010-09-15T15:53:00.000-07:00

I've had a lot of very weird dreams lately and then forgotten them. Particularly frustrating was one just the other night that I was sure I wouldn't forget. Of course now it's gone, except for a vague impression that it may have involved a pig, and a certainty that there were a lot of subplots.

One that I didn't forget was another group trip (of course). This was a true, classic Group Trip dream: it was a mission trip with a large group of people. There was a lot of the requisite sitting around and waiting involved in the real life version of such a trip. We were getting organized transportation-wise, which involved picking a spot in one of several house-like contraptions that would be moved. I suppose they were vehicles, but from the inside they appeared to be houses, with separate, adjoining rooms and regular furniture instead of vehicle seats (the furniture and decor tended toward the fusty).

I was trying to pick a spot that would be okay for the long trip without being too greedy and picking a really prime spot, so I settled on the corner of a bed. I thought that with the large number of people in the group, all the furniture would fill up, leaving me with just one corner of the bed (not a wall corner, at that, so I wouldn't even have anything to lean on). I left some of my stuff there to stake my claim, and when I came back there was a group of girls camping out on the bed. They were younger than me, and sort of the stereotypical bold, slightly mean group of girls who does everything together and won't be broken up for anything. I hadn't quite grasped what was going on so I said, "I'm sorry, this is my spot", but they wouldn't take no for an answer. [I swear, this particular girl who wanted my spot, while just a dream fabrication and not an actual person, was the doppelganger of a girl I got into a fight with in a thrift store in a dream I haven't ever gotten around to recording.]

At this point I have to speculate about why I was so determined to keep my corner-of-the-bed spot when there were still much more desirable easy chairs scattered around (including one exactly like this lovely Anthropologie model). It may have been my subconscious trying to tell me something about a particularly bad real-life habit I have of not articulating what I want. Anyway, I ended up finding a hideous white-and-pink sprigged armchair that was very comfortable, if not very sturdy.

I don't know if we ever actually got started on the trip, or if this was all still during the waiting-around period, but there were several instances of trying to find something to eat. The options on offer were all typical nasty institutional cafeteria food. Worse than that, though, was this startling and embarrassing phenomenon: every time I was standing around trying to get something to eat, an older retired-pastor type would grab my derriere! The first time it happened I almost wondered if I had just imagined it. But no, any time I saw a similarly late-60s pastor type out of the corner of my eye (always a different one), the bum-grabbing was not long in coming. I was getting extremely irritated about it by the time I woke up. My husband tried to convince me it was some sort of sublimated desire, but I'm quite sure I don't have a fetish for handsy old pastor types.

Bits and Pieces

2010-09-02T20:10:00.000-07:00

I haven't remembered any full dreams lately, just bits and pieces.

I dreamed about this guy with spiked hair and he was clean shaven. Later on in the dream, his hair was long and straight but he had what looked like dreadlocks hanging down from his mustache. It sounds pretty gross but in the dream, I thought it looked pretty cool.

***

I was blogging and noticed that I had 9 unmoderated comments. For some reason, Blogger no longer sent comments to your email so I had to go to the website to read them. Blogger had changed things around quite a bit and I wasn't familiar with how to navigate through the website. I clicked on the link I thought would allow me to view and approve the comments but it just took me to another screen with yet another link. I clicked on that link and it took me to a third page with another link. I clicked on that and it took me back to the first page. I kept going through the same three pages repeatedly but I couldn't ever seem to get to the comments moderation page. I eventually became frustrated and gave up.

***

I think I was volunteering at an old folks home. I'm not sure what my duties were there specifically but I witnessed this sad event.

There was an old man and an old woman sitting in chairs across the room from one another. The old man sat on the edge of his seat leaning forward, and the old woman did too. The man asked the woman to marry him. She excitedly said yes and the man got up and walked over to the woman. They embraced for a moment and may have even shared a kiss. I don't really remember there being a ring given. The woman's chair suddenly turned into a small sofa with just enough room for the two of them to sit on. They sat together holding hands. Then man put his head on her shoulder. I thought at first it was a sweet gesture of his affection towards her. I seemingly got distracted by something and looked away for several minutes. When I turned back to the senior couple, I realized the man was dead.

some non-gory but brutal violence, and an excessive amount of detail

2010-08-26T08:30:00.000-07:00

I'm completely overwhelmed by all the dreams I've had lately. For one thing, I feel like I've only remembered a tiny percentage of fragments; for another, they've been insanely and excessively detailed (noticeably more than usual, which is saying a lot). I guess I'll just start with some snippets in no particular order and see how far I get.

++++++++++++++++++++

This morning before work (in real life) I logged in to Yahoo IM in hopes of talking to a friend in a faraway time zone who's been wanting to chat for a while. Then I realized that I was falling asleep, so I turned the volume way up on the computer in hopes of waking up with the little window-opening noise if he tried to chat with me. That's the real-life background.

In the dream, I was sleeping in my house (except that of course it was slightly different, both in the house's characteristics and the location, which was more wooded). In the dream I also had the computer on while I slept (for the same reason), so I was sleeping a bit fitfully. [I find it weird when dreams parallel real life so closely, especially when I dream that I'm asleep.] I ended up waking up to find that my husband had been there, which surprised me since he had already gone to work and is usually way too busy to come back home. He was trying to sleep in a gigantic king-size bed in a different bedroom (our house had morphed again), and said that he had come home the previous morning too.

That was the boring part. I got into bed intending to sleep some more, and woke up to hear strange sounds outside. We got up and looked out the window, and finally figured out that it was a disgruntled former coworker of my husband, shooting randomly with a shotgun (it must have been a pretty wimpy shotgun, because the sounds weren't very loud). We weren't sure what to do, but before we had decided on a course of action I heard noises in the house. He had somehow gotten inside and was waving his gun around, ranting and raving. I went out into the living room, and he shot wildly and missed the side of my head. Obviously something had to be done, so I picked up a greenish marble cutting board (not something we own) and gave him several solid blows to the head. He slumped over a countertop and I hit him several more times, very much in the way you'd crush a cockroach to be sure it was dead (there was no gore, at least). Then I produced a small pistol out of the blue (we don't have a pistol either) and shot him in the temple to be really sure--no gore there, either. The pistol was just as wimpy as his shotgun--no kick, and not much noise. It occurred to me to wonder why I hadn't found a bigger gun, but this one seemed to have done the job.

Of course after that I was stressed about what to do, not to mention extremely disturbed at having just killed someone (in self-defense, but still, the repeated head-bashing was a little much). Fortunately my alarm went off then.

++++++++++++++++++

Another recent dream involved living in a dorm modeled loosely after my high-school dorm (where, thankfully, I didn't actually have to live). The rooms were very small and the hallways were narrow, and it was set up so that people in the hallway could peek through large cracks in western-saloon type doors and see what was going on in the bathrooms. There wasn't much of a plot, just an overwhelming amount of stuff all over--my stuff, other people's stuff, just all kinds of objects crammed into every available space. At one point I took a bath in some random stranger's bathtub, and the bathroom was chock full of all kinds of toiletries and shampoo. After that I visited my sister in her room and spent some time going through her selection of jewelry, which was a lot of ethnic and vintage stuff. I remember a necklace of jet beads carved into the shape of rosebuds, almost like a rosary, and a curious thing from Czechoslovakia: an egg-shaped container of very thin wood with decorative painting. I opened it up to find that it was full of tiny pins out of the same very thin wood, in lots of different shapes (people, geometric shapes, etc.), meant to be combined in different configurations. I was extremely impressed with her collection.

The dorm then changed a little bit, and I was in an upstairs room helping Curly Sue (who actually had to live in the aforementioned high-school dorm!) move to a different facility. It turned out that she had been incarcerated for some not-too-serious offense and was graduating to a lower-security facility. It can't have been anything too serious, because her mother was there helping with the move, and she didn't seem too disturbed about her daughter's crime/incarceration. Also, in conversation with them I remembered that my dad had recently had a similar stint behind bars.

The funny random detail here is that she was wearing several hats (literally, not figuratively). She had layered two or three knit caps of various textures on her head, and she changed these at least once during the dream. The consistent thing was that the hat on top was always just balanced rakishly on top of the others, not pulled down over her head. I found it curious and didn't completely comprehend the reason she offhandedly gave for her distinctive headgear styling, but I let it drop.

++++++++++++++++++

That's just a couple; maybe I'll give it another try later. Stay tuned for not just one but TWO dust-ups in thrift stores; an anthropological exploration of either Afghanistan or Macedonia, depending on which part of the dream you believe; and an outpouring of emotion for an adoptive father (??).

Paris in the Summer

2010-08-24T04:39:00.000-07:00

I was in Paris. We were on a bus, then suddenly a bubbly blonde girl next to me told me that she was going to take me to the best place in Paris. She whispered the name in my ear, but I couldn't hear it. Then she translated, but her voice dropped away again at the moment she started the translation.

Inside the restaurant there were many large tables, and people sat on high stools and smoked and drank. There was a lot of smoking, and I thought, 'this is paris!'. But, then it was hard to find a spot to sit - the location wasn't crowded, but there were only 3 or 4 stools at each table, and they were taken. As I looked closer, I realized no one was drinking and when they smoked, the cigarettes didn't get any smaller... it was going to take a very long time to get a table.

So we went out for a walk. There were a crowd of people out front, each with an umbrella in front of them, so we went in a different direction. We stopped at a street corner and couldn't go any further. I looked around at the grey city and couldn't believe that I was really in Paris. It wasn't as visually beautiful as I thought it would be, but the vibe was exactly what I expected.

*note - I have never actually been to Paris.

Mascara

2010-08-20T08:27:00.001-07:00

I was supposed to go somewhere--breakfast, I think--with a cute boy, but I wasn't quite ready, so we came back to my place so that I could freshen up. I was just going to put on some mascara, but for some reason it ended up taking me forever. I felt awful, because not only was I making us late, I has lost my sort of fresh-faced charm, both by appearing to be super high-maintenance by spending so long on my makeup, and for actually putting on too much. I knew I had disappointed him and felt like a total failure.

Unrelatedly, in the dream I had straight, dark brown hair that reached to my shoulders, and longish bangs. In real life, my hair is much shorter, curlier, and multicolored.

more group trips, and a trompe-l'oeil bird

2010-08-12T08:20:00.000-07:00

My brain is back to its old tricks, apparently--I had another group trip dream last night. It was a combination group trip/family reunion. All of the extended family members from my dad's side had met at some location far from where anyone lived. The first part of the dream involved some socializing with older relatives. Then someone tried to do an organized activity, and encouraged us to break up into groups of 3 or 4 (I've never been all that keen on activities involving a structured forming into groups). For some reason, a real-life friend (Curly Sue, as it happens) was also there at the reunion, so we formed a group with two of my younger cousins. In real life, one is my age and one is a few years younger, but in the dream they were teenagers, probably because I haven't seen them for years. We started talking to them, and I was aware that I was feeling happy about being the cool older relative (and simultaneously really annoyed at both the feeling and the awareness of the feeling; my self-analyzer just won't ever leave me alone!).

