retail

I haven't been remembering many dreams lately, although I know the group-living dreams are continuing, since I can recall a snippet of one from the other night (a friend was fixing a computer for me, pulled out a long, nasty string of mold/cobwebs, then carefully replaced it in the bowels of the computer).

Last night, though, or rather this morning just before waking up, I was having a different recurring-theme dream, a theme I like better than the group-living one. I was in an Anthropologie-esque store, looking at the sale section*. Actually, this store was a lot less attractive than a real Anthropologie store, resembling more closely a mall Dillard's or something like that. The merchandise, however, included some very cute clothing. I particularly remember a strapless dress made out of a linen-y fabric with multicolored blowsy roses printed on a deep rose background. It doesn't sound like me, not being either a strapless-dress or a cabbage rose kind of girl, but it was actually very appealing, and I was sorry it wasn't in my size.

The really great thing on offer, though, was a home fix-it book. It had simple, clearly written instructions on all kinds of things, accompanied by photos and drawings. The design was very well done, clean and attractive and just girly enough to be a good fit with the store (but not too girly; not festooned with pink). There were instructions on unclogging a drain** and rewiring a lamp, and I don't remember what else. It was quite disappointing to wake up and realize that I couldn't actually buy the book for $5.99 or however much it was on sale for.




*Not too far off from reality, since I often troll the sale room at Anthropologie, it being my "pass" to park in their parking lot so I can avoid the highly unpleasant Whole Foods parking garage. This particular retail dream differs from the usual, though, in that it's the first I can remember not involving secondhand merchandise.
**Also reality-based, since we've been having some bathtub drainage issues.

some non-gory but brutal violence, and an excessive amount of detail

I'm completely overwhelmed by all the dreams I've had lately. For one thing, I feel like I've only remembered a tiny percentage of fragments; for another, they've been insanely and excessively detailed (noticeably more than usual, which is saying a lot). I guess I'll just start with some snippets in no particular order and see how far I get.

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This morning before work (in real life) I logged in to Yahoo IM in hopes of talking to a friend in a faraway time zone who's been wanting to chat for a while. Then I realized that I was falling asleep, so I turned the volume way up on the computer in hopes of waking up with the little window-opening noise if he tried to chat with me. That's the real-life background.

In the dream, I was sleeping in my house (except that of course it was slightly different, both in the house's characteristics and the location, which was more wooded). In the dream I also had the computer on while I slept (for the same reason), so I was sleeping a bit fitfully. [I find it weird when dreams parallel real life so closely, especially when I dream that I'm asleep.] I ended up waking up to find that my husband had been there, which surprised me since he had already gone to work and is usually way too busy to come back home. He was trying to sleep in a gigantic king-size bed in a different bedroom (our house had morphed again), and said that he had come home the previous morning too.

That was the boring part. I got into bed intending to sleep some more, and woke up to hear strange sounds outside. We got up and looked out the window, and finally figured out that it was a disgruntled former coworker of my husband, shooting randomly with a shotgun (it must have been a pretty wimpy shotgun, because the sounds weren't very loud). We weren't sure what to do, but before we had decided on a course of action I heard noises in the house. He had somehow gotten inside and was waving his gun around, ranting and raving. I went out into the living room, and he shot wildly and missed the side of my head. Obviously something had to be done, so I picked up a greenish marble cutting board (not something we own) and gave him several solid blows to the head. He slumped over a countertop and I hit him several more times, very much in the way you'd crush a cockroach to be sure it was dead (there was no gore, at least). Then I produced a small pistol out of the blue (we don't have a pistol either) and shot him in the temple to be really sure--no gore there, either. The pistol was just as wimpy as his shotgun--no kick, and not much noise. It occurred to me to wonder why I hadn't found a bigger gun, but this one seemed to have done the job.

Of course after that I was stressed about what to do, not to mention extremely disturbed at having just killed someone (in self-defense, but still, the repeated head-bashing was a little much). Fortunately my alarm went off then.

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Another recent dream involved living in a dorm modeled loosely after my high-school dorm (where, thankfully, I didn't actually have to live). The rooms were very small and the hallways were narrow, and it was set up so that people in the hallway could peek through large cracks in western-saloon type doors and see what was going on in the bathrooms. There wasn't much of a plot, just an overwhelming amount of stuff all over--my stuff, other people's stuff, just all kinds of objects crammed into every available space. At one point I took a bath in some random stranger's bathtub, and the bathroom was chock full of all kinds of toiletries and shampoo. After that I visited my sister in her room and spent some time going through her selection of jewelry, which was a lot of ethnic and vintage stuff. I remember a necklace of jet beads carved into the shape of rosebuds, almost like a rosary, and a curious thing from Czechoslovakia: an egg-shaped container of very thin wood with decorative painting. I opened it up to find that it was full of tiny pins out of the same very thin wood, in lots of different shapes (people, geometric shapes, etc.), meant to be combined in different configurations. I was extremely impressed with her collection.

