zombie lambs

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.

handsy old pastors

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.

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

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).

fake iranian names??

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.

very weird miscellany

It seemed like I woke up every 20 minutes or so last night thinking, "that was so weird. I have to remember that." Of course I forgot most of it, but I think the few I do remember are representative of the rest in weirdness.

• My husband was going to do some interplanetary travel. I'm not sure if I was going too, but at any rate I wasn't concerned or worried, just excited for him and the other two people who would be traveling in his little "pod". It was a very rudimentary metal construction divided into three stall-like compartments, almost like a flat-topped horse trailer, minus the wheels. Each stall had a round porthole-like window that the traveler could look out while en route. He and the other two travelers were getting inside the pod to accustom themselves, but not yet leaving. Oddly, I don't think there was even any glass on the windows. Apparently there had been such great advances in space travel that things like pressure and oxygen were no longer a concern.

• I was staying in a largeish cabin with my parents and sister in the woods somewhere, on a family vacation. I'm not sure who else might have been there, but I had the impression of more people there than just my nuclear family. At one point when we were all sitting around in the living room, I began to talk to the cat. It was a large, mottled gray cat with a slightly cartoonish air. I asked it some question of little consequence, and it answered me immediately as if to have a spoken interspecies conversation was completely normal. I looked around at my human companions and said, "See, that's why I like cats so much. They're so much more intelligent than dogs."*

• [Same setting, cabin in the woods, raised up on a very high foundation/stilts; on the front porch this time.] I was just loafing on the front porch when a redneck-ish man with a junior-high-age redneck-ish son sauntered onto the porch. I wasn't at all alarmed, because it felt like they had some business being there. I just kept reading my book, until I started to feel like the son was infringing a bit on my personal space by staring at me (the father was completely absorbed in the view of the woods and not paying any attention at all). The son said, a propos of nothing, "I'm kweeping!" which in this alternate dream universe meant, I knew, that he was *ahem* very excited**. I was pretty offended by his forward declaration and also didn't want to encourage his attentions, so I went back in the house without really saying anything. On one hand I didn't want to hurt his tender young feelings, but really! A few minutes later a [very corny] rejoinder came to me: "You're kweeping me out! I'm mawwied." [Get it? Think "mawwiage" from The Princess Bride.] I don't know where my brain comes up with these things, and I find it even more alarming that in the dream I considered it a brilliant example of l'esprit de l'escalier.

• Then there was a very brief vignette, maybe a movie, in which a bimbo-ish blonde woman was threatening a used-car-salesmanly man*** with a ludicrously tiny gun, cocking it and holding it to his head. It was some kind of revenge thing for his ostensible past mistreatment of her, and I never did see what actually happened. I had the impression that she was all just hot air (and whether such a tiny gun could do any damage was another legitimate question).
  

*This coming from a person who in real life very much likes both cats and dogs.
**What can possibly be with this recurring theme of inappropriately young boys expressing interest in me?
***Although I know that there are many exceptions to this, my stock impression (based on extensive experience being dragged to car dealerships) is a stout man with a greasy, bloated face and moist, meaty hands with one or two large rings jammed on to his fat fingers.

put this one in your pipe, sigmund....

I had the weirdest [most Freudian?] dream last night, in which, somehow, both I and my mother were married to my husband. Also, in the dream he was prone to picking fights both with random strangers and spouses. The whole thing was very weird, and I could do without having more dreams like it. The only redeeming aspect of the dream was that after my (our?) husband ran off in a snit (because I/we got mad at him for picking fights with random strangers) we consoled ourselves by doing some flea-market shopping.

oh boy (literally!)

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

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

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

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


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

Creepy

Wooo, crazy dreams last night.

Many of them revolved around the theme of my family taking a trip in our old Corolla, and me being late (probably because I rode to work with my mom yesterday, and was running late). In the creepiest one, my siblings kept switching between being children, adults, and other people). The little boy (I don't know if he was supposed to be my brother at this point) had a heavy, suspicious-looking plastic grocery bag. I never got to look inside it, but the suspicion was that it contained body parts (is this what I get for reading about Deleuze and Guattari's Body without Organs?). My sister/the girl had one, too. They looked guilty, and seemed to be intending to dispose of a body at our final destination--though whether human on animal, and where it came from, I never found out. Then I remembered (ah, retroactive dream "memory"!) that they had made some reddish mouse that we had eaten, and felt very disturbed about its potential origin; if it had been what I was afraid I was, did that make me no longer a vegan?

I was all packed and ready to go, but I ran downstairs so that I could use the restroom one more time. When I tried to flush, the water pressure was really low and didn't do much. When I tried again, a jet of air shot out of the toilet at me! It finally flushed, and looked like it was going to overflow, but then it didn't. I ran back upstairs, and everyone was in the car waiting for me, except for my brother (now his adult self), who was leaning against the back bumper, looking disgusted at how late I was.

In another of the family-trip dreams--or maybe just another part of the trip?--we were in a big, multi-story parking garage, and my uncle was there. I think his car was a pale, minty-green Honda. I got out of the car for something, and my family drove away! I ran down several flights of stairs and met them at the bottom.

There were more dreams--about touring a beautifully finished attic apartment and cleaning the room of one of the senior girls in my dorm when I deaned (who in real life was beautiful, deaf, and kept her room immaculate), but I don't really remember much.

Fragments

So last night I had all sorts of crazy dreams, which are coming back to me in bits and pieces. Here are a few of them...

