gross and racist?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

movie dream

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

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

wow

The other night I had the most visually beautiful dream in recent memory. I don't remember much of the storyline, except that a group trip was involved (of course!). I was in India, and the beautiful part involved exploring a very old hillside town. The streets were narrow and pedestrian-only, and extremely steep--stairs, really. A lot of the buildings were made of red sandstone, but I think there were also some buildings of white plaster and a few other colors of plaster. I went into a building with a fancy carved door, and it turned out to be a temple, with very elaborate red sandstone carvings of monkey deities all over the ceiling. The ceiling was arched, and the carvings were so 3-D that they stood out and hung down like stalagtites. It was one of the most mind-blowing specimens of dream architecture I've ever seen. And I got to see it twice--I had been exploring by myself, and then I met my husband and took him back to see it.

I suspect that if I ever tried a drug that produced images like this I would have a hard time not becoming a junkie.

Camping Dreams

I was camping this weekend, and had extremely vivid dreams all Sunday night. Here are a few of the highlights:

• I somehow managed to break big chunks off my molars, possibly exposing the nerves. I spit a mouthful of chunks into my palm, and when I touched the broken spots in my mouth with my tongue, it had that iron-y taste and sent pain radiating through my bones.
• I noticed this while I was brushing my teeth, getting ready to leave. It seemed to be late at night, and I needed a ride home. My ex-boyfriend agreed to take me home, but then my sister rode with us and he was flirting with her.
• My aunt and Small Cousin (in the dream, about three years old, with a very round face) were walking at night in a warm city. My cousin sat down happily in a mud puddle and then insisted that she would not take a bath.
• In this city, we saw a Mexican wedding taking place. There was a live mariachi band, and people were dancing. Food was being cooked, and one of the women recognized my aunt and held up a piece of cake for her to take. Later, we made our way down there and she got her cake.
• As we were walking home, we passed some beautiful architectural elements, including an elaborately carved door. It was very windy, though, and I almost got blown away--a very similar sensation to this dream.
• People were coming to my aunt and uncle's house. At first, it had something to do with some sort of Easter egg hunt--we had hidden objects for them, apparently--but then it became that they were coming to fight us. There were only two of us, to defend two doors. A heavyset woman was the first person to come to my door. I gave her a speech about how I didn't want to fight her, and that she could just surrender and join us. She wanted to fight me, though, so I fought her. In the dream, I was plenty clumsy, but my blows somehow still struck home. I injured her--and felt terrible about it--and she joined us. I had to fight another couple of people later, although some who showed up were willing to surrender without a fight. Eventually, we either beat or converted everyone and celebrated in the empty house.
  

Gravity and Obama

I was with my aunt in a domed white building. Apparently we were in Rome, and the building was Catholic (at some point I had a little a-ha! moment when I realized it was Roman Catholic, though I'm not sure whether the Roman or the Catholic was the revelation). The interior was completely white, and benches of some sort wrapped the entire perimeter of the building, essentially floor to ceiling. Other people were also touring the building, and when I looked up I saw that people appeared to be walking, in some sort of gravity-defying illusion, on the ceiling. This was somehow explained, in bizarre dream-logic, by the fact that although we generally think of gravity as merely "down," it of course refers to the pull of a smaller object toward a much more massive one.

I totally wanted to climb on the ceiling, so my aunt and I went out to a narrow passageway where there was a staircase with a red wooden banister. At first it was easy to climb the stairs, but then I felt a strong pull back down the stairs, like I was losing my balance and the stairs were being pulled out from under me. It was a very unpleasant, vertiginous feeling, and I realized I just didn't have the fortitude to climb on the ceiling.

So we sort of slid back down the stairs, holding on to the banister, and then went outside to continue our tour of Rome.

Later I dreamed that there was a cute little boy in a highchair, who was rocking back and forth so that if I hadn't stepped in and caught him, he would have fallen over backward. He pointed down and said "Floor!" so I undid his little safety belt so that he could play on the floor. Then I noticed that Barack Obama was giving some sort of speech in the other corner of the room. He left, and I knew that he was going to come back in the entrance right beside us. He did, and I said to the little boy, "There he is!" and he waved at us.

weirdly detailed

I had the most absurdly detailed dream this morning. First I was at a shopping center here in town that morphed into a more upscale (although strangely empty) enclosed mall. I guess clientele was scarce, because I was begged by desperate shop and salon workers to come in and look at their wares/services. One blond and very-made-up lady in a salon was especially desperate-sounding. I didn't like the begging and found an empty office to wait in. I don't know why I was there to begin with, but I ran into a couple of classmates from way back. I was ambivalent about seeing them, since I inexplicably had a clay mask on my face. I decided to go ahead and try to enjoy the interaction, though, and assume that they would understand and give me time to wash off the mask if they decided to go somewhere else for another activity.

