a dream about a dream about a dream

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.

harrowing pet and school dreams

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.

in which my subconscious's superego punishes my subconscious's id

The other night I dreamed that my husband had branched out at work into managing not just landscaping stuff but computer/software/marketing things. It wasn't clear how he had gotten this particular project, but it seemed like he had maybe taken it over from another manager who wasn't getting things done. He was excited about having such a big project; it was something for a huge, important company, and although I didn't really get what it was, it was something fundamental like managing orders or something. That's the boring part, though. The funny part was that he introduced me to the guy who was going to be his assistant in charge of all the computer aspects: it was Sam Worthington, in a wheelchair, no less. He was grinning affably and seemed about as happy about the job as my husband was.

Perhaps I was feeling guilty about my glee that the spouse had an attractive sidekick, but the next part of the dream was extremely unpleasant. We lived in an old fixer-upper house in the country (although not our real-life house). I was rooting around in a cluttered room trying to find something when I saw a flash of color. It turned out to be a black-white-yellow-and-red reptile. At first I thought it was a coral snake and went through the little ditty in my head ["red and black, friend of Jack; red and yellow, kill a fellow"] and was alarmed to see that the red stripe was right next to the yellow stripe. Then I noticed that it had legs and thus couldn't be a snake. I was still thoroughly freaked out, though, assuming that it was some kind of equally poisonous "coral lizard". I jumped up on a chair like the stereotypical woman-confronted-with-a-mouse and tried to figure out what to do. There were three big dictionaries within reach, so I figured I could try crushing it with those. I hurled the first one at it, but it landed an inch or so away from the offending beast, prompting it to scuttle away.

Knowing that the "coral lizard" was hidden somewhere in all the junk was even more alarming, and I had no idea what to do. I knew I had to find it and kill it so one of our dogs didn't stumble on it and die (not to mention the humans). Then I looked around (still standing on the chair) and noticed that there were all kinds of big, dangerous-looking scorpions* and other insects on the walls. The whole thing was rather creepy, especially with the added layer of guilt at lusting** after my husband's coworker.

*The scorpions on the walls of my house do have some basis in reality.
**Yet another illustration of how embarrassingly G-rated my dreams tend to be: said "lusting" was really just the idea that he was cute and it would be kind of fun to make small talk with him.

Hit and Run?

I dreamed that I was walking through a very large, circular (or spiral) parking garage. It was very white, all the walls anyway. Sort of Guggenheim museum-like. I was looking for my car and I wanted to go home. The parking spaces were semi-full. Somehow I was surprised, but happy, about this because it meant that I could find my car more easily.

I found my car, started it up, and started to pull forward to leave my parking space. Somehow, though, I managed to crash into a snazzy red sports car quite hard, considering that I had been going very slowly. I could even hear the sound of tinkling as the headlight covers were shattered. I reversed away from the red car and sat in my car thinking hard. Should I write a note to leave on the red car, apologizing and leaving my insurance information? Or should I just take off, run away? I was leaning strongly to the second option because somehow I knew that if I admitted guilt, my life would never be the same again.

I had almost decided to leave when I noticed a small family. The garage had been totally empty, but now a family was there. I wondered if they'd give me away. I woke up before I decided what to do.

Bad Owner

I came home to an apartment I shared with a roommate (my ex). I was rushing to get ready to go back out again. My roommate needed the place to himself. I was trying to get ready, then suddenly remembered I had a dog. My dog was a black Labrador retriever. She came out looking a little emaciated and dehydrated. I had forgotten to leave out food and water for her all day and did not walk her before I left that morning. I was apologizing to the dog, thinking she would be mad and not come to me, but she was still very sweet and just happy for me to be home. I filled her food bowl with extra kibble from the bag and filled up two bowls of water. I still did not have enough time to go for a long walk, so I asked my roommate if he could let her out for five minutes, so she wouldn't go in the apartment. I felt guilty for rushing out again.

Yes! With three-inch heels!

Another recurring dream theme I have is a scenario in which I discover that I've grossly neglected a pet (or pets). This hasn't happened for a while, but I had one last night. I was staying in a dorm that alarmingly resembled my high school dorm (which I fortunately didn't have to live in at the time). I had just realized that I had a pile of overdue books and dvds for the library (a recurring real-life theme), and I was agitated about going to return them. I think I was making pointless and confused trips up the stairs to my room and down to my car.