After that, the group broke up pretty quickly and people started leaving. I guess we had planned to have a "friends" outing after the family reunion, because I was supposed to meet another real-life friend. I did some random wandering around, and then Curly Sue and I met her at a cafe that bore a strange resemblance to a cross between a laundromat and a Chinese restaurant.

This friend recently had a baby in real life, but in the dream she had apparently, in addition to having her real-life baby, had another baby who was still-born. She started talking about how she was looking forward to the second coming (of Christ, that is) because then her baby would "rise first" with a wave of other babies who had been still-born. In real life I'm not quite clear on the various Christian denominations' views on this, but in the dream she held a view that was supposedly the "evangelical view". She said that she and her husband hadn't thought they had any particular religious views, until the birth of the still-born baby, and then, very abruptly, they "saw the light" (she worded it more gracefully than that) and suddenly started subscribing to this mainstream theology. She even had a printout of something referring to the mass resurrection of still-born babies, some sort of liturgical thing printed out on the typical half-page paper with poor copy quality. I think both Curly Sue and I were a bit surprised at this, but she made it clear that she hadn't become a hardcore conservative and was still her old, open-minded self, so we figured it was a good way for her to adjust to and accept the death of the baby.

After that, I went on a hike with the other friend (not Curly Sue), and we ended up on a very steep scaffolding-like section of trail above a boardwalk (almost Coney Island style, but with less people and more nature). There was an odd encounter with a little bird. It was hopping around, and I noticed it looked strange. I realized that the actual bird had been encased in a covering (made from an old sock!) painted to look like a bird. I managed to catch the bird and remove the covering. It was a bit unsettling, but the bird seemed to be happy either way (with or without the trompe-l'oeil covering).

a dream about a dream about a dream

2010-08-09T15:18:00.000-07:00

I've been having a terrible time remembering my dreams lately. I keep waking up, noting something, thinking "there's no way I'll forget this", and then forgetting it. Last night's dream, though, I could have done with forgetting.

To start with, I had a terrible time going to sleep, which is unusual for me. My fingers kept falling asleep while I was still awake, which prompted me to fidget, which woke up my grumpy sleep companion, who was also apparently not sleeping as deeply as usual.

That was the real-life part. I realized that I was fidgeting a lot and disturbing the sleep of the bed's other occupant, and this started blending into my dream: I started to dream that we were sleeping, in our usual bed, and that I was moving around a lot. He (in the dream, and possibly also in real life) kept waking up and making progressively more irritated growling noises. Of course the more I tried to stay still, the harder I found it. This dream went on and on, punctuated by short periods of waking that mirrored what was going on in the dream. At one point, I woke up and realized that I had been dreaming that I was dreaming about a bad night's sleep. To add insult to injury, our dogs kept barking (in real life), which is something they don't normally do at night.

I finally woke up not long before it was time to get up, realized I was cold, and added some covers to my side of the bed. After that I must have slept better, because I then dreamed that, twenty minutes before we were due to get up, my husband woke up, looked at me, and said, "well, then, let's just order some breakfast from IHOP" (which is an odd choice, because neither of us likes IHOP). We started discussing menu options, and I was relieved that he had decided not to blame his sleepless night on me.

The real-life post-script is that, on actually getting up, I realized that the whole horrible night of sleeplessness wasn't really my fault. For the next hour, both dogs continued to have barking fits indicating that there was some kind of animal nearby (the neighbor dogs were doing it when ours weren't), and I realized that they had been doing it for most of the night. Of course that didn't give me back my lost sleep.

Like You Don't Read The Tabloids Too While You're Waiting In Line At The Grocery Store!

2010-08-05T22:38:00.000-07:00

I haven't remembered any dreams in a really long time with the exception of several snippets involving a spider on the wall or the ceiling. Um yeah, not really liking those dreams so much...

This one was from earlier in the week and is the one I remember the most clearly in a long while. There's a blogger I'm following who recently posted that she's in the hospital. And this is my dream:

I was standing in line at Walmart, waiting to pay for the items in my cart. While waiting for the person in front of me to finish, I was perusing the tabloids. What better way to pass the time, right? I opened one up and right there, in the tabloid, was a story about my bloggy friend being in the hospital. I was really shocked! Not because I didn't know she was in the hospital, because I did. What shocked me is that I didn't expect the tabloid to write about it. After finishing the story, I set it aside and picked up another tabloid, which also had a story about my bloggy buddy. Finally, it was my turn and as I was stacking my items on the belt thingie, I remember thinking, "Wow, who knew Juliana was so famous?"

When I woke up from that dream, my first thought was that she had died. I'm sure she hasn't. She may still be in the hospital or if she's not, she's probably still not feeling well. But each day that passes and she hasn't posted, that thought comes back to me. I hope she's ok.

Re-Do

2010-07-31T16:59:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I had a dream that I woke up barely remembering. There was something about Britney Spears, and my friend Taryn from college, and maybe someone's grandma died. There was definitely a very long pier. Bit and pieces. Barely remembered fragments.

Then last night I started having the same dream again. But this time, there was an instruction - I was supposed to change it, so that someone else couldn't trace it. I tried to make it more complicated, this time some of my cousins were involved, as well as an ex. I had to fake "them" out so that they couldn't find the body. Somehow the same pier was there, but this time there was a tall fence with barb wire.

And we went to the beach. While unpacking the trunk, my grandma told me that I had go get some toys for my cousins. Like maybe some handheld-gaming systems or a laptop or something. I balked - we were at the beach. Besides the fact that they'd get ruined by the sand, I thought they should have to enjoy the beach the way everyone else always had... a book and maybe a boogie board.

I woke up shortly after. I wonder if I did a good enough job of changing things up so that "they" didn't know what was going on. I wonder.

#did inception do this to me?

Demon Cat

2010-07-25T14:19:00.001-07:00

My psyche totally made up for the last thoroughly uncharacteristic, but lovely and affirming, dream I posted here by waking me up this morning screaming. In the dream, if was a full-throttled anguished wail, but what actually woke me in real life was my own pitiful whimper.

A couple of my best friends were in town for my wedding (what?!)*, and he brought their daughter and cat to my apartment so that I could watch them for a while; I think his wife was sick. Almost immediately, though, this cat (which in real life is lovely) revealed itself to be an absolute demon. It went behind the TV and there was a theatrical flash of light blue light and a powering-down sound that indicated that the cat had chewed through the TV wires. The same thing happened and the computer went down. As I tried to catch and contain the cat, it chomped down hard on my left wrist and latched on. I tried blowing in its face, swatting it, flinging it off, and prying its jaws open, but it held on, and although I knew it was inflicting a pretty serious injury that would hurt a lot, I also didn't want to hurt the cat.

But then, then! It let go, only to dart into a large cage that had appeared on the floor and contained another couple of best friends' kitties. These kitties were somehow much smaller and more fragile, and the demon cat killed them almost instantly.**

This time I picked up the demon cat and sort of flung it to the floor. Even though it was nothing compared to the shaking that completely failed to loosen it when it had its teeth in my wrist, this time it, of course, suddenly died.

It was the realization that I was directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of basically all of my best friends' cats (though thank goodness my subconscious forgot the toddler in my care and thus allowed her to escape unscathed!), and the fear that David wouldn't love me any more after I'd killed all those animals, that woke me up howling. What an awful dream.

*This getting-married-oh-no! themed dream broke with convention, as the potential groom was my current boyfriend, it was a day or two before the wedding, and before my brain could totally freak out over the idea of getting married, it was interrupted by the antics of a demon cat.

**In real life, one of these kitties really is kind of demonic.

Baby

2010-07-22T10:46:00.000-07:00

Somehow, I had a baby. Theoretically I had given birth to it, although that part didn’t figure into the dream at all. In fact, although my baby had apparently just been born, it was beautiful in the way that few, if any, newborns are: it had creamy ivory skin, downy hair, bright eyes, and a perfect little mouth. Oh, and it spoke in complete sentences. That part was especially impressive. Even in the dream, that seemed a particularly unusual feature.

I marveled at the baby’s beauty and intelligence and I loved it intensely—I just wanted to hold it and stare at it and kiss it. And I could tell it loved me back! It would affectionately snuggle up to me, and since it could speak, it also told me as much, although I can’t remember now exactly what it said. I liked the way it would put its head on my shoulder when I carried it on my back.

At one point in the dream I was carrying it on my back while I attended to other business, and suddenly realized I was missing it. I remember thinking something along the lines of, “Awwww, man! I KNEW I wasn’t responsible enough for this!” But then I discovered that one of the women I work with had taken my baby and another friend’s baby to put them in a double-cradle for a nap, so that was okay.

There were several of us with babies, actually, including a grad school friend whose baby looked rather like the Renaissance baby Jesuses she studies, and I think my aunt Teri. I was thankful to have them to ask for advice. Near the end of the dream, I realized I’d never had my baby weighed, measured, or in any other way tested after it was born, and wondered if I should find a doctor to do that. “No,” one of the other mothers assured me, “it’s better this way!” The reasoning was something about not buying in to the idea of comparing with others, or false progress, or something like that.

In real life, I do not want a baby, although I do enjoy other people’s. But this dream was kind of amazing, particularly for the mutual adoration between the baby and me, an emotional sensation that has lingered since I woke up. In the past I’ve had very anxious dreams about caring for someone else’s child and something going terribly wrong, but in this case, even though the baby was (yikes!) mine, it was all very positive and generally affirming.

the zombie horde

2010-06-29T08:35:00.000-07:00

I had a series of weird dreams this morning in between repeated snooze-button punchings. In the first, I had been obliged to attend a high school reunion and was not happy about being there. In hopes of avoiding being seen and having to fill people in on my current news, I escaped to the library (not my actual high-school library but a dream library). The rows of shelves were very low, about shoulder height, which dismayed me since I couldn't conceal myself without hunching over.

I was still vainly hoping that I was somewhat hidden when I noticed that a group of older people had come in. I'm not sure what they were doing there, but they had some connection with the reunion or with some other event that was going on. I sensed that they were trying to get away from the action and into a quiet spot. However, lined up evenly spaced between the rows of shelves, they just looked alarming. They all had salt-and-pepper hair in exactly the same shade, were all about the same height and weight (short-to-medium height and skinny), and they all moved very slowly and had vacant looks.

I shouted, to no one in particular, "look, it's the zombie horde!" In real life, of course, this would be extremely rude and not funny at all, but in the dream it was absolutely hilarious and I couldn't stop laughing and congratulating myself on my wit. I was also relieved to have had a bit of comedy to take my mind off my undesirable situation.

I don't remember much of the other dream, except that the protagonist was a rather nondescript man in his mid to late 30s. He had somehow gotten himself employed as a telemarketer, calling up a narrowly defined target demographic (doctors or engineers, something like that) to try to interest them in some very specialized consulting service. Of course none of them were interested, which made him hate the job even more. He was sitting at his desk trying to assemble his lunch, which consisted of sliced turkey lunch meat, sliced cheese, and some kind of flat bread*, and having a meltdown. He was yelling at his boss about having to call these people who weren't interested, how that wasn't what he wanted to do, etc. etc. I really felt sorry for him, because I knew that he was highly educated and had gotten himself into this job by mistake and necessity.

