zombie lambs

I had a really weird and disturbing dream just before waking up this morning. I wasn't clear on all the details, and I think there were some double meanings/significances that I barely caught at the time but now can't remember.

It started out nicely enough. I was in a beautiful open field that sloped up on three sides to more wooded areas (there was a road in the distance at the uppermost point). I was just walking slowly and enjoying the scenery when I noticed a deer. At first I thought it would run away as I approached, but it didn't because it was very intently searching for something. Rather creepily, it almost brushed me as it went past in its quest.

I was a little alarmed and hoped that it didn't have some kind of dangerous rabies-like illness that was causing it to throw caution to the wind, but I soon realized that she (it was a she) was looking for her fawn. Just when I realized this, the fawn hopped into sight, but kept on going after something further up the hill.

It turned out that the fawn was going toward what looked like a group of lambs. All very idyllic, right? Almost syrupy-sweet? BUT. When it got to the group of lambs, I saw that they were writhing around on the ground in various zombie-like states (I guess my fears of a malicious infection were well-grounded, if misplaced). Some were motionless, apparently having died from their malady, others were wriggling around weakly, and still others were aggressively jumping at the fawn and trying to bite it.

As if that weren't disturbing enough, I suddenly found that I was responsible for either a small child or an animal (a dog? a kitten?). I really can't remember what my child/pet was, exactly, but I suddenly had to protect some sort of relatively helpless being from the zombie lambs. The whole thing was extremely creepy. I think some of the animals may have had speaking parts too, but I can't remember what they may have said.

in which my subconscious wins the Gross and Creepy prize

If you're ready for another excrement-themed dream, read on! (You can guess the corollary to that, I'm sure.)

The dream started with a work trip with a nameless, faceless coworker and a real-life coworker who, although nice, has bossy tendencies. We were in a small car, trying to go somewhere to do some sort of site-based work (I have no idea why I was along). It started raining harder and harder, and at some point we had to ford a rushing creek with the small car, which I now noticed was either completely topless or just open on all sides like a Jeep. The bossier coworker was issuing directives about how to go about crossing the stream ("gun it" being the main idea). She said something about bracing myself, but I wasn't entirely braced, and I certainly wasn't ready for the head-to-toe spattering with muddy water.

We made it across okay, except for being completely wet and muddy, and stopped at a ramshackle house where we were going to stay. There were some other assorted people there, although I'm not sure who they were or what they were doing. The overall atmosphere was sort of scientific field outing (or rather, what I would imagine that atmosphere to be like)*.

The place was pretty makeshift, with a toilet out in the middle of the room. No one seemed to find this odd or unsettling, and consequently I didn't either. I sat down and did my business**, and that's when everything started to go off the rails.

For some reason when I stood up, the *ahem* excrement ended up in two [rather large!] piles on the seat (?? it was definitely in the toilet before). That disturbed me quite a lot, but I was even more disturbed to see a little worm-like creature wriggling about in it***. And then, as if that weren't disturbing enough, the real freak-out began: on closer inspection, the "worm" turned out to be a snake! Wriggling around in the excrement, mind you. The body was about the size of one of those small green snakes, but it was oddly segmented. The head was disproportionately large****, at least 2 inches across, with large, very creepy roundish yellow eyes. It was bobbing its head about like a cobra (no hood, at least), looking at me in the most alarming way. I can hardly emphasize enough how very alarming and disturbing it was.

I had started making alarmed noises on seeing the mounds of excrement on the seat, and they had escalated by now to full-blown, terrorized screams (although I couldn't properly get out half of them, so they were half raspy whispered screams). A kid that I had "dated" in 6th grade (?!?) was sitting near the toilet and hadn't reacted at all until this point. He suddenly had had enough, though, and told me to pull myself together and stop the screaming and freaking out. I pointed out to him that he might be freaked out too if confronted with the fact that such a vile creature had just passed through "one of the most sensitive holes in [his] body" (?! sigh.).

That's all I can remember, but it's still disturbing me.



*An interesting detail was that the makeup of the group was eerily multicultural, although disproportionately male.
**Odd variation on the theme of having to go to the bathroom in public--ordinarily in those dreams that's a major source of distress (although, oddly, I don't really have those dreams).
***The real-life inspiration for this undoubtedly being a real-life colony of fruit flies in the compost I just emptied yesterday.
****Which, with my limited herpetological knowledge, I took to mean it was a viper.

