so random

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

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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).

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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!].

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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.

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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.

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*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

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.

sad but not traumatic, and no excrement!

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.