*This was undoubtedly thanks to a recent viewing of the remake of The Prisoner, wherein the only food available was "wraps" (I recommend it, by the way--the program, not necessarily the wraps).

Used Car Saleswoman

2010-06-26T06:48:00.000-07:00

In this dream, I was scouting around for a new job (as is always the case in real life). I'd decided to try out selling used cars (?!). In a dingy, dirty, run-down part of the city, an older black man who owned a used car lot decided to give me a chance.

This was a tiny car lot, squeezed onto a street corner. It wasn't even a square lot, but was very irregularly shaped, hemmed in my a huge chain link fence topped by razor wire. The main office was in an old RV or bus.

The owner of the business gave me two crisp hundred dollar bills, presumably to use in Making Deals. And then he kind of left me to it. I was pretty nervous, since I've never sold anything to anyone in my life.

Pretty soon, however, a small group of middle-class white people showed up, though not to buy a car. It turned out that the owner of the car lot was involved in the local at-risk-teens program, and these white people were delivering some kind of program materials and some money for him to run it.

They were kind of milling around, so a woman (much shorter than me) started asking me about myself. I told her I was just trying out this job because I was dissatisfied with my current job. She said she could tell that I was smart and a nice person, and she knew of a place that was hiring, and that it would be perfect for me.

I was kind of excited, so I asked for details. She said that the job was in a library. I was pretty let down, since that's my current job, and I told her that I already worked in a library.

Devil at the Party

2010-06-26T06:41:00.000-07:00

This was one of the dreams in which I'm sometimes observing the action, and sometimes a direct participant.

I dreamed I was at a party of some kind, with lots of people just sitting around in a living room or a patio. At first, I was sitting there, enjoying myself, but then I started to realize that a person sitting across from me was actually evil. This person seemed to shift from a man to a woman, so I couldn't say for sure which it was. But she/he was evil.

As I came to realize this, the devil just kept staring at me, and I knew that she/he knew that I'd figured it out. Somehow I feared that it could sort of read my mind.

Then I switched to observing. A younger kid went to the bathroom and figured out that the devil was at the party. He poked his head out of the bathroom and signaled to his mom to come to help him. But he really wanted to tell her about the evil person. She came to the bathroom and decided to give him a bath. But when she turned to get a towel, the boy seized up and just died instantly. She fished him out of the tub, where he'd sunk. She was scared and freaking out, but she knew she had to keep a low profile.

Then I was back in the living room. I knew what had happened in the bathroom, and then it suddenly became clear to me that the dead kid was really my sister. I started trying to signal to a friend that this evil person was in the room. I still suspected, however, that the evil person could read my mind. She/he just kept sitting across from me, wearing a small, ironic smile that was just for me. She/he knew that I was going to try to spread the word, but she/he also knew that I was afraid that more deaths would take place.

snippets

2010-06-23T08:48:00.001-07:00

I had a weird assortment of dreams last night, but I only remember a few bits. I was crawling on my stomach with a few other people into a cave-like space under a concrete traffic underpass construction. I wasn't too excited about it and was starting to feel pretty claustrophobic, which led to a realization that I had never really liked caving. I announced that to my companions with a feeling of relief, as if I had been obliged to do a lot of caving (??) and this was finally going to free me of having to do an activity I didn't enjoy.

While we were crawling around, I was gathering dirt in addition to some other unclear objective (there was a reason we were under there). The next snippet I remember was a contest involving making a concoction with an inedible substance that would resemble as closely as possible a food or personal care product (??). My item was a skin cream simulacrum, made by whipping up the collected dirt with some store-bought lotion (apparently we could use a certain amount of ready-made product). I whipped it up until it looked like light-colored chocolate mousse (which begs the question of why I didn't call it chocolate mousse) and labeled it as a beauty product.

The judging involved normal consumers looking at the products (not knowing about the inedible ingredients) and choosing which they were most interested in buying. There was a lady who was very excited about my skin cream and wanted to buy some and use it immediately. I wasn't sure what the procedures were going to be for the rest of the contest, but I was very concerned that she was actually going to try to use some--I kept picturing her applying what was basically mud to her arms. I dropped several broad hints, but she wasn't taking them and I got more and more panicked about how to stop her from trying the cream.

After that I was stuck in traffic, which is a frustrating thing to dream about, since I spent about an hour stuck in terrible traffic on my way home yesterday. I was able to drive at almost full speed for a while in the dream, although traffic ahead was slowing drastically. Suddenly one of the tires on my car blew out, but I managed to calmly brake and pull over without rear-ending the car in front of me. When the insurance people showed up (insurance people show up to accidents?), they knew me already because apparently we had been ordering a lot of miscellaneous car parts and they had a lot of dealings with the parts people. What a boring snippet....

crocodiles and mobsters

2010-06-18T12:25:00.001-07:00

I know I say this fairly often, but I really had the most exhausting dream just before waking up this morning. [This is Part 1 and Part 2, since blogger won't let me put in all the necessary labels. Part 3 is below.]

Part 1:

I had a plane ticket to go and visit a friend of mine. There was one connection, and for some reason I thought the hour or so was a huge amount of time. I left the airport and ended up in a national park near Houston (apocryphal as far as I know) known for its crocodiles. I had no car and no camping gear, but I had completely forgotten about my flight and was walking around the campground choosing a site. I felt slightly liberated by the idea of camping all alone, like I was doing something very brave and adult. I guess it was rather brave, since the campground was surrounded by a bayou (of very clear water, weirdly). The water came right up to the campsites, and the bottom sloped down very slowly, giving the impression that you were actually in the water while you were still on land. I didn't see any crocodiles, somewhat disappointingly.

Part 2:

Before I could settle on a campsite, I remembered that I was supposed to be making my connection flight and was now about three hours late for it. I was extremely unhappy with myself, and stressed out about what to do. I hemmed and hawed for a while, and then finally realized that I was actually at my friend's house, having somehow magically arrived there. For a while I was very confused and kept thinking that I still needed to arrange transportation to get there.

She lived in a weird building with a labyrinth of rooms and an assortment of people. At one point I found myself squeezed onto a couch with her (somewhat portly) father and some random young bearded and hatted musicians, all singing and boisterously celebrating their newly-released cd, the product of a collaboration with a lot of high-profile people (including Charlotte Gainsbourg). Her father was getting very excited about the music and the cd, and kept encroaching further into my personal space. It was all completely innocent, but I was getting very physically uncomfortable being squashed, and couldn't think of a way to extricate myself without making a scene. I think he was also shirtless, which added to the discomfort.

[continued below]

crocodiles and mobsters cont.

2010-06-18T11:52:00.000-07:00

(cont.)

Part 3:

I was now out somewhere with a group of people, including the friend and some random dream characters of a wide range of ages and ethnicities. We were in a big concrete building on an upper floor--it was a very bare, industrial sort of building, all metal and concrete and very Soviet Eastern Europe. We must have been on a guided tour, because we had all entered a rather dodgy-looking restroom (this was part of the tour, not a bathroom break). About that time, I realized that we were being guided in there by Russian mobsters. They did the requisite yelling ("get down! Shut up!" etc.), and I dove into the first available stall. Unfortunately it turned out to not have a door, so my hopes of crouching on the toilet to avoid detection were dashed.

The mobsters singled me out for some reason and yelled something at me. I'm not really clear on what happened next because it was very quick, but I realized that a grenade had been unpinned and it would behoove me to get out of there. I had a very weird sensation of simultaneous extreme fear and complete fearlessness, and for once my dream running was very effective (probably faster and with more coordination than in real life). I ran right past them and out the door to try to get out of range of the grenade.

I dashed out into a hallway and out the door, which led me to a long concrete exterior staircase with no railing (this was probably at about a 5th-floor level). At this point I realized that the bathroom mobsters had let me go knowing that they had companions outside the building who could take me out. I got to the bottom of the stairs and started running across an open space of packed dirt (there were buildings all around similar to the one I'd come out of, all deserted). I knew that there were mobsters around, but I also realized that I had to keep running even though the open space left me vulnerable to being picked off.

At about this point, I think I was caught by one of them, but this is where things got weird. Because when I realized that I was being caught, I also realized that this was a movie dream, and my perspective shifted to outside myself. When it shifted, I saw that I wasn't really me, but a much smaller teenager with long dark hair and bangs. This smaller "me" started belting out a song and I realized, "great, I've gotten myself trapped in a musical". [I'm not a real-life fan of musicals; I find it disconcerting how they burst into song at random times.] I tried to put the movie/dream on fast forward so I wouldn't have to listen to the songs and could get to the end faster, and it worked.

a first

2010-06-10T10:26:00.000-07:00

readers, i had a dream first! last night i dreamed that i was myself... and then turned around and saw myself... outside of myself.

i don't remember any other details of the dream except this:

i had the contents of my purse spread out on a sofa. i was digging through it and trying to determine what i needed and what i didn't (i think this represents my current state of feeling cluttered in my life - my house is not tidy and my brain has a lot of cluttered thoughts at the moment about life-direction, what i want, that kind of thing). while i was digging through the mess and feeling a bit overwhelmed and ashamed of myself for the mess, i turned around to see myself sitting in a chair behind me!

the me who was sitting in the chair (we'll call her CM for chair me) had a peaceful and knowing smile on her face as she watched the me who was digging through my things (we'll call her DM for digging me). DM was startled and a little giddy to see CM, knowing that this was something that had never happened before - two MEs in the same room at the same time. DM wanted to call someone else to come in and witness this strange event but as soon as she attempted to call for someone, CM disappeared. DM turned back to her task at hand and thought about what a crazy/weird/cool thing had just happened and then decided to turn around again just to check if CM had come back - and sure enough, she had. CM was still pleasantly smiling and chill and this made DM relax and chill out as well. and then once again, CM disappeared.

i've never seen myself in a dream in that way before. i recall seeing myself in a mirror, and i'm pretty sure i've had dreams where i was outside of myself and watching myself (like watching a movie i was in, that sort of thing)... but never have i interacted with myself in a dream like that before. crazy.

i determined when i woke up that DM represented my thoughts and CM represented my awareness behind my thoughts. it seemed the most logical conclusion when i was still half asleep, and seemed even more logical when i was fully awake... so that's what i'm sticking with.

scary rednecks

2010-06-04T08:27:00.000-07:00

I may be having another run of unpleasant dreams, because I had one last night that was really scary, although it probably won't sound scary. Trust me, it was terrifying.

I was out somewhere in the country with some members of my family. I don't remember exactly who was there other than my mother, but I think my sister, grandmother, and some other random people were with us (yeah, I guess it counts as a group trip). I was walking by myself down a very narrow, deserted country road. It was very pretty, running between wide fields on one side and a hillside on the other, and I was completely relaxed (I think I was even picking wildflowers).

