stressful heist

I had a very stressful dream last night. My husband was working for some industrial company (mining? petroleum refinery? chemicals?) in a lower/middle management and/or possibly security capacity. For some reason I was there with him at the main office. No one else was around, so it was just the two of us. I'm not sure where the office people were, but it was clear that they would be gone for a while.

In the middle of our uneventful office visit, there was a loud explosion from the direction of the factory/mine/refinery. From the sound of it, no one was going to make it out of there alive. I asked him what it was and he replied "kryptonite" (??). He then sprang into action, although I couldn't determine whether this action was premeditated or a spur-of-the-moment idea. Apparently there was a huge amount of the company's capital just stored in cash in the office (??). He filled up two or three paper Whole Foods bags (again, ??) with what supposedly amounted to 400 million (billion?) dollars.

I found this sudden turn of events disturbing in the extreme. First of all, the idea that he was going to try to make off with this enormous amount of money was alarming both on an ethical and a practical level. How did he think we would ever get away with such a thing? And then there was the disturbing question of whether he had known about or somehow been involved in the explosion, which was such a terrible idea that I didn't want to dwell on it.

I guess my hesitation and nay-saying cost us some time, and we didn't end up leaving right away (I also argued that skipping the country at the exact time of the explosion and disappearance of the cash would make us look way too suspect and that it was better to stick around for a while to lessen suspicion on us; I think I was also hoping to talk him out of his scheme). I also pointed out that any business who kept large quantities of cash would be foolish not to mark the bills somehow, and that the first bill we attempted to spend would get us caught.

I woke up around the time that the police were starting to swarm around the place (amazingly, they didn't nab us immediately; I don't know what became of the paper bags full of cash, but they were still somehow in our possession). Then I kept drifting in and out of sleep, anxiously concocting strategies to keep us from getting arrested--plant a bill or two on an unsuspecting passerby? Drop a bill in a place where it was likely to be picked up and spent by someone else (I was very preoccupied with the whole marked-bill scenario)? I was afraid we were condemned to a fugitive life and would never actually be able to spend any of the money--so it was obviously better to just abandon the whole idea while we were still somewhat uninvolved.

in which I dabble in the Albanian underworld

Well. After yesterday's extremely mundane dream, last night I had a pretty wild one. Following a bit of conversation about the Balkans yesterday, I dreamed that I was in Albania. Not only was I in Albania, but I was--wait for it--dealing drugs.

I'm not sure how I came to be in Albania, but I had our (real-life) old Jaguar with me (this will come up again later). Despite having transportation, though, I was stuck because I didn't have enough money to leave the country. So, logically, I turned to dealing drugs to make a quick buck (or lek, as the case may be).

I don't know how I made the acquaintance of the local underworld figures, but I had ended up as sort of a freelancer, only dealing with them in an off-hand way. I think I was obligated to turn over some kind of "tax" to ensure that they wouldn't meddle in my affairs. I also got my drugs from them. Of course they fit the exact mental image you'd have of a small-time Albanian Bad Guy: greasy hair, gold necklaces, track suits, unfortunate choice of headwear.

At one point I was in the lair of my drug provider to get re-supplied. There were several young women/girls in various states of intoxication and undress--it was obvious that they were working in a state of semi slavery, serving both as prostitutes, sex slaves, and drug customers. One of the gangsters was beating one of them up*, and I was trying to think of a way to get these girls out of the situation, while realizing that most of them were too addicted to participate in any way in their extrication.

During this same visit, while the guy I was dealing with was otherwise occupied, I started idly examining some of the wares on the table. I wasn't sure what it all was, not having any experience in that area myself. There was a pink package with some pink plastic objects resembling short pens (the labeling and packaging style was very Feminine Hygiene Product**). They had a little hole near one end, which I deduced was supposed to be sucked on or inhaled to get a hit. I tried it once, and got enough of an indefinable sensation to remind myself that rule number one was always that a successful dealer didn't consume the goods.

One of the most noticeable things about the dream was the feeling of being in a dangerous situation but of being tough and "bad-ass" enough to not be worried about the gangsters trying to mess with me (where this came from, I don't know, since I'm not exactly a toughie in real life). The scariest moments were two encounters, while in or near my car, with a group of young knife-wielding Roma boys intent on carjacking my car (I put that down to a stereotype about them favoring Mercedes and Jaguars). They were significantly scarier than the grown-up gangsters, but I managed to evade them both times.

