pop culture reference extravaganza!

I was in the middle of a very detailed and tiring dream when I woke up this morning, the sort that makes me intermittently raise my eyebrows in bemusement for the next half hour or so.

The dream began with--what else?--a group trip. I was traveling with my parents, sister, and some assorted people who popped up fuzzily in the periphery and then disappeared. We were staying at my ex-boyfriend's parents' house (not their real-life house, but an apartment influenced by some extended family members' apartments in Canada). I was sharing a bedroom (with whom, I can't remember; either my husband or my sister, I think) that I realized belonged to the parents, with a very large white bed and a setup including about three fans. The fans kept turning themselves on, even after being unplugged, which really freaked me out. I didn't want them on because I was cold, but it took me quite a while to work out how to get them completely off.

By the time I got the fan situation resolved it was almost time to get up and around, so I took a shower and was trying to figure out when and where would be best to do the rest of my morning remedial work (what is with this constant issue in dreams of trying to put myself together?). The other guests were starting to gather for breakfast, and there were a few minutes of that annoying back-and-forth about the best way to schedule breakfast and bathroom for all parties. There was that cumbersome feeling of too many people trying to move together.

I guess everyone managed to get ready, because we got to church (based on my parents' actual church, except with uneven, too-close-together rows of metal folding chairs instead of actual pews). I sat down next to a real-life coworker and my sister, but my sister got up at some point to sit with friends, and I was left with the coworker to my left and several empty seats between me and my mother. For some reason I was annoyed with her and wanted to ignore her for the duration of the service, but she kept talking to me about various things (notably whether I had a kleenex). I was uncharacteristically empty-handed in the dream, so I didn't have a kleenex, but she had sidled over in the kleenex search and was sitting next to me. I couldn't get rid of her, but wished she would go away because in the dream I was developing a bit of a mutual crush on the coworker* (sitting progressively closer together in a G-rated way, as is the usual pattern in my "crush" dreams).

The church service finally started, and a group of about 7-8 high school students got up to sing. It started out with an almost unbearable solo by the girl in the center: that almost-inaudible, reedy, breathy voice of a teenager who thinks she can sing because she sings along to music in her room. Soon the others joined in, which made it more bearable and added a bit more volume. They were all swaying and dancing to various degrees, which I found kind of charming ("aw, youthful exuberance"). I knew that my mother was going to freak out, though, and possibly get up and walk out. Their dancing soon coalesced into a routine, and when the group turned around I was startled to see that one of the girls was wearing a dress that amounted basically to an apron, so that her hot-pantsed backside was completely exposed when she turned around. She did a not-quite-expert version of a jiggling "booty dance". The whole effect was extremely jarring, although all I could think was, "that poor girl, why didn't anyone advise her against this?"

When the song ended, the entire audience booed, and a short, stocky, Chuck-D.-esque man in a military uniform took the stage. He began to rail against the dance piece, which he clearly hadn't appreciated either. And he had really not appreciated getting what amounted to a (very short) lap dance by Miss Hotpants/Apron.

Things didn't get a lot better after that. They started running a video showing a Jessica Alba lookalike clothed in a sort of leotard over a printed, almost-transparent full-body catsuit. The catsuit had a really beautiful pattern to it, a kind of leaves/flowers/wheat thing. The girl had water (rain?) running down over her, which was slowly dissolving the print/material of the catsuit (but not the leotard). I gradually caught on that it was an American Apparel ad, for a water-soluble catsuit (??). From what I could understand, it would dissolve and then reconstitute itself. They were hinting that this feature would be useful when one needed to pee, since you could just leave it on (?? yuck). The video ended with what I finally realized was a closeup of the model's (clothed, but barely) crotch.

The dubious church service being finally over, several members of the party went to a flea market. I love these flea-market dreams because they're always so detailed, but I can't remember many of the items I looked at. The thing that sticks out most was a beautiful, elaborately hand-embroidered pillowcase. One side was white embroidery on white, and the other side was a mixture of white, printed border, and white embroidery. The fabric was a loosely woven linen, which didn't seem either all that comfortable or very durable, and there were a couple of holes toward one end of it. What was really noteworthy about it, though, was its former owner: Anne Heche (??)**. While the completely white side had an elaborate embroidery saying "amor", the other side had "Anne Heche" embroidered on it. There was a note pinned to it saying, "soon to be Leah Anne Somebody-or-Other", from which I deduced that the pillowcase was part of the spoils of her relationship with Ellen Degeneres. There was another pillowcase-like object next to it, and I thought it might be Ellen's, and might be similarly beautiful (although I did think it might be a bit freaky to have a set of Ellen-and-Anne pillowcases on my bed). On closer inspection the object turned out to be not a pillowcase but a red Chinese towel. I first looked at the back side, and was thinking of buying it. On turning it over, though, I found that what had looked like two plain panels were actually two photorealistic renderings (in terrycloth?!) of a couple of celebrities in the style of mid-80s Glamour Shots (tm)***.

