The pregnant lady

In my dream, I am pregnant. I’m not exactly sure how far along I am, but I know that my belly gets in the way of things like steering wheels, tables, other people, and being close to anything.

            Because of this, the outdoor café table at which I sit is far enough away that I have to look up from the book I’m reading to reach for my cup of tea. I notice a man in a suit in the ironwrought chair across from me. His appearance does not stir any emotional response in me at first except for a mild surprise. I immediately understand why.

            This man is the devil.

            He sits straight-backed and still in the chair, one leg cocked and resting on the other. His hair is sleek, slicked, curly and dark. His skin is pale but not noticeably so; the crisp cream-colored suit he wears compliments his strong, sturdy frame nicely.

            The only inhumanity that betrays him is his eyes: they are bright bluewhite, as if his brain were an electrical plant gone AWOL. His face is no face and every face; handsome but indistinguishable. He does not blink. He does not smile.

            I don’t either.

            “Hi,” I say, closing my book.

            “Hi,” he says in a rich, silky purr.

            I know this man well. We’re past small talk.

            He reaches out an unblemished hand and picks up my teacup. He moves with a fluid, unbroken grace that only exists for him. He sips, never taking his wild, lurid eyes off mine.

            Later, as we talk, I realize that there is steam rising from my cup where there wasn’t before. Every so often I check. The tea never cools. I don’t touch the cup again.

            “Your child will have a good singing voice,” he says in his own sweet baritone that nearly drove me out of my mind with need for him. “Your child will have good eyesight and gentle hands. It will grow wise and compassionate. It will love easily and be loved by nearly everyone close to it.”

            “Nearly everyone?” I ask, the answer dangling just out of reach on the hinge of my mind.

            He nods once, slowly. For the first time since he sat down, his eyes stray from me. I look at him now in profile.  As he speaks, I watch with interest the words riding out of his mouth on a heat shimmer so intense it blurs the color of the space behind him into a watery grey.

            “Your child has nothing to prove to you. But you won’t remember that.”

            I cock my head. I am not angry or defensive or even confused. I am curious.

            The baby kicks me high in the ribs once.

            “I would never ask it to prove anything to me. Unless I were teaching it how to argue.”

            The devil sighs. Twin blasts of heat billow out from his flared nostrils. The air distorted by the heat is mesmerizing. There is no breeze in the cool spring morning, but I catch a whiff of burning leaves.

            He returns his face to me, etched in lines of sadness. Those lines look foreign, alien, on the plain white clay of his skin. His eyes spark with something that is not sadness. It is not greed or rage or lust or envy or hunger or pride. It is not human; it is not emotion. All I know is what it is not. His eyes spark and glitter, and the not-knowing is the water that urges the feeling of unease into full, queasy bloom. It is never outright fear, not around him.

            “What do you gain from having this child?” He asks.

            “The knowledge of another part of myself,” I reply.

            The baby kicks me again, this time low.

            The devil stands up, not even a whisper of silk on silk accompanying his movement. It is then that I notice a song playing softly through the speakers on the café’s eaves:

                        Time it took us

                        To where the water was

                        That’s what the water gave me

                        And time goes quicker

                        Between the two of us

                        Oh, my love, don’t forsake me

                        Take what the water gave me

This song would be playing throughout the rest of the dream.

            The devil rests a hand on my shoulder. My eyes trail up the length of his arm. The suit fits him so well there is barely a fold or a ridge. He’s got his eyes on me, those cold-burning blue eyes, those eyes that have seen the firstborn chaos of the universe, those eyes made of entropy. They uncouple me from the hook of reality.

            When I surface from the moorless depths of disassociation, I am sitting at the edge of a large lake at dusk. I breathe in the dimness, but my lungs cannot expand.

            Partially because the darkness is thick and sticky and it coats my lungs like tar. Partially because the baby has grown so big that it presses against my diaphragm. I cough, but it does no good.

            Darkness drops fully like water from a bucket and I look for the source of my unease.  To calm myself, I begin humming under my breath.

                        Lay me down

                        Let the only sound be the overflow

                        Pockets full of stones

                        Lay me down

                        Let the only sound be the overflow

It’s a struggle to stand. I keep stepping on the gauzy, flowing dress I find myself in. It feels wonderful against my skin, but it’s little comfort. With the smell of rotting lake all around me and cold mud sucking at my knees and feet, I am immobilized by the mire in my mind.