On one of these trips, as I was walking past the movie-set Western Town setup (?what?), I heard clomping footsteps and looked over to see a guy who looked like a 17-year-old Hayden Christensen, walking by in cowboy boots. He was doing that thing where you watch someone to gauge their reaction to you while trying to not appear to be watching. I didn't think that much about it, but he followed my trajectory for a while, gradually starting to walk beside me.

Around the time I realized he was really trying to accompany me I remembered that I had had my childhood cat (still alive, apparently) with me in the dorm, but that I hadn't fed her or even seen her for quite a while. I went back to the dorm and tried to talk to the dean about it. She tried to be reassuring, saying that cats were self-sufficient and she might have just wandered off to find a new home (or, she added, maybe she had just died and that was why I hadn't seen her).

All this time Hayden, Jr. seemed like he really wanted to talk to me. I was a little annoyed because I was already stressed about the library and the cat, and I couldn't figure out why he was so interested in me. Was he really desperate for a friend, or did he have a Thing for Older Women, or what? (Despite the living-in-the-dorm thing, I was my actual age in this dream.) He finally engaged me in conversation and asked if I had noticed him as he walked past the Western Town. I said, "yes, you were wearing cowboy boots", to which he answered triumphantly, "Yes! With three-inch heels!" Bizarre.

Scenes

Friday night I had fairly vivid, episodic dreams all night long. Saturday morning I couldn't remember most of them, but a few did stick out.

-There were a lot of fat babies. In the dream, they were very cute, but upon waking consideration, remembering our exclamations over their multiple chins, I'm thinking they were morbidly obese.

-I was preparing two kinds of cheese and bread for some event. The bread I was just slicing or tearing (it was white and very soft), but the cheese I was actually making. One of the cheeses was orange, and the other one was white. The white was very soft, kind of like ricotta, and had some herbs or something in it. When I tasted it, though, it was bland and kind of grainy.

-I was at a wedding--with my dad, I think. It involved a huge parade to a specific location. The guests followed--and sort of became part of--the parade, behind costumed acrobats and the like. The parade stopped when we reached the destination, which was just the street in a nice historic neighborhood, with the setting sun in the background. We all stopped, and the officiant said something, to which the bride--who was very petite, with a small, white, heart-shaped face and dark hair (I think she may have been a character in a book I'm reading, Claire in White Oleander), responded. When she did, a lantern that someone had been holding went out, and everything went black. When I was able to see a second later, I had been whisked along with the crowd in the opposite direction, deliberately turning our backs on the bride. I "remembered" (whether I'd actually been told earlier in the dream or if dubious dream-memory filled it in) that it was some sort of gypsy (?) tradition, where because the bride had been unfaithful to someone else, the community shamed her by pretending to go along with the wedding, but then at the last minute, showing their displeasure. I felt bad about it.

my mother thinks i'm a terrible person

I had another one of those disheartening mother-hate dreams last night. I was in high dudgeon about something and my mother got really disgusted with me (thank you, i hope so, that was the apt word for her reaction in these dreams). She started raking me over the coals about my bad attitude, saying that I was getting disproportionately angry about everything, it was a terrible attitude, I needed to shape up, and basically that I was a terrible person.

The interesting thing is that I do feel like I've been disproportionately and indiscriminately angry for a while now, and I feel guilty about it. So maybe some of these dreams are just caused by guilt feelings.

Baseball Game

I was at a baseball game with co-workers. Everyone was joking that one of the guys liked me, and I just kept saying, "But I have a boyfriend!" and no one was listening to me. So I was kind of hiding behind a pole. And then the stadium erupted into a cheer. I know they play it at Pirates games, but I don't know about anywhere else. It goes Da-Da-Da-Da CHARGE! And I was watching the woman leading the cheer. She was playing a black baby grand piano that sounded like a keyboard. And she had a cannon on top of the piano. And on the last time we all said Charge she pulled a lid off the back of the cannon and a cannonball went flying out. And it hit some guy in the chest. It was like a cartoon, the way it sunk into his body. And he just fell backwards. And then everyone around him kept saying, "Dude, he's dead" over and over and over again. I woke up feeling like I had caused his death.

Rebellion

I was teaching a Level 5 class of about 15 junior high students. It was near the end of the class, and I was trying to wrap things us, but I didn't have any of my class notes, and had no idea what came next.

I ended up saying something like, "So, today, we've been reading things. You've been doing some reading." I realized this sounded terribly lame and I strained my brain, trying to remember what I was supposed to say.