Sigh. I knew this one was going to go over the character limit for tags....

*Alert Readers should be assured that this is not a real-life development, although I do enjoy this person as a coworker because he tends toward a benign grumpiness that I find soothing.
**Where DO these random celebrities come from? They're never anyone I've actually been thinking about.
***Research reveals they're still in business!

contradictory messages from my subconscious

I had a weird variation on the choosing-clothes dream last night. I dreamed that I was in a church boarding school environment* and there was going to be one of those "banquets" that happens every so often at schools that don't condone dancing and thus can't have a school dance. I was more or less my actual age, so I'm not sure what I was doing at the school--I think everyone else was more or less my actual age too, so logistically that was weird.

The really weird part, though, was that I actually had an appropriate outfit picked out, it fit fine, and I was completely relaxed and even kind of looking forward to the event, if for nothing else because I really liked the outfit. It was a floor-length, vaguely 70s dress--maybe strapless--with interesting construction. The cloth was very thin black silk with large, bright-colored slightly abstract watercolor flowers (mostly various shades of red and orange, with some gold and green). There were several layers of fabric, with slightly ruffly pieces sticking out here and there, and it fit me really well. I'm not sure what shoes I was going to wear (I remember rejecting a pair of red eelskin boots I actually own as being too wintry), but the shoes went great with the dress, and I was going to carry a red eelskin clutch (also an item that I actually own).

I was feeling pretty satisfied and slightly surprised that my outfit had come together, when I heard that the event had been postponed because of a tragedy that had befallen a girl's family (someone I actually went to school with). A building that the family ran a business in had burned down recently, and now their house had burned down too, so the banquet was being postponed as a gesture of respect for their loss.

The next I can remember, I was driving a big truck, very much like a huge SUV we actually used to have**. I needed to park it at some business, and on arriving I was a little dismayed at the lack of sufficiently capacious parking. I drove around to the back and found that there were more empty spaces back there. I aimed for a space marked "SUV" that was wider than the others, but instead found myself headed into one marked "small car". I thought, "well, maybe I can at least center it in here since the spaces on both sides are empty. I started to brake, and was alarmed to find that although it was slowing down it was definitely not stopping; in fact, it kept going and I eased right off the edge of the lot and landed (rather gently) on a lower parking area. To add insult to injry, while this lack of braking control was going on, I was also experiencing a lack of bowel control!

I can't believe my subconscious is this sadistic; first it teases me with an "I'm-in-control-and-not-having-a-wardrobe-crisis" plotline, then it throws an out-of-control car AND bowels at me.


*What's with these constant school-flashback dreams?
**This SUV has figured in my dreams at least once before, in a similar role--I'm having a hard time driving it/stopping it.

chubby and manly?

I hate to displace the great dream below, but if I don't I'm going to forget this. I've had three depressing low-self-esteem dreams lately, three nights in a row.

1.
All I really remember from this one is suddenly realizing that my posterior was WAY bigger than I had been thinking it was. This didn't really fundamentally shake my self-concept, it was just really weird and very surprising. My first thought was, "well, I guess I didn't need to be worried about having a lack in that area", and my second thought was, "oh, I guess I should start exercising more". I also wondered what other aspects of my self-image were totally inaccurate.

2.
This was the worst one, and I was discombobulated by this one for a while after waking. It was in the course of a much longer dream in which I was in Italy on an extended vacation with my parents, sister, and grandmother. We were staying in a huge rented villa. It was a very old building with a lot of weird rooms and strange layouts resulting from hundreds of years of add-ons and modifications. There was also some very unattractive carpeting and paint (think a church basement/fellowship hall with carpet that was cheap thirty years ago).

At some point I was attending a wedding in a nearby church. I don't know who this wedding was for, but the curious thing is how I was dressed. Normally in a dream like this I would have gone through an agonizing search through a weird assortment of very detailed clothes, but I don't remember a getting-dressed sequence in this one. I do remember what I was wearing: an oversized sports jersey (hockey?) tucked into a rose-colored below-the-knee early 90s pleated skirt and topped off with a squarish navy blue cardigan (??!). I had my hair straight and parted on the side, and I remember being satisfied with how I looked [although, at the same time, my always-awake editorial review board was strenuously objecting to the outfit].

