Car towing and bloody trees

This was very brief dream I had in the early morning, after I hit the snooze button and fell asleep for about 15 minutes...

 I was staying with a friend and had my car parked in the lot at her apartment. I hadn't left the house in a couple days. When I did leave, I couldn't find my car. There were about 10 cars in the parking lot and the space where I parked mine wss empty. My friend said "your car may have been towed." She said it so nonchalant, I was pissed. I said "what do you mean? You said it was ok to park here." She said "well it's the commuter lot for people who take the train, and if you park here during the week without a permit they will tow it." Now, I'm really angry. I started to yell at her, as I'm thinking about how much money is in my bank account. I said "well how much is THIS going to cost me?" She said "nothing. I will call these 2 guys, they will bring out a lift and they can get it out for us. They will authorize your credit card for $180 but it won't go through and charge."

We walked to the rental office to ask about my car. She no sooner gave the address, when the two women in the office said "oh yes we towed that car." I saw the address handwritten on a piece of paper and they had some paperwork in their hand. Both of the women were wearing glasses, were about 40ish years old with dark hair but I don’t remember seeing their faces. More paperwork was strewn all over both desks. I asked why. One of them turned to my friend and said "she is not allowed to go swimming in our pool either. That car hasn't moved in 2 days and we found egg sacks on the tree branch on your balcony." They showed me a photo of what looked like tree branches, with large white tunnels on it about the size of a sausage. I felt sick looking at it. I envisioned hundreds of spiders coming out of it. She snapped me out of my daze when she said "you two aren't taking care of your apartment and you won't be able to use the same privileges as everyone else." I argued "but I don't even live here! The car hasn't moved in 2 days because I haven't been working."

My friend asked if they were going to charge for the tow. They said "I don't know. You have to concern yourself with getting the infected branches off of your balcony."Then, I was wandering around a hallway at a college dorm. I had just moved in there. I was looking for a guy who I had only recently started talking to, I wanted to ask him for help. When I found him, he seemed excited to see me. He had a short beard, a baseball hat and brown eyes. I didn't get a good look at his face. I asked if he could do me a favor. He said "of course! Anything" he had a wide smile. I started to explain about the branches and said they needed to be cut down. I no sooner finished my sentence, when he said "ok sure no problem." I asked "do you know what you're really getting yourself into here?" He smiled and said "don't worry about it." He asked for the address, and my friend was there with me again. She said it was at Seaton Hall and I saw a picture of it in my mind. I envisioned a three-story building, with white balconies. The vision was in black and white. I said "oh yea" as I remembered where it was, and we started to explain how to get there.

 We were at the apartment, and he was on the balcony holding the tree branches when he asked "do you know what this means? He took one of the branches, bent it in half and blood started to come out. There was an opening on it, that was darker brown than the rest, with blood inside of it. He pointed at it and said "this kind of infection can hurt you and your family." He had a look of great concern on his face. Then, I woke up.

weird combination

In all this time I haven't posted, of course I've had a lot of dreams. Last night's were particularly impressive, though. First, I had a terrible dream about my husband getting shot in the head. We were somewhere with a group of very young people (I don't know if we were as young in the dream, or just out of place). We were hanging around in a semi-derelict house, and one of the guys had a gun. He started messing around with it, shooting out the door at something outside. In theory it wasn't supposed to be dangerous because he was just shooting at a target, but somehow he accidentally shot my husband in the back of the head.

I don't need to go on about how awful that was, because it's self-evident. He was still alive, though, so the awfulness just escalated. The kids freaked out and didn't want to take responsibility (didn't even want to call 911). Of course I immediately started to try to stanch the blood (of which there was surprisingly little) and call 911. I failed at first at calling because I kept getting distracted with my first-aid attempts. Then, every time I tried to dial I couldn't get it right. I accidentally entered the wrong sequence of numbers, an extra number appeared at the end, I accidentally erased all the numbers, I pushed the wrong button, I accidentally hung up on the dispatcher, etc. etc. I couldn't find my own phone, which had fallen down somewhere, and kept trying on a variety of phones that were lying around, none of which I could figure out how to use (usually it was the crucial "call" button that I couldn't locate). Finally I decided to look for help on foot, while simultaneously trying to prevent the kids from burying my still-alive husband to hide the evidence of their accident. I eventually ran into some people outside who seemed helpful and competent. I think at that point I must have woken up and realized that he hadn't actually been shot, because I don't remember how it ended.