-My sister was making Rice Krispie treats (as we actually did in Hawaii). She had put melted butter and some melted marshmallows in a 9x13 pan, with about half a cup of Rice Krispies. She kept saying, "I don't want them to be soupy! I don't like it when they're soupy!" I asked her if she had put in six cups of Rice Krispies, and she said that she hadn't. I tried to add Rice Krispies to the pan and stir everything together, and it actually went better than it would in real life; the Rice Krispies seemed to sort of inflate and look like bars.

-My sister and I were walking downtown, and stopped at a jewelery store to look at the shiny things. Then she brought over a little ukulele, and I discovered I was able to tune it by ear. Then I played "Pearly Shells." She said the ukulele was $30, which seemed like a really good price, but I didn't want to buy a ukulele.

-We were still walking in the city, and it was dark out, apparently just before dawn. I realized that when we had started walking, everything had been light because the artificial lights were on. However, that meant that we'd been up, and walking in the city, since the middle of the night. I asked her why we'd gotten up so early, but I don't think I got an answer.

-I was tidying the kitchen of the last house I lived in with my parents, in Auburn. My mom had placed towels across the stove top, and there were boxes of fruit on the floor, which I understood to mean that she was going to be doing some canning. Then, somehow, a cat fell down the garbage disposal in the sink. The disposal wasn't on or anything, but it was still alarming. Only the cat's little gray head was poking out! I tried to help it out, but I had to kind of grab it by the head and neck. As I was pulling it out, it slipped and fell back in a little bit, but then it was able to get out.

You Say Toe-May-Toe, I Say Toe-Mah-Toe

my very first post!

i always have very weird dreams and this one is no exception.

so my mom knocks on my door to wake me up and walks into my bedroom. she proceeds to go to the closet and open it up, asking what i wanted to wear that day. i was an adult in the dream so i'm not sure why she seemed to think she needed to come over to my house and help me get dressed but i didn't question it at the time, i just told her i wanted to wear a dress. she said it was windy and nasty outside so a dress probably wouldn't be an appropriate choice. i was still in bed under the covers at this point so i pulled back the sheets and showed her my left leg. growing out my leg was some kind of thick, leafy plant - like a tomato plant, although i'm not sure if it was a tomato plant or not. as i held out my leg, i said, "but if i wear pants i'll crush my plant and it's just starting to grow out so nicely!"

that's it. that's alls i remember.

Demon cats

She pointed out the moving things in a dark corner--something black and fluttery? At first, they seemed simply to be black moths. Then they were bigger: bats? Finally, they emerged in their final form as sleek, very thin black cats with bat wings and strange green eyes. They were not very big, but seemed vicious--likely because of their long, pointed teeth. There was an entire collection of them--six or seven. We contained them by binding them together in some way, and I tried to get good pictures of them using my digital camera. They kept moving, though, so I wasn't sure I'd captured them.

Somehow, the dog--like a small golden retriever at first, but later more like a terrier--was attached to them, whether because he had pursued them and his leash (red) had gotten tangled with their bonds, or because someone had connected him in an attempt to control the cats. Somehow, he ended up being dragged along behind them and getting roughed up--the skin on his sides was scratched and his fur was bloody. When they stopped, he lay perfectly and frighteningly still on the chair, and I was afraid he was dead. I noticed that his tail was sticking out rigidly over the edge of the chair, which I was afraid indicated rigor mortis. But when we got up closer, and touched him, he moved! He was definitely alive, and looked like he was going to make it.

There was lots more, which I wish I could remember. Unfortunately, all I have is vague snippets, including going to a church where the pastor was promising a million dollars to volunteers who could complete some task. I'm pretty sure that part was inspired by this YouTube video.

Screaming with Silence

Last night I dreamt about being mugged. I was trying to run away from the bearded man with dark brown hair, as he was catching up to me and was trying to steal my purse.
I tried to scream but only soft sounds came out of my mouth. I tried again; multiple times even, but only soft "helps" would come out. I finally got away in a crowd of people.

Then the dream suddenly went to a conversation with a friend of a friend about his divorce.

And then I woke up.

Weird, huh?

Diamond lip ring

I had forgotten this aspect of my dream until I interacted with my multiply-facially-pierced students this morning: I dreamed a woman had a lip ring that was a diamond stud, off-center and in the middle of her lower lip. It actually looked kind of cool, but I didn't realize until I thought about it this morning how completely impossible such a piercing would be.

I think the influences were probably a combination of shopping online for tiny "diamond" stud earrings and Mandy's sexy motherpucker.

Dessert Party!

Yesterday I had a dream about desserts. I was in a staff meeting at my last place of employment, listening to a meeting led by two of my professors. At one point in the dream, one was trying to enunciate the word "heroine" (the drug) in an effort to pronounce it correctly, whereas the other one was puzzled at these attempts. (They are both married to each other in real life and in the dream.) The dream continues to pan toward the table, which is long and rectangular, and contains any dessert you can imagine. Chocolate? Whipped cream icing? Buttercream frosting? Pastries? Apple Fritters? Cherries? Cakes? Cookies? Donuts? Yep. They were all there. We begin to eat and then it immediately is time to go. Then we all scramble to grab the desserts we want to take and then begin to realize there is just too many desserts to eat. And then I woke up.

Explosive Game Show

I was in the audience of a new game show. About 6 contestants would be sitting in a row behind a table with a number in front of them. The host would ask one person at random from the audience what number they wanted. The host would walk, or run to a wall and press a button. Kaboom...Oops, you picked the wrong number. Then I woke up.