In the end, the dream wound down in a fairly tiresome way. I had met up with some random young-ish American(-ish?) dream acquaintances, and we were all hanging around waiting for something undefined. I think we were waiting to be able to leave the country, although I don't know what specific event was going to allow us to leave. I finally got tired of them and their uninteresting and stupid conversation and went off by myself.

So there's another one to add to my collection of dreams dealing with unsavory themes. In my defense, I don't actually remember selling any drugs to anyone, and I remember having a philosophy of not introducing new users to drugs.


*In an interesting twist, I'm positive that this brutalization was inspired by that recent video of the guy stomping on the moveon.org protester's head. He used the exact same foot action.
**I was surprised to note a manufacturer's name and address in China; I hadn't thought that a manufacturer of illegal drugs (in my mind, this was some new exotic form of crack) would label their products as if they were, say, something you'd buy at Wal-Mart.

Staying Cool

I had a horrible dream last night involving stabbing someone. This was not the first stabbing dream I've had, but I certainly hope it's the last.

The first part of the dream was pretty inoffensive. I was supposed to be going to something referred to as a "charity gala" (yes, really) for some organization my husband was involved with. Once again, I was trying to figure out what to wear. A coworker's husband called and just kept on talking and talking and I was getting frustrated because I couldn't figure out how to get him off the phone so I could get on with my charity gala preparations.

Then I was at resort/hotel with my husband. I think we were there for a convention of some sort (not a charity gala!). The atmosphere was kind of 1960s, which came in handy later. The hotel was on a hillside with a pool overlooking a valley. At some point we were in a sort of auditorium with very steep steps up to the exit. The auditorium was fairly empty, and I think we were among the last to leave. We suddenly found ourselves facing several young guys dressed rather snazzily, who wouldn't let us pass--not overtly threatening at first, then becoming more so.

I realized that we were in some kind of life-threatening situation and it was a matter of us or them. I'm not sure if I grasped the plot against us, but there clearly was one, and these young men were clearly its executors. One of them pulled out a knife, and I either grabbed it from him or somehow produced one of my one. *****Warning: rather graphic stabbing content***** Before I could really think about it, I plunged mine into his abdomen, and here's the worst part: I remembered that in such a situation one was to twist the knife for maximum effectiveness, so I did. It was horrible! Just the same sensation as in the other stabbing dream.

As expected, the young man crumpled to the floor, and his companions ran off, although I figured they were just going for reinforcements. My husband had also had a knife in his hand, one of those utility knives (dark red with stainless steel), and he let it drop to the floor (I don't think he had done any stabbing; maybe some light slashing, but nothing fatal). I thought it was very unwise of him to just leave the incriminating weapon like that, but didn't say anything about it. Instead I carefully wiped off my knife (a burnt-orange Swiss Army knife) on the dead guy's shirt and stashed it away in my bag.

We high-tailed it out of the auditorium and into the adjacent parking garage. We knew we couldn't take our own car and would have to steal one for our getaway. My husband said, "so which car should we take?", to which I replied, "our yellow one, of course". He nodded sagely with an admiring look at my presence of mind.

About then we realized that an even better course of action would be to fly somewhere from the airport (the airport was attached to the resort complex). Our first impulse was to fly back home. We were already at the parting gate, talking to the girl at the counter [this is where the 1960s-era vibe came in handy; there was no security to speak of--also, everyone had 1960s hair and clothes]. Of course I realized that flying back home was the stupidest course of action possible and managed to calmly intercept my husband just as he was opening his mouth to buy tickets and somehow indicate to him that we needed to go somewhere else without exciting the suspicion of the ticket-counter girl. He immediately saw my point and congratulated me for being so smart (!), and proposed that we go to Detroit instead.

So I think I woke up just as I was thinking that Detroit was a pretty smart choice, being somewhat of a modern-day Wild West. Also I thought that with the depressed economy it might be easier to start from scratch there if we ended up having to stay. And then as I was further waking up but not fully awake I moved on to strategies for changing one's appearance fast and convincingly and Staying Cool [I had resisted, in the dream, telling my husband to Stay Cool because I rejected the phrase as too hackneyed, no matter how appropriate to the situation].

breaking and entering

Speaking of dreams in which people are out of character, I had one last night in which my parents were completely out of character (they're normally extremely law-abiding and very concerned with propriety).