            The moon is broken and sickly, gives off a drunken yellow light that does not illuminate but confuses. I grab at something near me upon which the light sizzles like sluggish oil. It’s an oar.  I pry myself out of the swamp by clawing up its length. My legs are rubbery and uncooperative, so I stand swaying for a moment, resting a hand on my belly and feeling the mud squelch up between my bare toes.

            I can’t catch my breath. But years of dealing with asthma have taught me not to panic and gasp, so I don’t.

            In, out, in, out, in, out.

            There are soft voices behind me. Familiar familial voices.

            Oh no.

            The thought sparks in my head and lights a flame of fear. I know what this means. When I dream of water, I dream of drowning.

            There is a log cabin set several dozen feet back from the lake. Lights burn fitfully in the windows, casting shadows that leap like rabid things over the walls. The voices inside are risen in song. I open the screen door and the flickering candlelight flays me. I cringe and squint and am assaulted by life, foaming at the mouth. My family, extended, adopted, all, is crammed into the cabin. They are exuberant, they are wild, they are loud and completely unlike themselves. They dance as if there is nothing left for them in the world. There is gravity here, and it grabs at my chest, wanting me.

            “Hey!” I scream into the light, the heat, the rush, the motion, the oppressing life. “The water is rising! You have to get out! Get out! Get out!”

            I lean as far in as my arms will let me, my hands holding onto the outside edge of the doorframe for dear life. For a moment, the terror of getting lost in the press of bodies overwhelms the sick, sinking knowledge of the water behind me.

            Nobody hears me. Suddenly, my feet are cold. I jump and look down. Water, ankle deep. Moonlight slathers itself on the little lapping ripples like rancid butter. Still gripping the doorframe with both hands, I twist my neck as far as it will go. The grass is gone. The gravel path from the lake to the house is gone. The creeping fingers of the lake have taken it all. The darkness, I realize then, did not grow down from the sky. It grew up from the water like vines and infected the world. The smell of decay, of murky, evil water, gets thicker. I feel it trickling into the hollow spaces in me, filling me, making me feel heavy and awkward.

            I hear singing in my head:

 They took your loved ones
But returned them in exchange for you
But would you have it any other way?
Would you have it any other way?
You couldn't have it any other way

I rend myself from the doorframe of the cabin and shut the door against the painful light inside, against the rising liquid darkness outside. I pray that my family is safe from the water inside the cabin. I hope that the energy they create will be enough to fight the water back. I cannot help them now.

            The water is knee-deep. My dress is no longer gauzy and light but floppy and sloppy. I slog back toward where the bank of the lake used to be. My leg bumps something. I reach down into the freezing black, curving my back so that my chest doesn’t touch the surface, and pull up the oar I used to help me stand. The water drips off the oar onto my arm and it’s not water but a condensation, a concentration, of the darkness. It leaves oily trails on my arm.

            There is a small wooden canoe to match the oar, but it’s way out on the lake. Yards away. To reach it, I’d have to swim.

            I lay my hand on my belly. The baby has been quiet for a long time. I worry for it. Will my heat be enough to keep it alive in the impossible cold of the water? Will the weight of it, plus the weight of the darkness in my lungs and the weight of the dress drag me to the bottom?

                                   

Lay me down
Let the only sound be the overflow
Pockets full of stones
Lay me down
Let the only sound be the overflow

The water reaches lustfully for my hips. As I wade toward the canoe, I keep an ear trained back toward the cabin. The terrible cold rips the breath from my lungs. It swallows my belly. The baby does not kick. The water licks my neck. I fight the air for breath.

            In, out, in, out, in, out.

            Kick.

            I kick.

            I’ve lost the bottom; I float now, kicking to keep my head above the grabby little waves. Soon, my legs disappear into the numbing black. So I wave my arms and, despite what I’d feared the most, I reach the canoe. The devil is sitting in it. I know it’s him because his eyes slice through the darkness like knives made of electricity. They seem to scream at me. He sings:

Oh, poor Atlas
The world’s a beast of a burden
You’ve been holding on a long time
And all this longing
And the ships are left to rust
That’s what the water gave us

            I know better than to reach out a hand to him. I cling to the side of the canoe. I am past cold, past shivering, and I know that if I don’t get out of the water, both the baby and I will die.