I wasn't expecting a car to come along, so when one did I was completely taken off guard. I didn't even see it until it was level with me, and the road was so narrow that it brushed me as it went past (very slowly). I wasn't too alarmed until I noticed that not only had they slowed way down when they passed me, but they were coming to a complete stop. The driver and passenger got out, and I saw that they were a couple. Normally this would reassure me, but they were horrifying, very Menacing-Redneck-from-a-horror-movie*. The man was tall and skinny with stringy blond hair and a trucker cap, and the woman was one of those skinny, withered long-term smokers/drinkers/druggers of indeterminate age. They were both very weathered, but the woman was a bit more horrifying, with big, buggy, glassy gray eyes.

I couldn't figure out why they were after me or what they intended to do with me, but they were clearly on the hunt. They chased me around the car several times, although how they didn't catch me I don't know, since I was doing that extreme slow-motion heavy-limb running that always happens in scary dreams.

I don't remember how I managed to elude them, but the next thing I can remember is being in a car with my various family members and still being terrified and traumatized. They didn't really take it seriously, since they hadn't been there to face the redneck specters. One interesting detail of this car ride is that I was in the passenger's seat, but my mother, who had previously been driving, was in the back seat. She said, "oh, it's no big deal, just steer from the passenger's seat"**. I wondered how I was supposed to deal with braking and shifting from the passenger's seat, but I think the car just rolled to a stop without any problems.

The next thing I remember is arriving at a house, still with assorted family members in tow. We were all hungry and needed to eat, but for some reason a restaurant wasn't a consideration. We had uncooked food, so we just entered a house (inhabited) and I went straight to the kitchen and started heating water***. Some of my party voiced misgivings with this, but I waved it off like taking over someone's kitchen without permission was a perfectly acceptable thing to do. I think I was still under the impression that my trauma with the rednecks gave me carte blanche to do whatever necessary for survival.

*It probably sounds from these dreams like I watch a lot of horror movies; I don't, but the ones I have tend to stick around in my subconscious. And at least 75% of them seem to feature Scary Rednecks.
**I've had this dream before, realizing that I'm in the passenger's seat of a moving vehicle with no one in the driver's seat. It's pretty obvious what that means, although I don't like the sounds of it. But frankly, I'm not sure I want to dig too deep into this new twist (my mother vacating the driver's seat). Seems a bit too Freudian for comfort.
***Wait a minute, I've dreamed this before too, except that my parents were the ones advocating breaking and entering, and I was the voice of reason.

Hilary

2010-06-03T10:42:00.001-07:00

I dreamed I was at some sort of fancy boutique, which sort of morphed into/out of a Banana Republic. I was examining two skinny belts, trying to decide which color to buy and having difficulty ascertaining the actual color of each. I think they started out basically red and blue, but then became so dark that I couldn't distinguish between them. I tried to get them into better light so that I could see more clearly, at which point I was assisted by a salesperson--who happened to be Hilary Clinton.*

In retrospect, I think it was 90s-era Hilary, with longer hair and a smoother face, and she struck me as very poised and polished. I was filled with admiration and respect, as well as gratitude for her help. (Later in the dream, I passed another older, very professional-looking woman, whom I understood to be the president of Banana Republic, and overheard someone mention how nice it was to have these two very important women on the floor.)

I didn't see Hilary again, but when I went to check out, my total came to $710. I had anticipated spending too much money, but not that much too much, so I asked the cashier to go down the receipt for me. I had somehow rung up all sorts of odd things, including a $20 DVD that I didn't want, and asked her to remove. I woke up before we made it through all the items.

*As Hilary hasn't even been in the news much, all I can think of that would have triggered this is having heard the news yesterday (via FB--not even an article!) about Al and Tipper divorcing.

yuck.

2010-06-03T10:13:00.000-07:00

It's been a really long time since I had a variation on this dream, but just before waking up this morning I dreamed that my husband was openly ogling someone right in front of me.

I don't know what the context was, but we were seated at a table somewhere, maybe at some kind of outdoor event. To my left was a Diane Kruger lookalike. In addition to being incredibly beautiful and completely flawless, she seemed to have a perfect personality (unlike grumpy, neurotic ol' me). I think I had made a little superficial conversation with her because she was just so nice that I couldn't be antisocial and ignore her.

After we had exchanged a couple of sentences, my husband leaned over from his position on my right and started brazenly ogling Ms. Kruger-lookalike. I'm not sure if he actually spoke directly to her, but he was clearly completely smitten and I had hopelessly lost the battle of comparisons. I don't remember if I objected verbally to his ogling or if he just saw that I was disturbed, but in response to my irritation he started in on a list of her virtues and my deficiencies.

Up to this point the dream followed the usual template, but whereas usually I just slink off and disappear to nurse my hurt feelings elsewhere, this time I practically exploded. I first ranted at him that he was being really rude to Ms. Kruger-lookalike by ogling her so brazenly. Then I may have added that I didn't cotton well to his ogling of her either--I'm not sure if I verbalized that. I do remember going into his flaws, although I don't remember what any of them were other than a failure to do the dishes. I think I went so far as to say that I wasn't sure I loved him anymore. The whole dream was extremely disturbing, and the aftertaste was pretty disturbing as well.

Snippets

2010-05-28T12:42:00.000-07:00

I haven't remembered many of my dreams lately, just a little snippet here and there. But I haven't posted in awhile and was kind of feeling like I've been neglecting this blog. So here ya go...

Last night I dreamed that I was back to working in a salon. (I used to work in one eons ago and quit there because it wasn't a stable income.) I had the feeling that I was pretty poor and was excited when I man came into the salon for a haircut. His first question was if I could shampoo his hair without getting water all down his back. He also wanted to know if I could blow-dry his hair once I was done. Of course I told him yes! We went back to my little area of the salon where I draped him with a haircutting cape. I then took him over to the shampoo bowl. His head didn't seem to fit into it and I couldn't figure out why at first. Then I noticed that there were perm rods in the bowl. A co-worker (one who I really did work in the salon with but haven't seen in years) came over and had the guy lift his head up onto the counter for a moment while she rinsed the rods and took them out of the sink. The counter was up much higher than the sink and the way the guy was positioned, I don't know how he could've gotten it up there?! So she gets all done and I proceed to shampoo his hair. In the mean time, some random dream guy showed up and was asking me all kinds of questions. I don't know what he was asking me but it seemed to take a lot of concentration to think of the answers and I wasn't paying much attention to the guy whose hair I was shampooing. I got all finished and sat up the guy there for a haircut and put a towel on his head. As he rubbed his hair dry with the towel, I noticed his back was all wet. He got up and left, cape and all. As he was walking out, I said goodbye but continued to talk to the second man. Shortly after, I realized that I hadn't given the first man any of what he'd asked for. I was concerned my supervisor would be angry that he didn't even pay for the shampooing and wondered what I'd tell her.
***********************************************************************************
This was a very disturbing dream to me. I don't have a job in real life and can't seem to get one. I'm barely managing to keep my head above water each month so I pray this isn't a forewarning of what's to come.

I was walking around my house and there were lots of packed boxes everywhere, some of them sealed shut already and others only partially packed so they were still open. In real life, I have a room which I call my girly room. It's sponge painted pink and blue. In the dream, I went into that room for some unknown reason and noticed the walls had been repainted, they were now all white. I couldn't figure out why it had been repainted. In my confusion, I stumbled into one of the open boxes and turned to look at the items in it. There was a look of horror on my face as I realized that not only were the items not mine, but the house was no longer mine either.
***********************************************************************************
I was on a campus of some school and was trying to figure out how to sign up to attend. I have no idea what kind of school it was (college, technical school, etc.) beyond the fact that it was some kind of higher education after high school. I also have no idea what kind of class(es) I was trying to sign up for. After walking around for a bit, I figured out where I needed to be. I needed help filling out the registration papers so I was taken to a classroom with a gentleman who helped me complete them. We sat in a classroom at a long table. As we filled out the paperwork, a class was going on around us. The weird thing is, it wasn't just one class being taught. There were mulitple classes all being taught at the same time by the same teacher. One of the classes was a Spanish class and the students spoke mostly Spanish. After awhile, she's switch to another subject. Each subject she taught had totally different students so everyone was crammed in together. I don't remember what other subjects she taught but they were things that were totally unrelated to each other. Like one subject was for sure Spanish but another might have been Greek History and another could've been algebra. I knew that I was registering for this teacher's class and wondered how I'd ever manage to not get confused or distracted with all the other things going on around me. When the class was over, the various students stood up to leave and that's when I got a better look at them. The majority of them were considerably older than me and several of them seemed to be senior citizens. The man who was helping me was trying to get my attention so that we could finish up the registration paperwork but I kept wanting to look around at everything going on around me. I noticed a gentleman I hadn't seen in many years who in real life has actually passed on. He was talking to a woman about his same age and they were discussing the difficulty of the class. He didn't seem to notice me and didn't acknowledge me at all.
***********************************************************************************
I was sitting on the edge of my bathtub in preparation of shaving my legs. There was a band-aid on my leg and I was trying to figure out how to shave around it without getting it wet or having to remove it.

morbid curiosity and other things

2010-05-18T18:40:00.000-07:00

last night's dream was prompted by some time i spent on facebook prior to going to sleep. through facebook i learned about a friend of friends who passed away on sunday. it appears he has had a rough couple of years emotionally and the death may have been a suicide or an accidental overdose... no one knows yet.

i never knew this man but morbid curiosity took over and i spent a good amount of time piecing together his story through the wonders (?) of social media. i was sad to learn that he left behind two young boys and that led me to dream about holding a sobbing boy in my arms as he mourned the loss of his father. it was a rather gut-wrenching dream. upon waking up i realized that this is the third (at least) dream i have had where i remember comforting a sobbing child.

*****

today i spent the day with the department i work with at a retreat. which means lots of time together in one room. when i came home i immediately fell asleep and had a dream that one of my coworkers was blind. my interaction with him as a blind man was very detailed and i thought it was a rather strange thing to dream.

harrowing pet and school dreams

2010-05-18T15:13:00.000-07:00

I haven't had one of these dreams in a while (I used to have them fairly often), but last night I dreamed that I had some pet birds. The dream followed the usual scenario: I had gotten them and then sort of forgotten I had them*; of course that meant I had forgotten to check their food and water; out of an original number of 5-6, a couple were dead in the bottom of the cage. Another variation I've had on this dream is that the birds are not dying, but escaping from cages with too much space between the bars. I've also had rather harrowing dreams featuring other pets that I've forgotten to feed/water, usually dogs (I don't recall one where the dog actually died, but there have been some close calls).

*Interestingly, I have a vague memory of also recently having a dream in which I had forgotten about being enrolled in a math class for an entire semester. Except at the end of the dream I realized that I had actually dropped the class and there was no reason to be so frantic.

literature-inspired, and annoying

2010-05-17T12:08:00.000-07:00

I had the most vexing dream this morning. To begin with, I kept almost waking up, thinking it must be time to get up, getting frustrated because I was wasting my precious last few minutes of sleep, and going back to sleep only to return to the very same dream cycling over again.