I entered the church and wasn't sure which side I should sit on, not recognizing any of the guests. I had just chosen a spot when an older man stationed on the opposite side of the church said--loudly--"young man!" I looked around to see who he was addressing, and he repeated it. Somehow I realized that I was the "young man" in question, and I tried to make him understand that I was not a young man. He was not to be dissuaded, and getting more and more worked up. He said, "young man, don't argue with me!", and went on to bluster that my lack of a tie was inappropriate and that I was going to have to leave until I could produce a tie.

Needless to say, it was extremely humiliating and destabilizing. I think everyone else there pretended that nothing was happening as I beat my retreat.

Later on in the dream, I had an exchange with Lindsay Lohan, who seemed very depressed and a little needy. We talked about how cruel the "entertainment media" was to publish pictures of "Stars without Makeup" and dissect celebrities' appearances when they didn't look any worse than your average person on the street. I got tired of the conversation pretty quickly, but I felt bad for her and couldn't figure out how to extricate myself without hurting her feelings.

3.
The third dream involved a couple of my real-life friends. We were eating in a restaurant somewhere, and one of them (who in real life is the most tactful person you could ever hope to meet) commented on how much I was eating. She said, "yes, I've always been amazed at how much you can eat and how often. I could never eat that much. I guess that's why you're chubby with a belly." This was said with a perfectly straight face, as if it couldn't possibly be offensive to me, so I figured I had better respond in kind, as if it were just a normal discussion about anything else.

extreme changes of mood

I woke up in a great mood yesterday after dreaming several pleasant things (I don't think any of them involved Johnny Depp). The only thing I can really remember was that I had made a lot of headway on a freelance translation career and had been engaged to translate a real book, and a work of fiction at that! I was hopeful that this was going to be a launching pad for a specialization in translating fiction and that I would end up being one of those translators the merits of whose versions get debated in scholarly papers.

Last night's dream was awful. My husband and I had decided to take a little jaunt to Paris. I don't know where we were, but Paris was within driving distance. The only problem was that I wasn't dressed appropriately and couldn't figure out what to wear. I was very flustered and nothing was coming together, although I was pretty sure that my rose-colored turtleneck* needed to figure in somewhere. He got really annoyed really quickly and stormed out to drive away in the car because I was taking too long, ignoring my tearful entreaties to wait.

It turned out that he had only gone for a short drive because he was feeling antsy and didn't want to sit there while I had a closet meltdown, but it was still pretty harrowing. He came back after about 15 minutes, not mad at all, but I think I woke up before we could get to Paris.

*Notable because this is one of the very rare occasions when an item I actually own shows up in a getting-dressed dream.

back to school

I had sort of a back-to-school dream last night. I was getting set up in a dorm, my roommate seemed nice, I had some cute clothes and dorm furnishings, so overall it was agreeable. There was an unpleasant bit where I got hung up on getting ready to go to the library to study, though. I kept putting on more and more and more makeup, wondering why I was doing it and why it wasn't making me look better [and now I wonder what that was all about, because it was significantly more makeup than I ever actually wear]. I made a resolution that I was just going to stop where I was, go to the library, try not to worry about looking like a clown, and henceforth be an effortless natural beauty (!). I felt rather optimistic about my future as an E.N.B.

The other disagreeable part of the dream was my ex-boyfriend calling just as I was getting ready to leave. I was puzzled about how he had gotten my new number so quickly, and I was really annoyed because, although I didn't have anything against talking to him from time to time, I had a sense that he was going to start calling really frequently and I wouldn't be able to figure out how to get him to stop without being rude and hurting his feelings.

And I just had a flashback to a dream that I had completely forgotten, from a few weeks ago. I don't remember the story line, just images. It involved a fantastically overcrowded house (not mine) and a blues singer. The whole atmosphere was very Deep South.

colorful dresses and makeup mishaps

I had yet another dream where I was picking out clothes and trying to get ready. I was at my parents' house, and I was supposed to be participating somehow with my sister in the church service at my parents' church*. I guess I hadn't packed any appropriate clothing, because I was looking through the closet in my sister's old room. There was a huge selection of dresses, so huge that they were stored on one of those rotating racks like at a drycleaner's. I could tell that most of the clothes had been found at thrift stores. They were all really interesting, with a lot of prints and unusual color combinations. Some of them were overtly "ethnic" and others not, but they all managed to be unusual while still being very wearable and not too weird or cutesy. I was really impressed that she had amassed such a huge collection of interesting clothes, and ended up spending too much time browsing. I finally settled on a black dress** and realized I hadn't left much time for the rest of my preparations.