            “You remind me of Ophelia in that dress,” the devil says. “Or the Lady of Shalott.”

            “The Lady of Shalott didn’t drown,” I say.

            “I’ll write your name round about the prow,” says the devil. “Then you can sing me your last song.”

            With some untouchable force that is brother to the darkness, the devil pries my frozen hands from the edge of the canoe. I swallow my panic, force it down into my gut to warm me, give me buoyancy, buy me time.

            The sick yellow-grey moonlight wanes. Only the high edges of things are lit, and even then they aren’t lit but painted with light. It drips from the tops of the trees and falls thickly onto the devil’s shoulders and head. He chuckles deeply as he carves my name into the inside of the canoe. That chuckle finishes what the water started; it crawls into my ears and piles up at the base of my brain, sinking me.

            I sing with the last breath I have:

She’s a cruel mistress
And a bargain must be made
But oh, my love, don’t forget me
I let the water take me

It’s peaceful in the deep.

The arms of the water are no longer crushing. They welcome now; they curl around me protectively as I curl around my belly. The fingers of the water no longer grope and want; they soothe me and smooth my hair and my dress.

            I rest in the black sanctuary. Now that I don’t have the sound of the devil or the cabin in my ears, I can hear the singing:

Lay me down
Let the only sound be the overflow
Pockets full of stones
Lay me down
Let the only sound be the overflow

            It seems to take hours to lift my head far enough to look up at the surface. The last bit of moonlight is fractured by the waves and sluggish fragments float down at me.  They never reach me because I’m sinking.

            I look forward to reaching the bottom. I’ll finally have somewhere still and quiet to rest my head.  

Is this what it feels like to give up? I ask myself.

            The baby kicks once, hard.

(Song: What The Water Gave Me by Florence + The Machine

weird miscellany and zombie shooters

I had the weirdest and wildest dreams last night, but I won't be able to do them justice, partly because my memory is a little hazy. Of course there was a group trip, a rather epic one involving travel on a giant bus with my mother and various random people from my past. I tried to find a seat, but each option presented problems. There was a very back row facing backward, which I thought would be okay although I don't like facing backward in a vehicle. But when I tried to sit down I discovered why the seats were empty: it really only worked if you hunched over or lay down across several seats, because of the combination of window and ceiling heights. Then my mother pointed out that there was a row of seats running up and down the left/driver's side, facing out sideways. I didn't like that option either because I thought it was dangerous. I was worried about the lack of seatbelts and what would happen in the event of a side collision*.

I finally sat down (in a rear-facing seat, but in the middle of the bus) next to a guy with a baby. The guy looked vaguely like Sean Bean, and I didn't really interact with him because I was distracted by the baby, who was dangling in front of me without any apparent support (although this didn't seem odd). Acting on reflex, I took the baby and set him on my lap, at which point I realized that he was actually a small freckled boy, maybe 6 or so**. I started talking to him rather animatedly, which surprised me since I'm not normally one of those people who makes over small children (not that I have anything against them, I'm just not the one who runs over and starts talking baby talk to them).

I'm not sure if this was the trip destination, but the next thing I remember I was at a house on a very steep wooded hillside. This was surely inspired by watching several historical British dramas recently featuring those long-term (by modern standards) visits in which a group of random highbrow people would descend on a manor house. There were a lot of people around, a few of whom I knew but most of whom I didn't, and I was trying to navigate the bathroom-use system because I wanted to take a shower.

I had laid claim to a bathroom (one of a pair in an odd layout: they were on a stair landing near the entrance, and had white louvered Western Saloon type doors) and was just about ready to take a shower. I don't remember all the details, but the owner of the house (who I think was the Sean Bean lookalike from the bus) arrived and made it clear that his routine was to use this bathroom at this exact time for his ablutions. So I apologized, gathered up my stuff, and went to wait outside.

I don't know if I ever got my shower, because the next thing I can remember was being outside. I realized that something odd was going on, but it took me a while to grasp the basics (I never did understand the details). In a nutshell, there was a shootout between some people, at least one of whom was a doppelganger of the host. This doppelganger had been activated by some action or event, but was apparently a chronic presence who appeared every so often--locked in semi-permanent conflict with the host.