The other part was considerably less harrowing. I was composing poetry, which is something that I think I've dreamed occasionally before*. Usually when that happens I can't remember any of it in the morning, but this time I remembered part of it. It was a medium-sized poem, so at least half of it is probably gone for good. The missing part was along the same lines. I think it was inspired in part by some recent thinking about my personality and priorities and how to deal with people with conflicting personalities and priorities; and in part by a book I've been reading about slowness. Anyway, this is all I remember:

Manifesto

We reserve the right to dawdle, to hem and haw, to hedge.

We write poetry in our dreams, and knowing that it was graven once in the gray folds of our unconscious is enough.

We are not waiting for happiness.

We know it when we see it.

I found the dream really interesting and amusing, because I remember the thought process I went through choosing the wording there, including a debate about whether the word "graven" was too stilted (I'm still very much on the fence about that). I think the lines that came more easily were the ones I forgot.

*In real life, I haven't dabbled in poetry since late adolescence, when I think one is contractually obligated to do so.

tiger

the tiger woods scandal made it into my dreams the other night.

i was in a car with my father. we were driving through my parent's neighborhood when a large west indian man with dreads came walking towards us from the side of tiger wood's house (tiger was my parent's neighbor in the dream). the man look frazzled so my dad slowed down the car, rolled down the window, and asked him if he needed help. the west indian man quickly shoved a pile of bloody clothes into my arms and said that he was tiger's house cleaner and tiger had just given him the bloody clothes and told him to "take care of these", meaning to get rid of evidence. the man believed tiger had just killed his wife and wanted us to call the cops and give them the bloody clothes. we took the clothes back to my parent's house and while my dad was trying to call the police, my mom kept digging through the clothes which frustrated me because she was contaminating the evidence.

Chico The Chihuahua

i go through phases with dreams.  i won't remember any at all for a very long time and then suddenly i'll start remembering them again.  and the ones i do remember are usually really odd.  like a recent one i just had where i went camping and some guy from dunkin doughnuts stopped by to deliver pancakes to us every morning.  'cuz yeah, i'm pretty sure that's a service they offer!
two nights ago i dreamt that i'd been gone all day and when i came home, i found some guy in my kitchen.  it wasn't someone i recognized from real life but i guess i knew him in my dream as i didn't seem surprised to see him.  anyways, he had my little chico on a cookie sheet and was getting ready to put him in the oven.  chico was just standing there on the cookie sheet with his little tail just a waggin'!  i told the guy no, i didn't want my little dog cooked and he said, "relax, i do this all the time!"  i woke up after that and made sure my little dog was still alive.
last night i dreamed I had some woman and her two kids over.  again, not sure who the woman was as i didn't recognize her from real life but i seemed to be friends with her in the dream.  so we're sitting there talking at my kitchen table when i realized that i hadn't seen chico in awhile.  i went to go check on him and discovered that he had broken his leg.  i was really upset and trying to clean up the blood that was coming out of his leg.  i told the woman one of her son's had hurt my dog but she didn't seem to be overly concerned about it.  i was upset by her attitude and told her i needed to take my dog to the vet and that she needed to pay for it since her son did this.  she didn't want to leave though, she wanted me to sit so we could talk some more.
i don't know where shiver (my other chihuahua) was in these dreams.  i really hope these dreams aren't a forewarning of something to come.  they were really bothersome.

Dogs and Blood

I had another nasty dream last night. Lately I haven't been remembering my dreams, but this one was vivid.

I dreamed that my boyfriend and I were sitting on the ground, watching two dogs playing. As we watched, it became clear that it wasn't really playing anymore, but was turning into a fight. One dog looked much smaller or weaker than the other, and seemed to be losing the fight, but suddenly he just launched himself forward and grabbed the other dog's paw in his jaws.