Obviously influenced by yesterday's reading material, I was dreaming that I was a secretary in a southern African country (although I don't think I had completely morphed into Mma Makutsi). I kept receiving a cc'd memo from some guy, and I couldn't figure out whether he was sending me the same one over and over, or whether these were all irritatingly similar and equally inconsequential. I never grasped the subject of the memo(s), just that the guy was copying me on all of them to cover himself somehow. I resented being involved in whatever he was trying to drag me into, and I also didn't like the impression I had that he was somehow attracted to me (what is with this theme?). All in all, it was one of my most annoying dreams in recent memory.

fake iranian names??

2010-05-14T08:25:00.000-07:00

I have no idea what I was dreaming about that may have prompted this, but as I was waking up, I was trying very hard to think of names that sounded convincingly Iranian (Fereshteh? Salafzaneh?). Very weird.

Classic Group Trip

2010-05-13T09:13:00.000-07:00

I had what I might call the Classic Group Trip Dream last night (as opposed to all those dreams where being on a group trip is just one background fact among many). I was on a trip to India with some random dream people and some random real-life past and present acquaintances. We were crowded (very crowded!) into an older van with a dark red interior, going very slowly through some kind of border crossing or checkpoint. I was extremely uncomfortable because we were so crammed in, and I turned to the guy next to me, a rather prim Indian guy who was the de facto group leader and asked him if it would be okay if I put my feet up on the dash to give myself some more room. He was shocked--shocked!--that I would suggest such a thing, and said that he couldn't countenance it because the van belonged to a couple he knew. He then (possibly hoping to soften the blow of refusal?) added that the couple were originally from Mali but were now running a church in the U.S. for Indians. I responded enthusiastically that I was very interested in Mali, grasping at straws to both diffuse my apparent brazen disrespect for their dashboard and to distract myself from boredom and physical discomfort with the odd coincidence of West Africans running an Indian church in the U.S.

There was an unsettling subplot after that in which I was suddenly saddled with the responsibility of looking after several small children, who kept wandering away (I had to sternly warn one of them about the dangers of wandering off down an alley).

cameo appearances

2010-05-11T08:25:00.000-07:00

I had forgotten until just now, but over the weekend I had a dream that Ewan McGregor was besotted with me [these so-and-so-is-in-love-with-me dreams are embarrassing]. He apparently had a well-documented, rather severe drug problem and was promising me, in the presence of some other people (assistant[s]?) to clean up his act and give up drugs for me. I said something noncommittal about how he needed to get his act together because he wanted to and not for someone else. Then I worried that maybe it came across as unkind, and I was glad that I had been mumbling and he hadn't heard me. So I came up with another, even vaguer and more noncommittal response--"umm...okay".

*********************

Then last night I dreamed that I was reading one of my favorite street fashion blogs. In real life, the guy who runs the blog was married, but now is dating the creator of another fashion blog I enjoy. In real life I was a little bit disturbed by this, even though they both seem like nice people as far as you can tell from their blogs. In the dream, I considered that he had gone overboard by posting some photos with some accompanying suggestive text*. The text was an allusion to really enjoying a hotel they had stayed at, if you get my drift. I can't remember what the photos were; I don't think they were actually nudes of his girlfriend, but I think they may have featured an unmade bed, or her lounging in a men's pajama top, or something like that. I saddled my high horse to post a reproachful comment about it, but I ended up paring it down to the succinct "poor taste".

*I should make it clear that he has not, to date, posted photos/text like that in real life.

dream within a dream

2010-05-10T09:29:00.001-07:00

I woke up in the middle of the night last night excited about an interesting dream*, but I can't really remember** it now. All I can remember** is that it was a dream* within a dream*. I had slept in the dream* and dreamed* about a space voyage, with a lot of very complex details involving the mechanics of space travel and various arcane measurement systems. I was impressed with myself in the dream* for having dreamed* such complex things.

*I think this wins the price for most redundant paragraph ever.
**See above.

so random

2010-05-07T08:10:00.000-07:00

Last night's series of dreams wasn't very interesting as far as the storylines go, but there were some funny details.

******************************************

I was somewhere with my parents, sister, and grandmother. We had been on some kind of outing and were getting ready to leave. We were in a weird, railroad-tunnel type structure (wood, with an elevated table-/rail-like structure running down the middle, with a small space to either side of it). We had almost gotten to the exit of it when a large javelina appeared in front of me. Either she (it was a she) knocked me over or I had already been sitting down on the middle structure--either way, she was looming over me. I was quite alarmed, having heard that javelinas could do a lot of damage. My dad indicated to me that it was my family responsibility to restrain the javelina while they got away, and then I would be able to extract myself (he wasn't throwing me under the bus, exactly; it seemed like the most sensible approach since I was last in line). So a tussle with the javelina ensued, with her eventually down in the little space beside the rails and me trying to immobilize her with my feet. The funny part was that she was speaking the whole time, although I can't remember what she was saying. I was struck by her rich vocabulary, though, and her excellent command of language (really, it was impressive, especially for a javelina).

**********************************************

I was on a _______ (that's right, Alert Reader--group trip!). I was riding in a car and we were caravanning with another car. I don't really remember who else was there; probably a combination of past acquaintances and dream people. We drove up a very steep, winding road in some wooded hills/mountains and stopped at the apartment of a group member for a bathroom break. I went into the bathroom and started out with some freshening-up. I guess I was taking a while, because another group member came in (a girl I knew in the rather distant past) and started messing with the toilet. It was then that I noticed it wasn't an ordinary toilet. To begin with, because of the remote, hilly location it was some kind of special self-contained system, some sort of chemical toilet (she told me it was quite expensive). Also, it was "wheelchair-friendly", which meant that it had a rather complicated fold-out system that produced a ramp up to the toilet itself. She had helpfully decided to start converting the toilet back into the non-wheelchair version to speed things up for me. It was a rather cumbersome process, and--grossness alert--the fold-out portion had been covered with toilet paper lain flat that was soaked with urine [at least no excrement, but still, yuck!].

***************************************************

I was on my way home from work and debating whether or not to go to a party I'd been invited to. I was very tired and had pretty much decided not to go. I stopped at a little health-food-y juice place/cafe on the way home (not a real-life place), and ordered some kind of snack. They had already started to ring me up when I decided to get a coffee too and try to go to the party after all (which I ended up clutching, un-drunk, for a good part of the dream before finally drinking it and rather shamefacedly just leaving the empty cup somewhere).The party was at a house in the country, given by a girl* I had gone to elementary and high school with. I went into a bedroom and found about 4 girls dressed up in bizarre, makeshift costumes (including something vaguely Mongolian, over jeans and tennis shoes). That made me think it was a costume party, but then I found that it was only the host's sister and a few of her friends, and the real party was outside.

On going outside I found a rather overwhelming scene. There were several folding tables with handwritten game rules on large pieces of paper (lots of cross-outs and corrections), and a huge crowd of people participating in some arcane game that I couldn't begin to grasp. It involved forming a large circle (like duck-duck-goose) and moving around it. Some people landed on spots with big, elaborate, ugly porcelain figurines of fantastical animals that were the prizes--they seemed very excited about them and lifted them up in the air. I gave up on figuring out the game and just people-watched. The most interesting thing there was a greyhound in a pastel crocheted jacket--she was very sweet.

*************************************

The last tidbit featured Picasso as a washed-up artist looking to re-launch his career. Apparently he hadn't actually died, just stopped producing. He was showing a few recent "works" which seemed to fall far short of his previous output (including some typed pages--?). I wasn't quite sure what to tell him, but he seemed very excited about re-branding himself in a new, more corporate environment.

**************************************

*An interesting detail here was that the girl and her sister were (surely still are) very pretty in real life, and my parents were excessively fond (to my mind) of pointing out how pretty they were. In this dream, they both had rather bad skin. This makes me a bit ashamed of my subconscious for being schadenfreude-y, especially since I liked them in real life and we were friends, despite my parents' harping on their looks.

in which my subconscious wins the Gross and Creepy prize

2010-05-04T08:05:00.001-07:00

If you're ready for another excrement-themed dream, read on! (You can guess the corollary to that, I'm sure.)

The dream started with a work trip with a nameless, faceless coworker and a real-life coworker who, although nice, has bossy tendencies. We were in a small car, trying to go somewhere to do some sort of site-based work (I have no idea why I was along). It started raining harder and harder, and at some point we had to ford a rushing creek with the small car, which I now noticed was either completely topless or just open on all sides like a Jeep. The bossier coworker was issuing directives about how to go about crossing the stream ("gun it" being the main idea). She said something about bracing myself, but I wasn't entirely braced, and I certainly wasn't ready for the head-to-toe spattering with muddy water.

We made it across okay, except for being completely wet and muddy, and stopped at a ramshackle house where we were going to stay. There were some other assorted people there, although I'm not sure who they were or what they were doing. The overall atmosphere was sort of scientific field outing (or rather, what I would imagine that atmosphere to be like)*.

The place was pretty makeshift, with a toilet out in the middle of the room. No one seemed to find this odd or unsettling, and consequently I didn't either. I sat down and did my business**, and that's when everything started to go off the rails.

For some reason when I stood up, the *ahem* excrement ended up in two [rather large!] piles on the seat (?? it was definitely in the toilet before). That disturbed me quite a lot, but I was even more disturbed to see a little worm-like creature wriggling about in it***. And then, as if that weren't disturbing enough, the real freak-out began: on closer inspection, the "worm" turned out to be a snake! Wriggling around in the excrement, mind you. The body was about the size of one of those small green snakes, but it was oddly segmented. The head was disproportionately large****, at least 2 inches across, with large, very creepy roundish yellow eyes. It was bobbing its head about like a cobra (no hood, at least), looking at me in the most alarming way. I can hardly emphasize enough how very alarming and disturbing it was.

I had started making alarmed noises on seeing the mounds of excrement on the seat, and they had escalated by now to full-blown, terrorized screams (although I couldn't properly get out half of them, so they were half raspy whispered screams). A kid that I had "dated" in 6th grade (?!?) was sitting near the toilet and hadn't reacted at all until this point. He suddenly had had enough, though, and told me to pull myself together and stop the screaming and freaking out. I pointed out to him that he might be freaked out too if confronted with the fact that such a vile creature had just passed through "one of the most sensitive holes in [his] body" (?! sigh.).

That's all I can remember, but it's still disturbing me.

*An interesting detail was that the makeup of the group was eerily multicultural, although disproportionately male.
**Odd variation on the theme of having to go to the bathroom in public--ordinarily in those dreams that's a major source of distress (although, oddly, I don't really have those dreams).
***The real-life inspiration for this undoubtedly being a real-life colony of fruit flies in the compost I just emptied yesterday.
****Which, with my limited herpetological knowledge, I took to mean it was a viper.

prostitution, partying, and megastores

2010-04-29T09:10:00.000-07:00

Guess who had another group-trip dream? This one was to Italy (or an Italy-like country). In the first part, I was walking around an old city square. It wasn't as idyllic as it sounds, though. There were various construction things around (those wooden sidewalk-cover tunnels, mostly), and a fair amount of trash. There were also a lot of youngish men loitering and walking around*. They were invariably small, kind of greasy, tackily dressed (tracksuits, gold chains, and curly mullets figured prominently), and they were all, in various languages, propositioning me for favors. The most common was "how much for the night?" I found that I understood perfectly what they were all saying, and a tiny part of me was exulting at my perfect understanding of languages I didn't really speak. I didn't take the propositioning too seriously; it was kind of annoying and unsettling, but I figured that it was a cultural thing and that they weren't targeting me in particular, just any female in a certain age range.