The dorm then changed a little bit, and I was in an upstairs room helping Curly Sue (who actually had to live in the aforementioned high-school dorm!) move to a different facility. It turned out that she had been incarcerated for some not-too-serious offense and was graduating to a lower-security facility. It can't have been anything too serious, because her mother was there helping with the move, and she didn't seem too disturbed about her daughter's crime/incarceration. Also, in conversation with them I remembered that my dad had recently had a similar stint behind bars.

The funny random detail here is that she was wearing several hats (literally, not figuratively). She had layered two or three knit caps of various textures on her head, and she changed these at least once during the dream. The consistent thing was that the hat on top was always just balanced rakishly on top of the others, not pulled down over her head. I found it curious and didn't completely comprehend the reason she offhandedly gave for her distinctive headgear styling, but I let it drop.

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That's just a couple; maybe I'll give it another try later. Stay tuned for not just one but TWO dust-ups in thrift stores; an anthropological exploration of either Afghanistan or Macedonia, depending on which part of the dream you believe; and an outpouring of emotion for an adoptive father (??).

in which my subconscious's superego punishes my subconscious's id

The other night I dreamed that my husband had branched out at work into managing not just landscaping stuff but computer/software/marketing things. It wasn't clear how he had gotten this particular project, but it seemed like he had maybe taken it over from another manager who wasn't getting things done. He was excited about having such a big project; it was something for a huge, important company, and although I didn't really get what it was, it was something fundamental like managing orders or something. That's the boring part, though. The funny part was that he introduced me to the guy who was going to be his assistant in charge of all the computer aspects: it was Sam Worthington, in a wheelchair, no less. He was grinning affably and seemed about as happy about the job as my husband was.

Perhaps I was feeling guilty about my glee that the spouse had an attractive sidekick, but the next part of the dream was extremely unpleasant. We lived in an old fixer-upper house in the country (although not our real-life house). I was rooting around in a cluttered room trying to find something when I saw a flash of color. It turned out to be a black-white-yellow-and-red reptile. At first I thought it was a coral snake and went through the little ditty in my head ["red and black, friend of Jack; red and yellow, kill a fellow"] and was alarmed to see that the red stripe was right next to the yellow stripe. Then I noticed that it had legs and thus couldn't be a snake. I was still thoroughly freaked out, though, assuming that it was some kind of equally poisonous "coral lizard". I jumped up on a chair like the stereotypical woman-confronted-with-a-mouse and tried to figure out what to do. There were three big dictionaries within reach, so I figured I could try crushing it with those. I hurled the first one at it, but it landed an inch or so away from the offending beast, prompting it to scuttle away.

Knowing that the "coral lizard" was hidden somewhere in all the junk was even more alarming, and I had no idea what to do. I knew I had to find it and kill it so one of our dogs didn't stumble on it and die (not to mention the humans). Then I looked around (still standing on the chair) and noticed that there were all kinds of big, dangerous-looking scorpions* and other insects on the walls. The whole thing was rather creepy, especially with the added layer of guilt at lusting** after my husband's coworker.

*The scorpions on the walls of my house do have some basis in reality.
**Yet another illustration of how embarrassingly G-rated my dreams tend to be: said "lusting" was really just the idea that he was cute and it would be kind of fun to make small talk with him.

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.
  

Vague and Undefined

I had vague and undefined dreams about computer programs and drag queens one night last week. The computer program dreams had something to do with discovering a new website, or some kind of interesting software, or something.

The drag queen dream just involved heavily made up drag queens (think Priscilla Queen of the Desert) moving in and out of my thoughts.

Animals

We were in the woods, camping, but for some reason I had my laptop and was using it on sort of a stand attached to a pine tree. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a moose, and we both stood very still, up against the computer, so that it wouldn't notice us. Then an animal came running by, sort of a light grayish brown, very round and furry, with a long tail, and on all four legs. "Was that a bear?" I asked, and he confirmed. Then another one came by, with a little cub! It was adorable, kind of like a teddy bear, and I felt very gratified to have seen a bear in the woods. Things felt vaguely dangerous, but not terribly threatening; the animals were close to us, but didn't seem particularly interested.

We went back into the tent, which was army green. The floor of it had been warmed by a shaft of sunlight coming in.

Fried Chicken and Feist

Background: one of my professors is a very smart, very intense, slightly scary woman. I have great respect for her, but she totally scares me, especially in non-classroom situations.