Then I realized that my supervisor was there observing me, standing just outside the door. I came up with something fairly intelligent to say, but then my entire class decided to be rebellious. They all started standing up and trying to leave. I kept commanding them to sit down and listen, but as soon as I'd get a few to sit down, others would be standing. Then they started sneaking out while I was trying to get the others to sit and listen.

Since I haven't taught any of these reading classes in about five months, I'm pretty sure this one represents anxiety about the sections I'm teaching this semester (in which, thankfully, no one has--yet--stood up and left).

Chased and late

So I was in the car with my parents, and we were driving along one of the semi-familiar composited freeways that populate my dreams. It was under construction of some sort. I don't remember if I saw a sign or heard a tour guide of some sort say it, but I became aware that there was something special about the robots on the side of the road. Robots?! I looked to one side of the car, and all I saw were these concrete pillar-things that looked vaguely humanoid. I looked to the other side, and there were some robots that looked like overgrown Lego men. One in a yellow hat started running up to the car, but my dad was able to speed up and get away from him. But then another of the robot guys started chasing us. This one looked like a human, with long dark hair and a goatee. I was reading a magazine and realized that the guy who was going to play a robot in a movie was a famous actor, who I think was named Collin Tokannon. Sure enough, that was the guy chasing us. I still felt alarmed by him, though, especially when he managed to catch us and then jump onto the bumper and cling to the car. We were in my car, the Bruise, and I was in the backseat, so I reached back and locked the back, just in case. I suppose if a guy can catch up to a speeding vehicle, jump onto the back, and manage to hold on, he shouldn't have any trouble opening the hatch and getting in (if it's unlocked).

Earlier, I had one of those awful dreams where I'm running late and about to disappoint everyone because I just can't get it together. It was my second day at a new job, and I was trying to decide what to wear. The outfit morphed a bit throughout the course of the dream, but throughout it was striking. I had on some sort of stripey green and pink long sleeved shirt, under a fuchsia button-down tunic with a beaded black bow-tie/brooch (I eventually removed the latter as being too over-the-top). Over that, I had on a sparkly black crocheted vest of sorts with a very open weave that showed the other two layers. On top of everything, I was wearing a soft, loose, long black sweater with a very deep V-neck, which made the whole thing very classy. The bottoms morphed from a knee-length fuchsia skirt that matched the tunic to capris of the same color. The thing that really pulled it all together, though, was my wide fuchsia bracelet. The problem was the shoes. Closed-toe shoes looked funny with such a spring-like costume, but it was winter and I had to wear them, even though the gap between my socks and the skirt/capris, exposing my very white legs, looked silly. I think I ended up settling on rather demure black sneakers with a couple inches of gray socks showing.

Even in the dream, I was concerned about such an odd get-up, but running as late as I was (45 minutes, I think, by the time the dream finally shifted), it didn't even occur to me to just start over. I think I thought if I could just get the right footwear ensemble, everything would be okay.

As if the stress in my waking life isn't enough. Instead it has to plague me in my sleep...

Troubled waters

I was in my car when I started up the bridge, because I remember one of the workers holding out his hand for me to stop as I approached, and then motioning that I could continue. It looked like it was under construction, or perhaps just being built, like the new bike bridge on my commute to school.

By the time I got near the end of the bridge, though, things were definitely not finished, and I was on my own; I was now on my hands and knees crossing the widely-spaced rungs of a swinging bridge. As I was struggling with it, a guy passed me, and then he got the single-passenger circular orange transport-thing that would take him to the other side of the river. It was meant to travel on water, which seems odd given that we'd just crossed a bridge, but the logistical aspect that most concerned me at the time was how I would get across if he was taking the only transporter. He assured me that there was another on the other side, which satisfied me at the time (dream logic!).

When I crossed the bridge, I realized I needed to pack my suitcase before I got on the transporter. I knew I didn't have much to pack, but found myself packing and packing. Suddenly I realized I had two suitcases, both with clothes in them, that I needed to consolidate into one. About that time I became aware that I had been spending waaaaay too long on this, that I was at my aunt and uncle's house, and that I was about to be late for my flight. Thankfully my aunt agreed to drive me to the airport if I could cross the street and meet her on the other side--whatever that means.

I keep having these packing dreams; this is at least the third this week. First, I dreamed I was repacking my suitcase on a bus trip and missed the bus. Then a few days ago, I dreamed my family and I were going on a trip and that I was trying to grab things at the last minute, because I hadn't packed at all. There's the general anxiety of being late and about to miss my ride, but there's also the guilt about my tardiness and inability to get it together. I want some pleasant travel dreams!