After that I was with my dad in a gigantic semi-outdoor home/garden/decoration megastore. My eye was caught by a display of wrapping paper on sale--there was a really beautiful Art Nouveau-ish design with red poppies, and some colorful Josef-Frank-esque botanical designs. I was trying to decide on a couple to buy, since I don't use that much wrapping paper. The more I looked, the more confused I got. I saw some very cute designs that were very original and would be really good for wrapping kids' gifts--but then I remembered that I don't give that many kids gifts. I finally decided I should just go with the two I had seen at first, since I had been there so long (my dad was being extremely indulgent, pretending to root around and be genuinely interested in the wrapping paper while waiting for me). Once I decided on that course of action, though, I could no longer find any that I wanted, let alone the two I had seen before. All I could see were disappointingly unoriginal designs that looked pretty lackluster up close.

I decided to give up on the wrapping paper and accompany my dad to look for some item he was looking for (which had been the original purpose of the trip). I commented on how gigantic the store was, and recalled that Curly Sue had told me of being on a business trip to Houston (??!) and killing time in a similar store.

After that, I was with a larger group (still in a vaguely Italian place) including my husband and some assorted acquaintances from college. It was in the evening, and activity plans were being negotiated. Several of us were lounging on a huge couch/bed thing, and suddenly a girl I had known in college threw herself down next to me/on me John-and-Yoko style. I was a bit taken aback at this sudden incursion into my personal space, but didn't try to make her move because I was cold. There was a lot of tedious back-and-forth in the group about where we would go and what we would do, and it became clear that the group members were all very !Party!Party! types. I found myself agreeing to go out and "party" with them. Not being much of a partier in real life, I was surprised at myself, and even more surprised to realize that although it was getting late I wasn't tired at all. Of course I woke up tired after that.

*An eerily true-to-life detail, from my limited experience in Italy.

High School Reunion

2010-04-27T09:11:00.000-07:00

I had yet another high school reunion dream (perhaps I'm developing a theme as strong as Strovska's group trip theme), this one ridiculously detailed. Note that this may have some basis in reality, since next month is my 15th high school reunion, although I have no plans to attend, and have never planned to attend any reunion. This resolve began the day after I graduated.

Anyway, my dream self seems to be highly entertained by the concept of attending reunions and last night was no exception.

I dreamed that I was arriving at my old school carrying my backpack. I was somewhat proud of myself for limiting my packing to just a backpack. I knew that the girl's dorm had been renovated, so I was expecting some changes. The exterior of the building was expansive and looked very nice, though I did notice that they'd chosen to retain the beige-y, buff-colored exterior, which I thought made it look like a motel.

Inside the lobby, the dorm had retained several architectural features of its former "glory," but with the additions of lots of glass walls with shiny metal accents, a la the CSI labs. I made my way inside and avoided the welcoming smiles of the girls' dean, who was standing at the front desk. She was the one I remember from my years there, and I just wanted to skitter past her with a minimum of "catching-up" chitchat.

I toured the chapel area, and thought it was a shame that they'd completely demolished the yellow stained glass windows in favor of a windowless, and beige-colored, set of blank walls, although I did appreciate the replacement of the seats, which had been horrible when I was there.

I went upstairs to find my room for the reunion weekend. Somehow I knew that I'd be staying in my old room, and that I'd have roommates AND suitemates for the duration. They were all already settled in, and the door was open a crack as I pushed it open and called out, "Hello J.B.!!" (J.B. being the initials of a girl who was my suitemate for two years in real life.) She was standing behind the door, hanging up her clothes in the closet. She gave me one of those friendly-stranger hugs.

I started working to unpack my stuff and get myself ready for something (dinner? church? assembly?). As I investigated the bathroom, I met my suitemates, my cousin A. and another former classmate, S. They had pretty much taken over the bathroom with mountains of bottles, towels, cases of makeup, and various toiletries. Still proud of my light packing job (presumably I was clutching at straws, trying to make myself "cooler" and different from my former classmates), I was trying to wash my face at the sink, which kept filling up with tiny bottles of lotions while I was washing.

There was a lot of activity swirling around me and I'm hazy on the details, but my overall impression was that I was trying really hard to be chipper and chatty, catching up on Life. Our suitemates kept popping in and out of the room, and I noticed that my cousin A., in particular, was wearing a TON of makeup. Verging on orange.

It seemed like we were all trying to get out the door at once, but with very little success, as everyone kept trying to use the sinks/counters in the bathroom, but being thwarted each time by the massive amount of potions. Everyone was trying to iron dresses and skirts, and while I'd been so happy with my limited packing job, I worried that my selections wouldn't be dressy enough, considering all the ironing, fluffing, make up, hair styling, and stocking applications that were going on around me.

In short, it was exactly like high school, and by the time I woke to NPR, I was pretty relieved that I don't have to attend any reunions if I don't want to.

pop culture reference extravaganza!

2010-04-27T07:51:00.000-07:00

I was in the middle of a very detailed and tiring dream when I woke up this morning, the sort that makes me intermittently raise my eyebrows in bemusement for the next half hour or so.

The dream began with--what else?--a group trip. I was traveling with my parents, sister, and some assorted people who popped up fuzzily in the periphery and then disappeared. We were staying at my ex-boyfriend's parents' house (not their real-life house, but an apartment influenced by some extended family members' apartments in Canada). I was sharing a bedroom (with whom, I can't remember; either my husband or my sister, I think) that I realized belonged to the parents, with a very large white bed and a setup including about three fans. The fans kept turning themselves on, even after being unplugged, which really freaked me out. I didn't want them on because I was cold, but it took me quite a while to work out how to get them completely off.

By the time I got the fan situation resolved it was almost time to get up and around, so I took a shower and was trying to figure out when and where would be best to do the rest of my morning remedial work (what is with this constant issue in dreams of trying to put myself together?). The other guests were starting to gather for breakfast, and there were a few minutes of that annoying back-and-forth about the best way to schedule breakfast and bathroom for all parties. There was that cumbersome feeling of too many people trying to move together.

I guess everyone managed to get ready, because we got to church (based on my parents' actual church, except with uneven, too-close-together rows of metal folding chairs instead of actual pews). I sat down next to a real-life coworker and my sister, but my sister got up at some point to sit with friends, and I was left with the coworker to my left and several empty seats between me and my mother. For some reason I was annoyed with her and wanted to ignore her for the duration of the service, but she kept talking to me about various things (notably whether I had a kleenex). I was uncharacteristically empty-handed in the dream, so I didn't have a kleenex, but she had sidled over in the kleenex search and was sitting next to me. I couldn't get rid of her, but wished she would go away because in the dream I was developing a bit of a mutual crush on the coworker* (sitting progressively closer together in a G-rated way, as is the usual pattern in my "crush" dreams).

The church service finally started, and a group of about 7-8 high school students got up to sing. It started out with an almost unbearable solo by the girl in the center: that almost-inaudible, reedy, breathy voice of a teenager who thinks she can sing because she sings along to music in her room. Soon the others joined in, which made it more bearable and added a bit more volume. They were all swaying and dancing to various degrees, which I found kind of charming ("aw, youthful exuberance"). I knew that my mother was going to freak out, though, and possibly get up and walk out. Their dancing soon coalesced into a routine, and when the group turned around I was startled to see that one of the girls was wearing a dress that amounted basically to an apron, so that her hot-pantsed backside was completely exposed when she turned around. She did a not-quite-expert version of a jiggling "booty dance". The whole effect was extremely jarring, although all I could think was, "that poor girl, why didn't anyone advise her against this?"

When the song ended, the entire audience booed, and a short, stocky, Chuck-D.-esque man in a military uniform took the stage. He began to rail against the dance piece, which he clearly hadn't appreciated either. And he had really not appreciated getting what amounted to a (very short) lap dance by Miss Hotpants/Apron.

Things didn't get a lot better after that. They started running a video showing a Jessica Alba lookalike clothed in a sort of leotard over a printed, almost-transparent full-body catsuit. The catsuit had a really beautiful pattern to it, a kind of leaves/flowers/wheat thing. The girl had water (rain?) running down over her, which was slowly dissolving the print/material of the catsuit (but not the leotard). I gradually caught on that it was an American Apparel ad, for a water-soluble catsuit (??). From what I could understand, it would dissolve and then reconstitute itself. They were hinting that this feature would be useful when one needed to pee, since you could just leave it on (?? yuck). The video ended with what I finally realized was a closeup of the model's (clothed, but barely) crotch.

The dubious church service being finally over, several members of the party went to a flea market. I love these flea-market dreams because they're always so detailed, but I can't remember many of the items I looked at. The thing that sticks out most was a beautiful, elaborately hand-embroidered pillowcase. One side was white embroidery on white, and the other side was a mixture of white, printed border, and white embroidery. The fabric was a loosely woven linen, which didn't seem either all that comfortable or very durable, and there were a couple of holes toward one end of it. What was really noteworthy about it, though, was its former owner: Anne Heche (??)**. While the completely white side had an elaborate embroidery saying "amor", the other side had "Anne Heche" embroidered on it. There was a note pinned to it saying, "soon to be Leah Anne Somebody-or-Other", from which I deduced that the pillowcase was part of the spoils of her relationship with Ellen Degeneres. There was another pillowcase-like object next to it, and I thought it might be Ellen's, and might be similarly beautiful (although I did think it might be a bit freaky to have a set of Ellen-and-Anne pillowcases on my bed). On closer inspection the object turned out to be not a pillowcase but a red Chinese towel. I first looked at the back side, and was thinking of buying it. On turning it over, though, I found that what had looked like two plain panels were actually two photorealistic renderings (in terrycloth?!) of a couple of celebrities in the style of mid-80s Glamour Shots (tm)***.

Sigh. I knew this one was going to go over the character limit for tags....

*Alert Readers should be assured that this is not a real-life development, although I do enjoy this person as a coworker because he tends toward a benign grumpiness that I find soothing.
**Where DO these random celebrities come from? They're never anyone I've actually been thinking about.
***Research reveals they're still in business!

george clooney

2010-04-26T08:36:00.000-07:00

I had one of those annoying late-for-work dreams last night. I had run a bunch of errands and badly miscalculated the time that would take (as usual in real and dream life). I was supposed to be going to work at 10 or 11 a.m., but still needed to take a shower. In the dream, I was living (temporarily?) in some group setting* with common bathrooms. There were about 4 shower stalls in the bathroom, and I had just peeked in and seen that they were all empty with no one in line for them. By the time I gathered up my stuff and got there to shower, though, they were all occupied and there was a line of about 6 people waiting, including a girl I had found annoying in high school.

