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.

Cats and Chickens

I dreamed that I was walking home from work/school, but not in this town, nor in any town I've lived in. I was walking through the neighborhood streets, looking at houses, when I noticed a sign on a street corner. It was like a "For Rent" sign, but it said "Piano for Sale" at the top in large, black letters. Underneath, however, was a long-ish paragraph of smaller writing. I stopped and read it, but all I can remember now is that the author(s) made a point of saying that they'd "been up for three days straight."

I was intrigued by the piano sale, but I continued on home because I knew that there were visitors waiting for me. A relative (in the dream, no one in real life) and her two small daughters were there: one girl about 6 or 7 and a toddler, about 2. I decided to take the girls on a walk and go back and see about this piano sale. For some reason we decided to take a chicken with us on the walk.

As we arrived at the piano sale house, we found three young, tall, thin guys lounging in the yard, as though resting after working hard. One was a tall black guy with dreadlocks and the other two were white. They nodded as we walked up to the door. An older, rounder, balding white man let us in. As we explained that we were interested in the piano, he showed it to us. It was an electronic, Clavinova-type piano and was, rather than the usual black, a wood-grained brown. I commented, "at least it's not black."

He asked us what we would be willing to pay, and at this point the six-year-old turned out to be a shrewd bargainer. She was signaling to me when to name prices and when to shut up. He mentioned $3000 and I regretfully responded that all I had to spend was $1200, when in fact me and the little girl both knew it was $1500.

During the negotiations, however, I became aware that the chicken had at some point turned into an extremely ill-tempered cat, which was trying to claw and bite everyone within reach. I was trying to hold this cat down by the scruff of its neck while continuing to bargain with the bald guy, but the cat was writhing and growling, clawing at my arms and hands. A few times it slipped from my grasp, but the tall, thin, young guy with dreadlocks would capture it each time and return it to me. It was very distracting, painful, and frustrating.