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.

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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.

creepy and out of character

I haven't been remembering a lot of my dreams lately, but I had a very unsettling one the other night. I was sitting around with my mom and grandma, and my mother had some old photos out. She started getting very agitated and talking about how my grandmother had tried to drown her when she was little. She had some photos of herself as a toddler and some other kids, playing in an irrigation canal*. At first glance they looked like cute old pictures of little kids having fun, but then she pointed to one that showed her lying face down in the water.

I had thought that she was just being ravingly paranoid, but the photo was pretty creepy. Even creepier was my grandma's reaction. She just sat there looking cold and scheming while my mom freaked out. [At this point I should interject that in real life my grandma is the nicest person in the world. She is almost 90, though, and in real life she has quite a bit of memory loss--but still an extremely nice, pleasant person. I've a few of these very disturbing dreams, though, where her real-life memory loss morphs into something weird and scary and she becomes a rather creepy figure. Which of course is disturbing in itself during the dream; and the fact that I'm even dreaming it is disturbing and a bit guilt-inducing.]


*I think she's mentioned playing in irrigation canals in her real-life childhood, but definitely no mention of near-drowning incidents.

creepy megachurch

Over the weekend I had another Back to School/high school/boarding school/group trip dream (of course). All I can remember of that part is a very rudimentary dorm situation (metal bunk beds), and a girl I actually went to school with referring very matter-of-factly to herself as a lesbian. This was surprising because, although I wouldn't have been surprised to discover that she was, she came from a very conservative family. I was a little in awe of her courage in being so open about it, in view of her background, although the implication seemed to be that she saw it as a spiritual burden to be borne and fought against. I guess that made it a little easier for her to be open about it.

Anyway, the rest of the dream was in the same cultural vein. I somehow ended up in a gigantic megachurch. It was more of an alternate universe, really. Instead of being just a church, with the usual seating-and-platform setup, it was a vast domed structure, with the dome duplicating a sky. It was filled with houses as far as I could see, like your average suburban housing development with largeish houses crammed very close together on very small lots.

The houses were arranged around a central mountain-like contraption. It was very tall and narrow, modeled after the rock columns/mountains you see in pictures from Asia, and although I knew it had been constructed from scratch it was a very convincing facsimile. There was a walkway with railings spiraling around it all the way to the top (which disappeared, or at least appeared to disappear, into clouds). A children's choir was arranged all along the walkway, conducted from below by a woman in a yellow satin robe (I think the children were similarly garbed). She had to crane her neck all the way back and wave her arms at the sky, but they seemed to have no trouble following her (although I wondered about the acoustic viability of such a setup).

The inhabitants, from what I saw and overheard, were very excited about taking part in this alternative living experiment. The whole thing was extremely creepy.

my subconscious is an overachiever

Think of the creepiest, most icky, bound-to-stick-with-you-and-resurface-when-you-don't-want-it-to dream that you can think of, not involving violence. Now see if it comes close to this:

I dreamed that I found out my mother was a hermaphrodite.

I don't see how it could get much more traumatic than that and not involve violence.

And then the other night I dreamed about being pursued by the mafia. I performed a lot of daring gymnastic stunts that I would never be able to do in real life, including but not limited to climbing down the face of a balconied apartment building. That's really all I remember, but it went on for quite a while and was very scary. Also, food was involved somehow--I think the mafia were pursuing me over some kind of restaurant-business secret.

Bugs

For some reason, I was trying to ignite a yellow chair in my living room, which in reality I like quite well. I was using either a candle or a lighter, and there were some charred spots, but I really wasn't making any headway. Then I looked down and saw that some cinders had fallen onto the floor. As I watched, there was movement amongst them, and tiny black bugs, and horrible spiders whose filament-like legs were almost transparent, started moving out from under the chair toward me.

I freaked out and started this full-on, ululating screaming as I attacked them with a broom (which I decided I would also burn when I was done).