We (parents, me, sister, and possibly grandmother; I don't remember either of the sons-in-law being there) were on a road trip somewhere in rural southern or central Arkansas. Apparently no one had planned for lodging, and it was getting late. Since it was so rural, there were no hotels around, so my parents stopped at a little cluster of houses in the middle of the woods. Somehow it was decided that one of the houses was where we would spend the night. I'm not sure how this was decided, but I was so taken aback that I didn't even question the decision at first, thinking surely they would come to their senses.

They started unloading the car and carrying things into the house, which was fully furnished and clearly lived in. They were commenting on the furnishings and dishes in a matter-of-fact way, and my mother started puttering in the kitchen, although she seemed a little disapproving of the cookware. My dad removed a screen from one of the windows, saying that it was double-screened for winter, and since it was no longer winter the screen should be removed. I thought at first that he was getting ready to do some repair work, which I had mixed feelings about. On one hand, this wasn't his house; on the other hand, maybe he was looking at it as payment for staying there.

When I realized that they were serious about staying there, I started freaking out and saying that we had to leave right now because someone lived in the house and we could be charged with breaking and entering. When they weren't fazed by that, I brought up the possibility of the owner coming home late, finding his house full of strangers, and opening fire with his shotgun and killing us in our sleep. That didn't make much of an impression either, and I was more and more stressed about how to extricate myself from the situation. I was also disturbed at not getting any backup from my sister, who in real life is sensible and very cautious about anything that could provoke a violent reaction from a random stranger. She had shut down and wasn't saying anything, just wandering around almost invisibly in the sidelines (maybe looking to make her exit unnoticed?).

After we had been there for a while, with all the lights blazing and the windows opened, a police car drove by. It circled around, left, drove by again, and parked facing the house. The policeman just sat there staring at the house, with a civilian woman in the passenger's seat who looked like Grace Jones. I thought that surely that would move my parents to change their plans, but they remained calm in their bedtime preparations.

I don't remember how all that ended. I think it just phased into another story line. I was at work, looking at pictures (or footage?) with my boss. The pictures showed the bend in a creek that was supposedly part of a cave/creek system here in town. The bed was eroded stone with very steep edges, like a very miniature western river canyon, and the water was gushing through. He wanted me to go out and explore the creek system and take more pictures, but I was a little worried about the safety of getting into such rushing water. He said it was only about waist deep, but I thought he was being a little cavalier because he's a very tall and large person and would be a lot more stable in such a rapid current than a medium-sized person. I also wasn't excited about spending my free time on a work-related project, even one involving such beautiful scenery, and hoped he would forget about asking me.

In the other snippet, I was shopping with my mother, and it's only significant in a dream-analysis sense. She was rushing me along and didn't want me to look at some things I wanted to look at, which is one reason I don't shop with my significant other (the other reason being that I don't generally like shopping with anyone but myself). It's one of a few examples of dreams in which I transfer annoying husbandly traits to my mother, which I find odd.

yakuza boss

I don't remember the rest of the dream, but the other night in the middle of a presumably longer story I dreamed that I was dating an old yakuza boss (Japanese gangster, for those whose significant others don't watch a lot of Japanese movies). I was confused about why I was dating him, and a little grossed-out because I didn't really want to be dating someone that old, not to mention not really wanting to get involved with the criminal underbelly of Japan. At the same time, I felt like since I had somehow ended up with him I had an obligation to try to use my influence with him. I don't know what I needed to influence him to do or not do, I just remember a very vivid picture of opening the door to the room he was in, seeing an old man in the fetal position on the floor, and wishing mightily that I hadn't somehow gotten myself into this.

framed!

last night's dream was filled with weird morphings from this to that and i'm not sure i can capture it all in a post but here's the gist:

i was at a house that was across the street from a park i grew up near. i was driving my current car and i parked at the house and went inside to check it out. i think i wanted to live there. no one was home and i was walking around looking in all the bedrooms wondering if one was available to rent. but they all seemed to be in use. while i was looking around the house, i was on the phone talking to a friend. i was explaining the house to him and talking about how i'd like to live in this particular neighborhood. then i realized i should probably leave the house before anyone got home, because it would be awkward to get caught wandering around inside a house that didn't belong to me.

when i left the house it was dark out. there were a lot of people hanging out at the park. i got into my car and started to drive away when i heard faint screaming coming from the back of my car. it was a male's voice and it sounded as if he was in the trunk. only i drive an SUV and there is no trunk. so i deduced that he must be in the back seat, tied up, and muffled by a rag of some sorts in his mouth(?). i was right. i immediately knew that i had been framed, because i certainly didn't tie someone up and put them into my car. i pulled over immediately and knew that it was going to look as if i were guilty. there was some morphing and it ended up with me at the police station (which was really the hospital i used to work at) and i was there along with the girl who framed me (a girl i worked with briefly years ago and haven't really thought of since). there was something to do with carnations for sale. that may have been related to when i sold flowers as a part of a vday fundraiser every year.