That was the boring, unpleasant part of the dream. After that, I was at an airport with both indoor and outdoor waiting areas, and I was supposed to get on a flight to somewhere for some kind of work-related trip. There was a giant snowstorm/cold front over pretty much the whole northern hemisphere, and all flights were canceled until further notice**. I was waiting outside on a high concrete balcony with an assortment of past real-life acquaintances, random dream people, a Norwegian girl whose design blog I sometimes read, and George Clooney (?). We were all leaning against or sitting on the balcony railing, and talking about random things. Incidentally, I was dressed in a very ratty pajama ensemble, possibly having given up earlier on getting a shower.

It turned out that George Clooney was extremely personable and funny, capable of a wide-ranging conversation. He had the sort of dry, punny, double-meaning humor that I particularly enjoy, but at one point he got serious and launched into a rather long, Steinbeckian soliloquy on the salt-of-the-earth working man and the dangers and hardships he faced (I think he was referring specifically to truck drivers, in the context of the big winter storm).

George stayed there for quite a while just chewing the fat with us, and I kept thinking, "he's a great waiting companion, but doesn't he have bigger fish to fry?" At one point he abruptly buried his face in my stomach to warm up his nose, which I thought a bit odd (although I realized that it must be an effective strategy, and that he probably found lots of willing stomachs to warm his cold nose, being who he was).

At one point in the dream, toward the beginning of the George Clooney episode, I was very concerned because I had noticed that several of my teeth seemed loose***. I was very worried, and asking everyone if they knew anything about it and if I should be worried or if it was normal****. No one had anything too reassuring or useful to say about my problem (I think the girls were all too focused on our distinguished companion). Only George had something somewhat helpful to say, and he also reminded me that [in this alternate dream universe] people's teeth were generally spaced far apart (??).

Anyway, if you're ever stranded at an airport in an open-ended, weather-related travel complication, look for George Clooney. I highly recommend him as a temporary waiting companion.

*I'd really like to someday get to the bottom of this group trip/group living thing.
**A relatively rare intrusion of current events into my dream life.
***I've experienced this loose-teeth thing a lot in dreams before, although not for a while.
****What a charming thing to bring up with a very attractive celebrity: "Nice to meet you. I think my teeth are getting ready to fall out."

A Dollar Off Sandwiches and Lesbians

2010-04-25T05:14:00.000-07:00

I dreamed that BNB and I were finished with work (somewhere I didn't recognize). We went outside and sat on the grass next to the parking lot to enjoy the outdoors. After awhile, we decided to go on a little walk. There was a creek nearby that ran down a gorge or a ravine that was mostly made of gravel. Somehow, it was necessary for us to fix this ravine, because the water had eroded the gravel at some point, making the creek dry.

I don't remember doing the work, but later I looked down into the ravine and saw BNB removing the final stones, which allowed the water to flow down the creek bed again. He looked up at me and I smiled and gave a thumbs-up.

He climbed out of the ravine, and that's when I noticed that in our work, I'd ended up on the opposite side of the ravine from him. Oops.

We walked a little further down the creek bed, and noticed that it became more and more shallow, and eventually I was able to just kind of walk across the creek bed/ravine.

At this point, I was wearing ipod headphones and listening to a funk band with a great female lead singer. I was listening, but while listening, I was also making the whole thing up in my head (I think I was aware that I was dreaming, and was impressed with dreaming self for making up such a cool song). I was telling BNB about the organ solo, and how cool it sounded, but I guess I didn't offer to let him listen. I looked at the ipod and saw that the woman singing was black and had short dreadlocks, but I didn't know her name.

We walked to a record store, which is actually here in BR, and started looking around. There were a couple of guys that I assumed to be DJs, but otherwise we were the only ones there. We went in the back door and made our way up to the front. I looked in the country music section and was disappointed to see that they only had CDs named "Greatest Country Music Hits of the 1960s."

BNB was looking at jazz records, but the owner of the store came through closing up, turning off the lights. We started to leave the store, when an old lady came up to us, excitedly talking about winning a coupon for a subway sandwich. Somehow we knew her, and we knew that we were going to be delivering a meal to her later that evening (a la Meals on Wheels), so we told her to go ahead and get her subway sandwich and she could eat the other meal later.

She was so excited about her coupon, and she kept chanting aloud, "I won a dollar off subway sandwiches, with chips and lesbians!!" We'd just smile and eventually directed her to a subway store so she could get her sandwich. I eventually figured out that she meant Lebanese salad, which made more sense than lesbians.

I was laughing about this mix-up when a man I haven't seen in years came up (he was my high school biology teacher). He asked what I was laughing about, and I explained, but after I'd used "the L word," I wondered if that had been wise, since he's old and conservative.

a dream? or an encounter with the devil? hmm...

2010-04-21T15:36:00.000-07:00

last night i had a series of off-the-wall, intense dreams. but the only one i can vividly remember was a dream (?) where i was lying in bed, half asleep, in the hotel room where i was staying at in real life. suddenly i felt someone crawl over me in bed and then wrap himself around me. i could feel the weight and warmth of his body. his hands were positioned on my head and neck. i was so panicked that i couldn't move or scream. my body ached from the fear and shock. i knew he was there to do something awful to me and i wondered if this is how my life would end.

and then i woke up.

in which i tire myself out both physically and mentally

2010-04-21T08:03:00.000-07:00

I had a slightly alarming dream last night. I was getting ready to go buy a bunch of necessary materials and tools for a home improvement project, going over the list with my husband because I was going to be going by myself and wanted to make sure I didn't forget anything. I was a little nervous about driving the truck, since I had only driven it a couple of times before.

I guess I got the materials, because the next thing I can remember I was with some assorted family members in a very small cafe attached to the building supply store. It was sort of like an uglier version of an ikea cafe, and my dad had ordered a pizza. One of the employees brought it out, and it looked really good--kind of a white sauce, with chicken and maybe rosemary*.

The trouble began when someone jumped out of nowhere to intercept my dad's pizza. The person who initially grabbed the pizza was a 35-ish, redneck-ish man. I was furious, and immediately started slugging him (?!), knocked him on the ground, and kicked him (I was pretty effective, if I do say so myself). I was a little surprised and alarmed at the intensity of my anger; I guess I was getting out all my suppressed indignation about everything. I kept yelling "you can't do that! You can't take my dad's pizza! You didn't pay for it!" Between the kicking and the hitting, he ended up moaning on the floor, with blood running down his forehead.

I guess at that point I came to my senses and decided I had done sufficient justice, because I stopped and the person got up, morphing into a youngish female. I asked her why she had taken my dad's pizza and she said, rather pitifully, "I'm hungry". I immediately turned good samaritan and said, "well, let me get you something to eat". There was an immediate switch from "I'm so mad I could kill someone" to "this person needs to eat and I'm going to get them something" (with accompanied rush of charitable feeling).

She ordered something and I went to pay at the counter. I noticed that she had slipped in a package of condoms**, and was initially irritated that she had added something when I had only proposed a meal. Then I realized that she seemed to be the sort of person who had a lot of high-risk encounters, and probably did all kinds of drugs, and that it was a good thing she was getting them, so I didn't protest and just paid for the whole thing, acting like they weren't there. I had very uncomfortable mixed feelings of feeling good about being helpful, while simultaneously realizing that I was experiencing unwarranted feelings of moral superiority and a particularly annoying sort of Liberal Do-Goodism***.

*ironic, considering that my dad is vegan.
**once again, why does it have to be me introducing these labels?
***not that I'm against being liberal or doing good; I'm referring to that annoying "I'm doing this and this and this and this to save the world--what are you doing?" thing.

in which i caricature my real-life tastes and interests

2010-04-16T10:09:00.000-07:00

This dream was really neat visually. It started with me on a visit to a Hindu "worship center". I refer to it as that because it was more than just a temple. It was a whole complex including a temple and some other community-outreach sort of areas (which I'll get into later).

I was in a small group, and we were there to visit the temple on what amounted to a guided tour. The lady in charge of the tour was one of the founders of the temple, and her thing was outreach to non-Hindus. She wasn't trying to convert outsiders, just to educate them on what Hinduism was all about and create positive impressions.

The temple itself was beautiful, a big open room with elaborate Indian decorations (I think the ceiling was highly decorated, and there may have been an upstairs balcony running along at least one side of the room). There were some people there engaged in some sort of worship, and although we didn't stay long and I didn't really understand what was going on I found it inspiring.

After the main room, we were led into a side room with a low ceiling. It was also highly decorated, and full of rows of raised tables with shallow tanks on top, almost like clear, shallow bathtubs on platforms. They were about half full of water, and all connected by a complicated network of piping. Most of the tubs had someone in them, lying flat, fully clothed, and completely, if barely, submerged by water that was running while staying at the same level (through the network of pipes, I suppose).

The tubs nearest us were occupied by very old Indian women, all motionless and with their eyes closed. They were apparently deep in some kind of advanced meditation in which one didn't have to breathe. There was another section on the other side of the room with somewhat younger Indian men, all bald. I found it very interesting, but then when I turned to the right I saw that there was a section full of deformed, premature babies. They had uneven, buggy eyes, large bulgy heads, and were kind of greenish and purplish. It was extremely, extremely unsettling. Apparently they had been taken in as orphans, but their prognosis couldn't have been too good.

After that I was with my mom, getting ready to go into a grocery store. I had a National Geographic, and I discovered that there was a whole article on knitting (across a spectrum of time and cultures, etc.). I was really fascinated, and so slow getting out of the car that when I finally tore myself away and went in the store my mother was already checking out. I looked in her cart and saw that there were only a couple of bags of vegetables and a few more miscellaneous things--not the whole week's worth of food that we needed. I got really angry and started yelling at her about how I thought that for once she could be responsible and buy the week's groceries because I had been doing it ALL THE TIME, and why should I have to do everything just because she found it easier to let me*. She just shrugged and pointed out that I could have come in earlier and gotten more things instead of staying in the car with the National Geographic.

****************************************

Another night I had a tidbit that fits in with the multicultural theme. I was in a library somewhere and found a very small softcover, staple-bound book. It had been self-published by an Ethiopian lady, and looked at first like it was a cookbook. I wasn't sure if it was handwritten or if it was just a unique font, but I absolutely loved the writing and was determined to find a place to buy my own copy of it.

On looking more at it, I discovered that it contained not only recipes (I like Ethiopian food in real life), but very cute line drawings and somewhat 1950s tips on how to manage a home while remaining glamorous and interesting. There was one little drawing of the author involving her two small children in cutting up carrots. The caption pointed out that involving small children in household tasks like cooking would keep them entertained and teach them, make them less picky in their eating habits, etc. etc. The whole aura was very idyllic, and the author photograph showed a very beautiful, flawless, serene-looking Ethiopian woman. The book was in English and Amharic, although of course the writing in the dream didn't look anything at all like Amharic does in real life. I was intrigued to see that there were a lot of "x"-like characters, and remarked that some characters showed up a lot in some languages while being rare in others (??). Anyway, I was completely obsessed with the book and its author, and determined to find it to buy and become perfect, well-groomed, immaculate, interesting, glamorous, etc.