The most fantastical moment involved a zombie-like young man propped up against the exterior wall. He had appeared to be dead, actually nailed to the wall by a gunshot. It became clear, though, that this was just a disguise to hide in plain sight--as the doppelganger (or maybe the host, I couldn't straighten out their identities) rounded the corner, the young man practically exploded from his position flat against the wall, shooting the doppelganger/host. I finally realized that this was a dangerous situation, and I started running/rolling down the hill. I'm not sure how I managed to avoid all the huge conifers, but the pine needles made a forgiving surface on which to roll, and when I had gotten to the bottom of the rather deep ravine I looked around and appreciated how beautiful it was, even though I didn't know how I was going to get out of there.

At some point a couple from my parents' church made a cameo appearance. In real life, this man has very straight, wiry hair that grows straight out from his head in all directions, and he favors a buzz cut of varying length. In the dream, he had curled his hair in a foppish late-18th-century/early 19th-century style***, and had caused some kind of unnamed scandal of medium-level seriousness. In real life, his wife has a rather old-fashioned haircut styled in a way that might be described as marcelled. In the dream, my sister informed me that he shared her husband's hair woes and that was why she always wore it quite short and curled in a standard "old lady" helmet style.



*I don't want to delve too deeply into this recent dream concern for vehicular safety.
**Nor am I going to meditate on the recurring theme of small boys.
***Thank you again, British historical dramas.

more group trips, and a trompe-l'oeil bird

My brain is back to its old tricks, apparently--I had another group trip dream last night. It was a combination group trip/family reunion. All of the extended family members from my dad's side had met at some location far from where anyone lived. The first part of the dream involved some socializing with older relatives. Then someone tried to do an organized activity, and encouraged us to break up into groups of 3 or 4 (I've never been all that keen on activities involving a structured forming into groups). For some reason, a real-life friend (Curly Sue, as it happens) was also there at the reunion, so we formed a group with two of my younger cousins. In real life, one is my age and one is a few years younger, but in the dream they were teenagers, probably because I haven't seen them for years. We started talking to them, and I was aware that I was feeling happy about being the cool older relative (and simultaneously really annoyed at both the feeling and the awareness of the feeling; my self-analyzer just won't ever leave me alone!).

After that, the group broke up pretty quickly and people started leaving. I guess we had planned to have a "friends" outing after the family reunion, because I was supposed to meet another real-life friend. I did some random wandering around, and then Curly Sue and I met her at a cafe that bore a strange resemblance to a cross between a laundromat and a Chinese restaurant.

This friend recently had a baby in real life, but in the dream she had apparently, in addition to having her real-life baby, had another baby who was still-born. She started talking about how she was looking forward to the second coming (of Christ, that is) because then her baby would "rise first" with a wave of other babies who had been still-born. In real life I'm not quite clear on the various Christian denominations' views on this, but in the dream she held a view that was supposedly the "evangelical view". She said that she and her husband hadn't thought they had any particular religious views, until the birth of the still-born baby, and then, very abruptly, they "saw the light" (she worded it more gracefully than that) and suddenly started subscribing to this mainstream theology. She even had a printout of something referring to the mass resurrection of still-born babies, some sort of liturgical thing printed out on the typical half-page paper with poor copy quality. I think both Curly Sue and I were a bit surprised at this, but she made it clear that she hadn't become a hardcore conservative and was still her old, open-minded self, so we figured it was a good way for her to adjust to and accept the death of the baby.

After that, I went on a hike with the other friend (not Curly Sue), and we ended up on a very steep scaffolding-like section of trail above a boardwalk (almost Coney Island style, but with less people and more nature). There was an odd encounter with a little bird. It was hopping around, and I noticed it looked strange. I realized that the actual bird had been encased in a covering (made from an old sock!) painted to look like a bird. I managed to catch the bird and remove the covering. It was a bit unsettling, but the bird seemed to be happy either way (with or without the trompe-l'oeil covering).

Baby

Somehow, I had a baby. Theoretically I had given birth to it, although that part didn’t figure into the dream at all. In fact, although my baby had apparently just been born, it was beautiful in the way that few, if any, newborns are: it had creamy ivory skin, downy hair, bright eyes, and a perfect little mouth. Oh, and it spoke in complete sentences. That part was especially impressive. Even in the dream, that seemed a particularly unusual feature.