Then it morphed into a workplace, except that it was still in the mall building. I was organizing a cabinet with all kinds of dried tea and spices, and feeling on edge because a somewhat bossy person I actually work with was making suggestions about how it should be arranged.

Then the interesting part started. I can't really explain how I was perceiving this, or in what sense I was "there", but it was like a hyperrealistic film. The image started out as a still image that I was looking at with some other people, including my husband, and gradually elements of the image started to move until finally we were actually *in* the image. It started out as a wild, deserted beach, and the camera panned to include some sea stacks. We were bent on guessing where it was, but not really sure. Then people started moving into the image, a lot of them with wild dreadlocks, and this prompted me to guess that it was Australia.

Maybe as a reward for guessing right*, at that point we were absorbed into the image, although it didn't stay a wild and deserted beach peopled by post-apocalyptic hippies. We moved up the beach toward a city and started sightseeing. There was an absurd quantity of very vivid detail packed into the scenery: a shoreline, a fancy Calatrava-esque bridge and a much smaller Victorian-era footbridge, complete with gazebo-like folly; lots of plants and flowers; a marketplace that was tourist-y but not offensively so; a cemetary with above-ground graves; a school complex that turned out to be the Savannah College of Art and Design (and somehow here we were either thinking about it or had actually moved to Savannah); etc. We were with another couple, random dream people based loosely on past classmates/coworkers, and I commented to the woman how interesting it was that there should be such vivid details in a dream. She completely ignored me and I assumed that was because she didn't want to recognize or be reminded that it was actually a dream.

*I think this is because we watched Part 1 of "Che" last night and at one point I recognized a place we went on vacation last year. Also, I know there was a mini-storyline featuring revolutionaries on the run somewhere in the dream, but I can't really remember that part.

get away from my dream, brangelina!

{I'm annoyed sometimes at how many of the same boxes my dreams check. This one checked most of them (school, group trip, career-related anxiety, procrastination, celebrities, family members).}

In the beginning of the dream I was somehow in school. It was neither college nor high school, really, more or a career-related thing (Remedial Career Planning?). We were either getting ready to go on or already on a group trip (I should just omit mentioning this and let the reader assume that, unless otherwise specified, all my dreams involve group trips). We were being assigned specific projects by a teacher/adviser, and when my turn came I was delighted to be assigned to design a coloring book featuring Texas wildflowers. The adviser hinted that it was in line with my interests in art and plants, and that I was wasting my abilities and should take advantage of this project to Get Ahead in My Career. I was really looking forward to it, but stressed at the same time because I had a sinking feeling that I was just going to procrastinate forever and either do a terrible job or not do it at all.

Against that cheerful backdrop, we arrived at Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's house (/compound?). It was supposedly outside New Orleans, but the scenery was very western. The house and various other buildings were in a grassy area nestled against some small hills. Behind one part of the house was a big ravine with a magnificent view of a canyon and distant hills (more on this later). I was with an undefined group, but my parents and sister were also there. My sister wanted to take pictures, more because she liked the place than because she wanted celebrity-related pictures. We were both rather upset when I realized that my camera was still broken and that I hadn't brought any other cameras.

I think we were there for a meal of some sort, but it was pretty clear that our presence was an inconvenience, and the meal didn't happen. A haggard Brad Pitt was chasing a bunch of kids around. Angelina never did make an appearance. Brad gave some of us a perfunctory tour of the place, although when we got to the actual house it was obvious that he didn't want to show us the inside, and hadn't really been planning to--it was completely chaotic.

By "actual house", I mean a small old semi-renovated house with bedrooms for all the kids. There were apparently common living and dining rooms elsewhere, possibly in the adjacent newly-constructed house where Michelle Obama's mother was staying with the Obama offspring. She was very cute, pleasant and spunky. Her bedroom looked out over the wonderful canyon/hills view, and she said, "I'm a low-wage woman, and look where I'm living! Look at what a view I have!" I wasn't sure why she and her granddaughters were living there, but everyone seemed to think it made perfect sense.

In addition to the two houses, there were several other buildings, some of them very weird. I was looking at one, a glass building filled with strange apparatuses and tube-like structures, and thinking it was really neat and had great potential when Brad wandered up, apparently having escaped all the children for a minute. He explained to me that the property had been a cleaning business (dry-cleaning, etc.), and that one of the reasons they had bought it was to take advantage of the cleaning-related buildings to modify them into something architecturally interesting. He got very excited talking about it, and seemed to shake off his haggardness for the first time.

I think there may have been some press people there then, because all the kids started posing for pictures, piling up on top of each other. They were stacked like pancakes, flat on their backs, but just before the picture could be taken the top couple of kids toppled off. Brad seemed rather stressed about having to get them all stacked up again.