At that point I looked in the mirror and realized that I looked better than I would have thought given my lack of cosmetics, and also that I was a very young-looking Asian girl with bangs. Apparently my sister was also Asian, and she looked much older and more sophisticated. I worried that, especially if I didn't have time for much cosmetic work, people would think we were mother and daughter.

I guess I had time to start on the cosmetic work, because the last thing I remember was putting a mascara wand back into a bottle of makeup because I was in a hurry and being frustrated that I had probably messed up both products.

I think it's weird that I have these clothing/preparation dreams so often. I love the clothing parts and wish I could remember the details when I wake up; the preparation parts I could do without, though. I wish I could come up with an interpretation for them that doesn't point to unhealthy appearance anxiety.

*That reminds me that I periodically have dreams where I'm supposed to play the piano for their church (something that happened a lot growing up) but haven't prepared anything and am trying to figure out how to muddle through. These dreams feature a weird combination of performance anxiety and hubristic overconfidence that I'll just be able to improvise something baroque-y.
**Why did I choose something black, with all the beautiful colored and printed options?

food sculpture

Part of last night's dream was about (of course) being on a group trip and getting ready to go somewhere. It was a large group, and I don't remember who was in it, where we were, or the purpose of the trip. The getting-ready part involved finding a bathroom, getting the bathroom fit to use (some shower-curtain difficulties), trying to arrange all my cosmetic equipment (which, in the dream, was much more plentiful than in real life), and forgetting several times to bring crucial items into the bathroom with me and having to go and retrieve them from wherever the rest of my things were. Also, I had a eureka revelation that I needed to remove all of my travel toiletries from their case and re-evaluate everything before each trip, because I had ended up with a lot of extraneous stuff and almost-empty containers.

The other part was less predictable. Still on the trip, I commented to a real-life coworker that her husband was "cute" [I met him yesterday]. She sighed and started talking about how he had been unemployed for quite a while and wasn't making any effort to find another job, and I realized I had stepped on a conversational landmine.

Then, the trip apparently over, I was at work and the same coworker brought a gift to my desk. It was something she was giving everyone in the office in honor of some holiday I hadn't been aware of. It was a surreal sculpture consisting of a chicken (cooked or uncooked, I wasn't sure), with all manner of small raw vegetable pieces stuck into the skin to make it into a whimsical rabbit-like animal. Small pieces of carrot made up the "fur", and other vegetables were used as facial features. The overall effect was like a very strange stuffed animal, and I wasn't sure what to do with it. Should I cook and eat it? Use it as a decoration? I played with it a little at my desk, trying to seem appreciative because she was very excited about these creatures. I tried to figure out if it was pre-cooked or not, and came to the conclusion that it was cooked just enough to be technically done, but still uncooked enough that one could bake it longer to cook the surface vegetables and make a nice crust on the meat itself. Then she commented that she didn't think it was "food safe", and that it was just a decoration that would last a few days, for whatever holiday this was. It was very confusing, and I also realized after waking up that it was way too light-weight to be an actual chicken.

midwestern girls

I dreamed last night that I had started dating a boy I had an obsessive but fruitless crush on in elementary school (the one who was messing with the coffeemaker in the other night's dream)*. [Obviously I wasn't married in this dream.] I was at my parents' house getting to ready to go to their church; it was going to be our public "coming out" as a couple and I was stressed out about it, not least because I wasn't sure how I had come to be half a couple with him and because I wasn't sure I wanted to be. Also, he had two small children, and it occurred to me that maybe he just wanted a nursemaid for them. And at some point I saw a picture of his ex-wife and she was really beautiful, which further stressed me out (I was sure he must not be over her and anxious about being compared to her). Oh, and I didn't like his hair very much, but it occurred to me that since he had worn it that way since age 7 chances were very slim that he would be convinced to change it now.

Of course I was trying to pick out something to wear, and at first I thought I had a lot of great choices. The closet was full of similar printed silk dresses, some of which had really beautiful patterns and colors. I was feeling optimistic and planning to wear my red shoes when I noticed that only one dress was wearable--the others were very wrinkled, as if they had been hand-washed and drip-dried, all crinkled and crispy. Also, they had alarming huge 80s-style collars, and the red shoes turned out not to be my actual red shoes but patent-leather things with chrome buckles, which didn't really go with the dresses.

Then to my further annoyance my brain woke me up blasting "California Girls" to itself, repeating the part about midwestern girls over and over**.



*Random people tend to appear a few times in a row in my dreams, then disappear again. I think it's because I'm so puzzled as to why they appeared that they stay in my head and pop in again.
**Apart from "The Sloop John B", I am not a Beach Boys fan.

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.