I marveled at the baby’s beauty and intelligence and I loved it intensely—I just wanted to hold it and stare at it and kiss it. And I could tell it loved me back! It would affectionately snuggle up to me, and since it could speak, it also told me as much, although I can’t remember now exactly what it said. I liked the way it would put its head on my shoulder when I carried it on my back.

At one point in the dream I was carrying it on my back while I attended to other business, and suddenly realized I was missing it. I remember thinking something along the lines of, “Awwww, man! I KNEW I wasn’t responsible enough for this!” But then I discovered that one of the women I work with had taken my baby and another friend’s baby to put them in a double-cradle for a nap, so that was okay.

There were several of us with babies, actually, including a grad school friend whose baby looked rather like the Renaissance baby Jesuses she studies, and I think my aunt Teri. I was thankful to have them to ask for advice. Near the end of the dream, I realized I’d never had my baby weighed, measured, or in any other way tested after it was born, and wondered if I should find a doctor to do that. “No,” one of the other mothers assured me, “it’s better this way!” The reasoning was something about not buying in to the idea of comparing with others, or false progress, or something like that.

In real life, I do not want a baby, although I do enjoy other people’s. But this dream was kind of amazing, particularly for the mutual adoration between the baby and me, an emotional sensation that has lingered since I woke up. In the past I’ve had very anxious dreams about caring for someone else’s child and something going terribly wrong, but in this case, even though the baby was (yikes!) mine, it was all very positive and generally affirming.

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.

babies on this brain, too

i am currently surrounded by talk of pregnancy and babies. i have two cousins each with a child under a year, another cousin who is about to give birth any day now, and my brother and his wife who are also expecting (anyone want to feel sorry for me? anyone?)

this dream was about the cousin who is about to pop.

my cousin was giving birth on top of a round conference table. there were people seated at the conference table, all business-like, watching the birth take place. i was in another room when someone yelled to me that it was "time". i came running in to see the baby's head sticking out of my cousin. this was not nearly as disturbing to me in the dream as it was remembering it when i was awake. the baby was gorgeous and had heart-shaped lips. i quickly left the room to find my camera and when i came back i was able to get a few shots before the baby popped all the way out. when she came out, i was the first to hold her. and i was in LOVE.

the best part of the dream was that john travolta (!) was seated at the table, watching the whole thing. he was so happy. i took a picture of him holding little emma, knowing this was definitely something she would be proud of in years to come.

Babies on the Brain

I don't remember much of my dream, but at least I'm remembering fragments again.

Last night I had a dream where my mom get pregnant. I was my age, my sister was her current age, and my mom was her age, and very very very excited to be pregnant. I didn't think for one minute that it was odd or unusual for her to be with child, I was just really happy to have another sibling.

Snippets

This morning I have a nasty cold--curse distance-run-induced immune-drop, coupled with sleeping only on planes/in airports the next day! Anyway, I ended up sleeping about 11 hours last night, and here are a few of the fragments of dreams I remember:

• I was at the beach with my nuclear family. I had a bunch of stuff on the sand by the shore, including a rolling suitcase, and as the tide came in, my stuff started to get wet. My sister and I went to clean up and change our clothes. There was a little shower up from the water; I remember thinking of it as a "freshwater" shower. We walked down a long hallway to the bathroom, where I waited for her while she got ready.
• At some point, my brother came back down the long hallway, with a new haircut. It was pretty strange--kind of like what you might get if you crossed maybe 90s-era Elton John with Edward the Vampire--but I thought it was cute. I asked who had done it, and he said "Guess." I realized that my sister must have cut it for him in the bathroom. He wasn't exactly thrilled with it, but it had a lot of product in it, so I encouraged him that it would all work out and be attractive.
• I went to my friends' house, and when I got there she was trying to get the baby (much smaller than she is in real life) to sleep. She motioned for me to be quiet and said that she needed me to help, and that I should sit down on the couch. I did, and she put the nearly-sleeping baby into my arms, where she did fall asleep.
• I was online, looking at some sort of strange uber-Facebook/Myspace/iGoogle/blog/chat thing. I was surfing through people's very elaborate, visually overstimulating pages, and realized that my ex-boyfriend was online, too. I could tell this by posts he'd made in the past few minutes, or by the stat counter on my blog, or by comments he'd left on other people's walls. I was online, too, so he could see that. I was thinking about how I maybe felt ready to talk to him again, though I wasn't sure I wanted to take the initiative. I just wanted him to contact me. Then I heard him say, over some strange voice-chat thing, my name, and something to the effect that he knew I was online. I woke up before I had fully decided whether or not I wanted to talk to him.
  

