squalid group living

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.

Sarah Palin's National Geographic Cameo

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.

Classic Group Trip

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).

in which i caricature my real-life tastes and interests

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.

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.

more [overflowing] baggage

I had a long, detailed, and unsettling dream this morning. I was on a group trip (sigh) with a lot of college-age kids (I was also that age), including some random former classmates from elementary school through college.

The trip was to India, and we were staying at a large, run-down resort. The hotel was very old, and pieced-together in the way of old buildings that have been added on to over and over. It was a weird mixture of good old (antiques), just run-down old, and new. There were a couple of pools outside that were especially impressive: a freshwater infinity pool and, just beside it overlooking the actual ocean, a rocky saltwater pool. The rocks were set up so that the seawater sloshed in and out over them, but swimmers wouldn't be washed out to sea. It was a really nice setup, so nice that the temptation to swim there overcame my desire to not expose my flabby belly.

There was some random exploration of the hotel, and a lot of time spent on my part preparing to swim. This involved showering, picking out the most flattering combination of a variety of unmatching two-pieces, and putting on various lotions and makeup. I was very stuck on the idea that I needed to look as good as possible for the swimming, but I also recognized that I was being obsessive, and I was frustrated that supper time was approaching and it was going to be too late to swim for more than a few minutes.

Other hotel curiosities were the stairways and elevators. The stairways were very narrow and low-ceilinged, so low-ceilinged that I was hesitant to try them. The hotel contained a lot of stories, though, so I decided to try the elevator. It seemed normal when I stepped in with another person, but morphed into a sort of minivan when we got down to ground level. She took charge and drove it, rather crazily, to another building on the resort grounds. I decided not to take the elevator again.

The whole atmosphere became a little oppressive once I started paying attention. The workers at the resort, if not openly hostile, obviously hated us all and hated the fact that we were there. Most of them were quiet about it, but not all. On an exploratory trip with some other people on a remote upstairs wing of the building, we came to a large open room decorated with lots of Indian things--rugs, hanging lamps, etc. We were interested because it seemed like The Real Thing and not something for tourist consumption, but when the man inside it saw us he got up from his folding chair and started yelling and gesticulating wildly at us to leave. A couple of younger men who could have been his sons arrived and went inside the room to start some kind of ecstatic religious dance, while the man kept on yelling at us.

After that, I think there was another mini-episode in which I was trying to sort through overflowing baggage to get ready to swim (I never did get to swim in the whole dream).

Then things switched to another story line. I was still at the resort, but it was night and the group had been given free time. I was in an upper story, very reminiscent of an airport, with little bars one after the other, not separated by walls. I was following around an older guy who was a mixture of several former professors and bosses, with a dash of David Carradine thrown in. I wasn't sure why I was following him, but I knew I was supposed to stick with him even though he wasn't interacting much with me. His demeanor was sort of your average Troubled Antihero, silent, brooding, with his mind obviously on something. He would stop at one of the bars and order two drinks (once it was a "lemon fizz" and a gin and tonic, I can't remember the others), one of which was obviously supposed to be for me. Since I was following him somewhat at a distance, though, I wasn't quite sure what to do. He never really gestured for me to come over, but his two-drink order made it clear that I was supposed to be with him. Each time, he would get the two drinks, look at them distractedly, brood for a while, push them back toward the bartender, and leave for the next bar without actually consuming anything. I got the impression that all this was leading up to some kind of action of vengeance on his part, although toward whom I wasn't sure.

This puzzling action went on for a while, and he eventually morphed into my husband. I don't remember what happened then, except that I was relieved to be back on more familiar ground.