*I have this dream every so often where I'm living with my parents (and sometimes sister and/or husband) and filling this Cinderella role where I do ALL the housework. Then I blow up and start yelling at everyone while they look on bemused and unconvinced.

gross and girly

2010-04-16T09:33:00.001-07:00

I dreamed the other night that I was staying with my husband at my parents' house (they weren't there). I had apparently disposed of some leftovers (a lot of beans, and some other miscellaneous food) in the upstairs bathroom toilet, but hadn't flushed for some reason that seemed perfectly legitimate at the time.

Three girls in their mid to late 20s were there, for some reason I can't remember. Neither of us knew them, but their presence there had been pre-arranged through some sort of lodging swap program. We had just gotten home from somewhere, and I had decided that it was the perfect time to broach the subject with him of whether or not we were ever going to have kids. I have no idea why I found this the ideal time, especially with the three visitors in the house, but I was convinced it was the perfect opportunity, so I cornered him on the piano bench and started questioning him.

He wasn't as forthcoming as I had expected, and the conversation soon fizzled out. I was walking around the house doing chores, and he was in the living room messing with his phone. I ascertained that he was calling, or trying to call, a girl, and got very disturbed about this--especially since I took it as a reaction to my effort to get him to decide on the procreation question.

I decided to just stay upstairs and occupy myself with things and let him call whoever he wanted. I would then react as warranted to whatever ended up happening. Alarmingly, though, I looked over the second floor balcony and saw the three female visitors lounging in the living room in see-through 1950s lingerie (all three of them had very vintage/rockabilly hair and makeup). Great, my husband is in the living room making a "booty call" while surrounded with three women in various states of undress, looking like Suicide Girls itching for an orgy! I was quite unhappy but determined to maintain my sangfroid. The most annoying thing was my impression that I was expected to waltz down there and join in their orgy with them (even though said orgy had not started and was possibly only a figment of my imagination).

I went into the bathroom fuming and flushed the toilet. Unfortunately, though, the garbage had sat in there long enough to start getting fizzy, and the whole thing blew and splattered all over the place when I tried to flush it. There were little bits of decomposing garbage all over, including on my eyelashes. I went out to inform the charming group below that the toilet had exploded and that I was going to have to clean the whole bathroom and then take a shower (what better way to discourage them from including me in their orgy?).

I never did get my shower, although I did get the bits of slime rinsed off my face. The girls had come upstairs and I gradually caught on that they did not, in fact, intend to involve our couple in an orgy. On realizing that, I started to warm to them and we ended up in my old room talking about vintage clothes, various sewing and crafty things, and selling on etsy. I started rooting around in my old dresser and came up with handfuls of really neat old pajamas--lots of hand-embroidered silk and that kind of thing.

The whole encounter turned out rather pleasant, except that after having rinsed my face I hadn't put on any lotion, so my face was very tight and itchy. Also, I realized that since my parents weren't there--and since the girls weren't there to engage in an orgy--we had three separate bedrooms to lodge them in. The only problem was that the other two bedrooms available hadn't been cleaned in quite some time and were crawling with dust bunnies, which I found very embarrassing. (Garbage-spattered clothing and dried-up face showing messy and dirty lodging space to very cute, put-together visitors. Great.) I don't even want to think about what this dream says about me or my sense of self, but once again I've managed to generate a surreal and unwholesome list of labels.

Watery

2010-04-01T14:44:00.000-07:00

I dreamed all night, but the most vivid images--and sadly the only part I can remember now--were this morning, just before I woke up.

I was climbing steep sand hills with some other people, trying to get somewhere. I was worried about two of the people with me, and how they'd make it up. One of them said it was no problem, because they had a sled and could just slide down. For some reason, this comforted me, even though it clearly wouldn't have helped them get up the hills.

At the top of the hill, though, everything changed. Suddenly, instead of golden sand, there was a lot of water. To my left was a glassy looking lake, and the colors were so bright and sharp that the overwhelming sense was Alpine. As I looked, I could see traces of bright white ice clinging to the surface in places. Then I noticed ice around long branches of what I assumed was some sort of seaweed, and my view was almost as if I were looking at the water from below its surface. Underwater vegetation usually massively creeps me out, but these, which increased into a veritable forest as I moved along, were bright red and bright yellow, and it looked like woods in their full autumnal splendor--stunningly beautiful.

Then I was in the road, but the road was water, as clear and crisp at the lake to my left, but moving with a quick current. I was fully clothed, but got in and discovered it was definitely refreshing, but not too cold. I was hesitant to put my head under, but tipped it back and was delighted with the sensation. The person I was with started swimming, and although I'm not at all a fast swimmer in real life, I discovered that with the current and my suddenly powerful strokes, I could keep up with him easily. It was elating!

He decided that we should get out and go to an indoor pool, where all of us could swim together. I was disappointed about this, but went in. There was a heated indoor pool, where quite a few people were swimming, and then, beyond a window, but perhaps contiguous with the indoor pool, was another, uncovered pool. As I watched, a few people were swimming, but then the water began to get choppy with motorboats. Two of them seemed to be having a competition, and one cut suddenly to the side of the indoor pool as I watched. But then the entire pool was moving! We were on a massive boat that contained the indoor pool, and started traveling down the river.

Sadly, I woke up before I could go swimming again.

mystery and intrigue!

2010-04-01T11:36:00.000-07:00

I had a really somewhat delightful dream this morning, spanning a couple of snooze-button pushes. It's a bit hazy, but it was a very plot-twisty cloak-and-dagger sort of thing. In the beginning I think I was in a group setting, maybe a school dorm. I was going out to run some errands (for me and/or others, I'm not sure) and get something to eat. This took me to an old Asian neighborhood, very much like how I would picture an old city neighborhood in China: very narrow, warren-like streets really only suitable for pedestrians and bikes/carts.

I went into a business that seemed to be partly food-based and also a front for some other, slightly sinister enterprise. In the course of a short conversation with the people working in there, it became apparent that I had somehow been peripherally drawn into a conflict/intrigue involving a Korean group and a Chinese group. It was never clear who the groups were or what they stood for, respectively, but they were a combination of underground political movement and organized crime group.

I think I was involved on two levels: one was a specific job that I was requested to do (by what group or who, I have no idea, nor do I know what the job was), and the other was a growing journalistic/investigative curiosity and a desire to figure out what was going on and who was doing what. I got very excited indulging fantasies of "cracking" the case and "breaking" the story, and wondered how it could have taken me so long to realize that my true calling was as a spy (I was absolutely certain of that).

After leaving the Asian neighborhood, I found myself in an old apartment building, in a living room with people talking and coming and going. They were all young, and seemed to be radical underground political activists of some sort. I wasn't really involved, just there and observing (a sign that espionage was my true calling was my uncanny ability to not attract attention). The neatest part of the dream occurred during this mini-episode, and consisted partly of what was actually happening in front of me and partly of my mental images of things that had happened before that. I was watching a young man and simultaneously an image of another young man I had seen before. It slowly dawned on me that the two were the same person, but came across as completely different people through his ability to project a completely different persona just with a change in clothing, accessories, and hairstyle. It was a wonderful ah-ha moment, both because of his transformative skill and because of my delight in piecing together the fact that he was a double agent.

I arrived home ("home" being a neat old house where we apparently lived), and my husband was there puttering around in the kitchen*. I indicated to him that I needed some time to think, undisturbed, because I was on the verge of piecing together the various pieces of the puzzle to figure out exactly what was going on.

The whole thing had a wonderful atmosphere of intrigue, adventure, and danger, although the sense of danger was more enjoyable than scary. And the settings were very detailed and atmospheric too--if it were a movie I would have given a good rating to the props/costuming/cinematography people. My snooze button went off a couple of times, and each time I was determined to return to the story so I could see what was going to happen next (unfortunately I didn't ultimately figure out the mystery). The ironic part is that when watching movies involving organized crime and political intrigue, it takes a great deal of concentration for me to figure out what's going on.

*This is not someone who normally putters in the kitchen, so I don't know where that came from.

sad but not traumatic, and no excrement!

2010-03-31T07:53:00.000-07:00

I think my string of truly unpleasant dreams might have ended, although I had a somewhat sad one the other night. I ran into the guy who was more or less my first boyfriend, which is something I've dreamed several times (not because I'm still carrying a torch for him or anything, just because he was someone I cared about a lot and I've completely lost track of him). I was really happy to see that he was doing well, because he had been a little bit troubled when I knew him. He showed me a lot of drawings he had been doing (he drew a lot in real life), and they were really beautiful, mostly line drawings and slightly scientific/botanical/steampunk.

The sad part was that right after that, while I was still talking to him, a former elementary and high school classmate I had completely forgotten about showed up out of the blue, and said that he was in the army and was going to be deployed. I asked him where he was going, and he said Afghanistan. I found the whole thing extremely sad on several levels.

more and more ugh

2010-03-29T08:05:00.001-07:00

The string of unpleasant dreams is continuing unbroken. The other night I dreamed that my husband and I were both undergoing some sort of hazing/trial period for a fraternity and sorority, respectively. And just before I woke up this morning, I was dreaming that a pleasant neighbor we had recently met (in the dream, not in real life) had abruptly committed suicide. In fact, I think it was the horror of that that jolted me awake.

Weird Time Mashup

2010-03-26T06:26:00.000-07:00

This dream is a strange combination of two different periods in my life: high school and grad school.

I dreamed that I had gone back to my high school to attend some kind of alumni function. I went into the dormitory where I'd lived in high school only to find that it had been extensively renovated. This renovation involved restoring it to its original ornate decor (very different from real life, I assure you), and, as a special touch, the heavy, carved oak doors had been elaborately inscribed with the names of the original occupants.

I found my room, which was upstairs, second door from the stairs. The names on the door were lovely, but I didn't recognize them. They were something like A. D. Smith and Mabel Something.

I wandered around the dorm, at one point going into the basement looking for the "trash room." I found it, and realized that the basement had certainly not been renovated, and the trash room was overflowing with garbage.

Later, I attended a performance of some kind. Someone I knew from my grad school days (here's the mashup) was in this show, playing a piece on piano (as far as I know she doesn't play at all). In the dream, I knew this piece, having played it myself. I knew that it was very difficult, with an elaborate accompaniment pattern played in the middle register with the thumbs and forefingers, and the melody played with the right pinky finger. It required lots of delicate touch and jumping around on the keyboard, both of which require absolute control.

I was really impressed with her performance, and during the applause, I went backstage to congratulate her. I found her stretched out on the floor (apparently exhausted by the effort of performance). She was surrounded by family members, her two babies, and a couple of small dogs. As they all swirled around her, I knelt by her head to gush about her playing. I kissed her on the forehead and told her she'd done a wonderful job, and that I totally understood how hard it had been.

(Upon waking and considering the piano piece, I know that whatever she was playing wasn't what my dream self thought it was.)