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.

murder and houses and babies and dogs and rainn wilson

not sure where one dream ended and the others began...

i had gotten some sort of a flier and saw a commercial simultaneously about ridiculously fancy homes with all kinds of amenities - hot tubs and lookout towers (?) - and the commercial and flier touted that these homes could be rented for super cheap. i showed the flier to my now roommates and told them that i didn't know if it was a hoax but maybe we should check it out. we went to one of the homes at night and met with the realtor lady. oh, and a big selling point was that you could have has many dogs as you'd like while living there. somewhere during the meeting/tour, it was determined that the owners of these super nice houses had all been murdered and that's why rent was so cheap. and that's when i had a flash back to a sentence on the flier that said "why let a little murder stand in the way of living your dreams"? oh, i thought, that's what that meant. i also learned during the meeting/tour that most people who have participated in this special "offer" came home to find that their dogs were killed. we decided to pass.

at some point one of my roommates was pregnant. she was very calm and collected about the whole thing, which surprised me because of the not being married and having a strict chinese mother thing. she asked if i would be ok with having a baby as a roommate as well because she didn't want to move. i was fine with it.

i was at my old place of employment (hospital) and was wandering around for some reason. i had a shopping cart. a 20 something girl came up and stood next to my shopping cart and smiled at me as she combined tomato juice and vodka in a secret container for her to drink while at the hospital. she then put the rest of the tomato juice in my cart, leaving it to drip where ever i went. i was very angry about this - like super angry and offended that she would do such a thing to me! i found the complaint desk and made a formal complaint and felt very vindicated in doing so. i think i also called her a bitch as she got into her car to drive off.

i was walking in a downtown area looking for a place to eat. i realized that i was with an ex and was confused about why we would be hanging out and having dining together. i decided we must be friends now. we had dinner at a chinese restaurant and the whole experience was rather lovely. when we left the restaurant it was raining. i did not have an umbrella, he did. he left me to walk back to the car in the rain as he ran off ahead with his umbrella. i mumbled something along the lines of wow, he is still such an ass.

i was outside of the hospital i was at a couple of sequences ago. it was night time. a man ran up to me asking me about a little boy named "walter". the man was frantic. i realized the little boy was rainn wilson's (dwight on the office) son and that the man was the boy's uncle and rainn wilson's brother. it turned out the boy had died while in his uncle's care. i felt so sorry for both rainn for losing his son and for his brother for having to carry the guilt.

Banana Stand

I've been watching alot of Arrested Development on Hulu lately, which gives a bit of context.

The other night I dreamed that we were running a Frozen Banana Stand out of the living room of my parents' first house in Auburn. We had the yellow button-down shirts and everything. A poor family (gypsies?) came to the door, but they didn't want frozen bananas; they wanted a scarf for their baby. I went hunting through my things and found a scarf fragment just long enough for the baby. The family wasn't very grateful, but at least they left.

another one

woke up from another pregnancy dream this morning at the same exact time i woke up from one yesterday.

it was another one that was more about the *feeling* of being pregnant (belly, baby moving, etc) than about any sort of story that went along with it. in this one i had my usual venti non-fat iced latte and then realized that wasn't a good idea when i could feel the baby moving around a bunch and i could *feel* his heart beating super fast. i was worried that i had harmed him. and then i woke up.

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.

iPhones

The other night I dreamed that my boyfriend and I had a baby (weird in itself) that lived in an iPhone. It was like an application in the iPhone. It had to be fed and cared for on the phone's screen, much like those little Japanese electronic creatures that were popular 10 or 15 years ago. In the dream, I remember being happy that I could turn off the iPhone when I was ready to go to sleep so that the baby wouldn't keep me awake, but initially I was also interested in what this baby would look like.