Some of the spiders had sprung very thin bubbles on top of/around themselves, like tiny parachutes. When I looked at the havoc I'd wrought with my broom, what I saw were some of those collapsed bubbles (though larger now, and more like plastic cling film), and not insect corpses, but tiny, grotesque doll figurines.

I think this was a fairly direct response to the box elder bug invasion that's been taking place in my apartment over the past few weeks. And, no joke, as I was writing that last paragraph, I discovered one crawling on my toe. Ewwww.

Overflow

I was in a full public restroom. I went into one of the stalls that had just been vacated, and the woman had left her red baseball cap on the hook, so I handed it back to her. I was putting toilet paper on the seat when the automatic flush went off. It went off again as I tried to arrange the paper, and this time it filled the toilet to the edge of the seat and the water looked murky. At this point, I had a dilemma: did I leave the stall and say that although I hadn't even used the toilet, it was now perilously close to overflowing? Would I be believed, since I'd been in there a minute or two and had apparently already flushed twice?

I decided to stay... but the toilet flushed again and began overflowing. I crammed myself up against the door, as far as possible from the font, which still splashed me a little. It did this a few more times, flooding into the surrounding stalls. I thought I could hear people talking about it. Finally the toilet settled to a normal water level and I decided I could risk using it. Just then, my alarm went off. What a relief!

Before that, I had been in a field in a car with my parents. There was a dog that charged us and that we determined must be "part horse" because it was so big (though friendly). A cow charged us, too, but was thwarted by a patio door, or something like that. And finally, a creepy guy came up to the car to offer us advice, but we only rolled the windows down partway because we couldn't figure out if he was good or evil.

It was once we'd gotten back into civilization that the toilet incident occurred.

Creepy

Wooo, crazy dreams last night.

Many of them revolved around the theme of my family taking a trip in our old Corolla, and me being late (probably because I rode to work with my mom yesterday, and was running late). In the creepiest one, my siblings kept switching between being children, adults, and other people). The little boy (I don't know if he was supposed to be my brother at this point) had a heavy, suspicious-looking plastic grocery bag. I never got to look inside it, but the suspicion was that it contained body parts (is this what I get for reading about Deleuze and Guattari's Body without Organs?). My sister/the girl had one, too. They looked guilty, and seemed to be intending to dispose of a body at our final destination--though whether human on animal, and where it came from, I never found out. Then I remembered (ah, retroactive dream "memory"!) that they had made some reddish mouse that we had eaten, and felt very disturbed about its potential origin; if it had been what I was afraid I was, did that make me no longer a vegan?

I was all packed and ready to go, but I ran downstairs so that I could use the restroom one more time. When I tried to flush, the water pressure was really low and didn't do much. When I tried again, a jet of air shot out of the toilet at me! It finally flushed, and looked like it was going to overflow, but then it didn't. I ran back upstairs, and everyone was in the car waiting for me, except for my brother (now his adult self), who was leaning against the back bumper, looking disgusted at how late I was.

In another of the family-trip dreams--or maybe just another part of the trip?--we were in a big, multi-story parking garage, and my uncle was there. I think his car was a pale, minty-green Honda. I got out of the car for something, and my family drove away! I ran down several flights of stairs and met them at the bottom.

There were more dreams--about touring a beautifully finished attic apartment and cleaning the room of one of the senior girls in my dorm when I deaned (who in real life was beautiful, deaf, and kept her room immaculate), but I don't really remember much.

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.

Golden Retriever

Last night I had two dreams:

The first was a sort of run-of-the-mill teaching anxiety dream, in which I didn't have enough exams, then I couldn't run the photocopier to make more, then class ended before I had given the exam, etc.

The second was infinitely more surreal. I dreamed that I was at a play, sitting in the balcony. The play was rather dark and creepy; one scene involved the characters onstage discussing in detail the ways in which a spider kills and eats its prey. It was meant to be a metaphor, see? Anyway, amongst all this creepy darkness, one of the main characters was a golden retriever. His trainer was sitting in the front row wearing a red jacket and giving the dog hand signals. At one point during the play, the dog got to have what I can best describe as a "solo," in which the trainer put him through all of his moves, completely independent of the play's plot. Just like at the end of a jazz solo, the audience gave the dog (and, presumably, his trainer) a round of applause. Then the show went on.