He set his legs, and shook his head a bit, but didn't let go. Suddenly he growled loudly, and I knew that he was going to rip the paw off. BNB and I were really freaking out and we both turned away just before he made one massive effort and tore the paw off.

Somehow I knew what had happened without seeing it in the dream. The smaller dog was standing there in a pool of blood, holding the paw in his mouth and panting. The other dog was shivering on the ground, lying in his own blood.

I was shaking in the dream and a bit shaken when I woke up.

Blood on the Street

I don't know if Strovska's recent dreams influenced mine, or if it was the five (!) squad cards my neighbor and I passed as we drove home from school yesterday, but either way my dreams also appear to be extremely suggestible.

I was on my lunch break from some training session, and I decided to go to the bookstore or library on my time off. As I approached an intersection that I now realize was probably a version of the one where my favorite coffee shop is located, the GPS device I was holding, and which was apparently giving me directions, narrated, in an increasingly wavering and eerily prophetic voice, that there was "blood on the street at [street name] and [street name]." It was rather disturbing, especially as it referenced a location close to me.

As I was waiting on the street corner, about to cross to my destination, an emergency vehicle with a bright white light flashing above its windshield came sailing through the intersection, I think with a siren going. As it passed, I saw there was a decal on its back window that looked like one of those "crossing" signs, except the animal in it was what at the time I think I identified as a marmoset. I now think it may have been a marmot.* Anyway, I figured it was the logo of the emergency rescue operation.

I entered the bookstore/library and started browsing the shelves. I noticed that most of the books had very worn spines. Then someone pointed out that someone (one of the professors/trainers from where I had just been) had set aside a book for me--there was a label with my name on it taped to the spine. Apparently it was a gift certificate, specifically so that I could get this book. It was on Vuillard, an artist I don't really know at all but in the dream seemed to like well enough. I took it up to the counter, and they rang it up for me. I had $1.60 left on the gift certificate.

Just before, I had remembered or been reminded (sirens?) of the violence ("blood on the street"), and had looked out the side window. In the alley, I could see a car and a person sort of bent over on the street, with his back sort of torn open and bloody. I told myself that I didn't really want that image in my head, so I looked away quickly.

As I looked out the huge picture windows at the front of the store, I could see that there had been a massive car accident. Five or six cars were strewn along the street, variously crumpled. There were big oily-looking patches of some fluid, from cars or bodies. Emergency personnel appeared to be draping sheets over bodies on the street. I could see that the building just down the block from the one I was in had been damaged, with its front window shattered.

Overall, one of the more disturbing dreams I've had in a while.

*The weird thing is that when I googled marmoset just now to find out what one is, a picture showed up that someone printed out and stuck on our office wall (the one with the two babies clinging to the fingers). I didn't know those were marmosets. I have seen marmots in person.

Demon cats

She pointed out the moving things in a dark corner--something black and fluttery? At first, they seemed simply to be black moths. Then they were bigger: bats? Finally, they emerged in their final form as sleek, very thin black cats with bat wings and strange green eyes. They were not very big, but seemed vicious--likely because of their long, pointed teeth. There was an entire collection of them--six or seven. We contained them by binding them together in some way, and I tried to get good pictures of them using my digital camera. They kept moving, though, so I wasn't sure I'd captured them.

Somehow, the dog--like a small golden retriever at first, but later more like a terrier--was attached to them, whether because he had pursued them and his leash (red) had gotten tangled with their bonds, or because someone had connected him in an attempt to control the cats. Somehow, he ended up being dragged along behind them and getting roughed up--the skin on his sides was scratched and his fur was bloody. When they stopped, he lay perfectly and frighteningly still on the chair, and I was afraid he was dead. I noticed that his tail was sticking out rigidly over the edge of the chair, which I was afraid indicated rigor mortis. But when we got up closer, and touched him, he moved! He was definitely alive, and looked like he was going to make it.

There was lots more, which I wish I could remember. Unfortunately, all I have is vague snippets, including going to a church where the pastor was promising a million dollars to volunteers who could complete some task. I'm pretty sure that part was inspired by this YouTube video.