Pregnancy and a Crush: Happiness all around

So..I have had two dreams over the last two nights that I can actually remember! I haven't been remembering my dreams for awhile now, so remembering these dreams is great news to me :)

The first dream I had was about a friend that I work with. She was pregnant in the dream, almost 8 months, and glowing. Once I saw her, I remembered that I have never felt a baby kicking inside the womb. So I asked her if I could touch her belly to feel the baby kick, and she said yes. Once I touched her stomach, the baby stopped kicking. I kept waiting for it to kick again, but it didn't. I was still excited anyway with the opportunity to try to feel a baby kicking in it's mother's stomach. It was a happy dream.

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The second dream I had was a little more exciting. I was walking in a store and knelt down to look a product (which I don't know, because I only remember seeing the white florescent lights and being in the greeting card section). All of a sudden, a man with dark brown hair climbs over me and starts to kiss me. (It was like the kiss between Toby McGuire and Kirsten Dunst in one of the Spiderman movies, where he is upside down and she is right side up, and removes his mask and kisses him.) It was a awesome kiss and apparently, I recognized the man in the dream as a current crush, however, I never saw his face in the dream. When I woke up I knew he wasn't a mysterious or random stranger, but I didn't recognize who it was in the dream either. Suffice i to say, this was a dream that was hard to wake up from.

annoying snippets

I kept having unsatisfactory dreams this morning and kept hitting the snooze button in hopes of ending it up on a good note. Every time the alarm went off I was annoyed to realize that the dreams weren't getting any better.

A few snippets I remember:

• I was younger and on a trip to San Francisco with a group of other early-college-age kids. They were somewhat wilder in appearance than most of the friends I've had in my life, and while this didn't bother me I was worried about my parents (who weren't actually there) worrying when seeing me with them. I did admire their strong individual styles, though. The annoying part of this dream was that there was a bisexual guy with extremely "gay" mannerisms who kept hounding me and another kid (who was the only person in the dream that I've known in real life). I was annoyed because the guy wouldn't leave me alone; worried that people would see his explicit overtures and get the wrong idea; and worried about the other kid, who I felt I needed to protect.

• I was on a group trip to France. (Argh. Why another group trip?) My husband and some of his friends were there, and they wanted to rent a car to make a trip out into the country (we were at a chateau). I was supposed to get the car, but when I got in I couldn't find the brake, and discovered that it was an automatic and not manual (whereas I was trying to drive it like it was manual). I finally discovered that the brake was a tiny knob concealed in a depression off to the left, but not before I plowed into the side of a Mercedes parked in the chateau parking lot. After a couple of snooze-button hits, while on to another dream, I received a bill from the rental company charging me for the damage done to the Mercedes.

• I was in another group setting, some kind of family-reunion type thing, except they weren't my family members. There was a really, really cute baby there and I was commenting to her aunt how incredibly cute she was. The aunt just gave me a worried look and said, "You're not connecting with her, can't you see? Look how she smiles at other people! {The idea being that the baby wasn't smiling at me like that.} You'll have to figure out what you're doing wrong and fix it."

Blah. What annoying dreams.

old friends

In this dream, I was working at a retail store (in real life I work at Target), though in the dream I was part of the group who does the intense stocking and unloading of trucks in the middle of the night. Somehow, this became a health clinic. Anyway, the most memorable part of the dream was that an old friend from college (who I haven't talked to in years) came into the clinic for an abortion. This in itself is kind of funny because she's gay, and wouldn't tend to need services like abortions. Anyway, she was understandably upset, and it was my job to sort of facilitate helping her fill out paperwork, etc. At the same time, though, this was happening at the retail store, so there were lots of customers milling around. Then someone from some kind of anti-choice group brought a baby to us while we were walking. I guess this person wanted my friend to hold the baby in the hope that she'd change her mind, but the baby was screaming and crying because it wanted its mother, and I was upset at this activist because I wanted my friend to have some peace and quiet during this difficult time. Then, we had to contend with one part of the retail store closing. Apparently, I was responsible for putting up these big aisle blockers to let people know that the area was off-limits. All this time, my friend was waiting patiently.

I think there was more, but I can't remember it. Then, I dreamed that I was writing this up in the dream blog. It was a dream within a dream (a dweam wifin a dweam)...too weird.