Dream: I dreamed that I was sitting in this professor's class, though we were at computer workstations instead of tables or desks. I was trying to get something finished or turned in, and she came to my workstation to check on me. After class, I kept working at my station, and the professor sat down at another computer to work. I had two keyboards and was having trouble remembering which to use. I wanted to leave, but I was afraid she'd think I was slacking off if I left before 6 pm. She called me over to her desk and, to my surprise, she showed me a recipe for fried chicken. She had the batter all mixed up already and was ready to put the chicken pieces in the fryer (which she had set up next to the computer). I was surprised and asked if she didn't think that grease would spatter on the computer. She was very excited about making fried chicken, though. I'm sort of scared of her (see background note) so I didn't want to argue. She was talking as though we were friends, which is eerie from a person that you're scared of.

We kept hanging out and for some reason I wanted to show her the video by Feist for the song "1234" (great, if you haven't seen it, see it!). I thought that the newly nice professor would like this song/video. I tried and tried to find it on YouTube, but had a lot of trouble. I would find lots of listings that said Feist 1234, but they would turn out to be something else. I can't remember if I ever found it.

Panera

At my parents' house over the holiday, I've been both averaging about 10 hours of sleep and sleeping on an air mattress that tends to chill me while I'm sleeping, the combination of which seems to be resulting in frequent dreams--and odd themes. Including the last one I posted, for example, I've had three separate dreams featuring garages. Teeth have also been reappearing; two nights ago I dreamed I was wearing flexible rubber retainers, and three nights ago I was late to a dentist appointment.

Last night I dreamed I was at my Panera. The layout was relatively recognizable; I parked in the same place and I knew where the outlets were (one learns these things when one's laptop battery lasts for just four minutes). Outside, there were a lot of kids with purple hair.

As I was approaching the counter (which looked like a ticket window, with a Plexiglas barrier) to order, I got a call, from pollsters who had called me earlier in the dream. They were asking me about all sorts of Spanish names that I should have recognized but couldn't quite place. The woman at the counter tried to help me, but it wasn't working.

When another customer approached the counter, I moved away to give him room, and then got into line behind him after I finished my call, just as another woman was coming in. She pushed right up behind me, sort of squeezing me off to the side, although I kept my foot in line. When it was my turn, she drew up to the counter. "Excuse me," I said, also at the counter. "It's my turn." In real life, I generally let people cut in front of me, but in the dream I decided to stand by my rights. She was really angry--on the brink of tears. She said when I had greeted her and her friend outside the Panera weeks ago (I vaguely remembered this) that it had been a horrible, painful experience. I apologized and said I'd had no idea it had offended her so much--but that it was still my turn to order.

So I ordered, and headed for my favorite table, by the fireplace. A lot of the tables had been moved, though, and there was a raised seating area that's not there in real life. Up there, people were crowded around tables, rehearsing for a musical that appeared to be in Italian. The scene apparently took place in a cafe, with people singing out their lines from their own tables.

I went to set up my computer, but the power cord was a stretchy light blue filament, like dental tape. I was trying to figure out how to strip the ends to get to the wires so that I could attach it to my computer, and the outlet, when I woke up.

Wet

I was driving in downtown Portland--I think I was trying to get to my grandma's old house--and I was lost. I had just gotten off the freeway, but traffic was crawling. When I finally reached the front of the line, I realized that it was a pedestrian area and cars weren't allowed through. There was also some sort of demonstration or celebration; one of the people allowed me to go around, which involved squeezing the car (my parents' blue Toyota) through an area that was too narrow. But I realized I could just float it up and over. Then I was pulling the car through waist deep water (I haven't had one in several years, but pulling/driving cars through water used to be a recurring theme in my dreams). I realized I didn't want to "flood" the engine (yeah), so I lifted it higher.

But then the car was my laptop, which was worrisome, as it had then been dragged through the water. Still, it turned on, although the graphics seemed a bit... watery. I thought I'd go online and figure out how to get to my destination. I was also going to change my clothes. I don't remember what happened next, but at some point the dream shifted and I was in one of those group-training retreat weekend deals. To get to the bathroom, one had to walk through multiple rooms furnished with comfortable chairs and one bedroom. When I got there, I realized I was wearing light blue denim overalls over a really large graphic T-shirt, which later turned into a red and white striped bustier of sorts. Part of the bathroom also included a sort of maintenance shed, where tools were spread out on a brick counter with a view out the large window.

For some reason, I'd only had two minutes for my bathroom trip, but realized, predictably, that I was running later and later, due to the long trip there and then fussing with my costume. On the way out, there was a woman unpacking on the bed in the bedroom, and I apologized for trespassing, but she assured me it was the only way to and from the restroom.

brilliant

i was sitting at a computer - a desktop, oddly enough - composing a blog post. not sure what it was about but i do remember feeling rather proud of it. it was new year's eve.

i'm lame, even in my dreams.