anyway, i knew the girl had set me up for the crime, but i didn't know why or how to prove it. then things morphed into my mom and i doing our own investigation. we were sneaking into houses and spying on people in an effort to collect clues. at one point i was back in my car, searching the backseat, looking for evidence. i remember talking to my mother about why the police hadn't searched my car yet, there seemed to be a lot of clues that proved that i was framed. during the searching of my back seat, i found a journal that was shoved down into the seat. the journal had my dreams written in it (like a paper version of this blog). on one of the pages it had this girl's handwriting. there, written out in a step-by-step format, was how she had set the whole thing up. she made a note that was meant for me to read/find that said something along the lines of "you've had lots of dreams about getting framed and put into jail for something you didn't do. how much fun will it be to actually live your dreams!" i remembered thinking the girl must be nuts and had way too much time on her hands. my mom was happy because we could take the journal to the police and prove my innocence. only, i knew the journal wouldn't be acceptable evidence.

another morphing took place and i found myself in a basement. there was a vent on the wall. the girls hand popped through the vent and handed me a thumbdrive. she said "here, all the evidence is on here. you can give this to the police. hurry up, there is a press conference about to start".

and then i woke up.

guns?

I dreamed last night that I went to a big night-time outdoor fair-type event with my husband and another (female) friend. The friend was just your average dream person, no one I actually know. We had been walking around for a while and sat down in an area on the outskirts of the action where some small tables were set up with bar stools around them. My husband said he was going to go do something and would meet us back there. Right after he left, I started looking around and didn't like what I saw. We were surrounded by groups of men who were talking among themselves and staring at us menacingly. There was a sense that they didn't have our best interest in mind, and also that some kind of violence might shortly break out between them. Most of them seemed to be foreigners (from several different parts of the world), and I got the impression that they weren't there legally and that most of them made their living in illegitimate ways*.

The friend and I decided that we should leave immediately, but just as we were walking away I realized that in my hurry I had left my purse on the table. I ran back to get it, but was too late; a guy who worked for my husband [in the dream--I don't know how I knew he worked for him, but it was an established fact] had made off with it. He hadn't gotten far, so I started yelling and ran toward him, but he whipped out a pistol and started yelling back at me. I realized that it wasn't a good idea to get in a shouting match with an armed thief, so we got out of there.

We finally found my husband in a more crowded part of the fair. The guy might have been pursuing us, because he showed up just as I was trying to tell the story of what had happened. The thief brandished his pistol at the three of us, among a growing crowd, and suddenly my husband pulled a 12-gauge out of his jacket. [How does one conceal such a big gun in one's clothing, and why did he have it there?] He cocked it with that menacing CH-CHK sound, and the guy, seeing that his pistol didn't measure up to a Big Gun, ran away. I have no idea whether I got my purse back, though.

I much prefer clothing dreams to gun dreams.

*This part makes me feel like a closet racist. For the record, I think the vast majority of illegal residents make their living in perfectly legitimate, if underpaid ways.

more violence

Not only are my pets provoking bad dreams, now it's my husband. He watched something last night involving organized crime and witness protection. I must be extremely suggestible.

I don't remember the backstory, but I was with a diverse group of people who had been thrown together because they were in some sort of undefined danger. We were all in a house waiting for something to happen--I think we were waiting to be taken somewhere. At this point the dream switched to a movie-within-a-dream. I was aware that it was a movie, but I think we were watching it out the windows and it was happening outside the house instead of on a screen.

In the movie-within-a-dream there was a group of people (very much resembling the group of people in the dream) who had been involved somehow with organized crime. I think they had witnessed something rather than committing anything themselves, and the criminals were after them to "rub them out" so they couldn't testify. They (like the people in the dream) were waiting to be escorted to an undisclosed location to enter completely into a witness protection program (they were in the initial phase and thus in a somewhat-but-not-completely-undisclosed location). A couple of armored vehicles showed up with a group of SWAT-team type officers, their faces concealed by their uniforms. They ushered all the people out to get into the vehicles, then opened fire on them and killed them all. One of the "officers" raised his face shield and it became clear that he (and thus the rest) were hit men who were impersonating the police in order to wipe out the witnesses.

The woman I was in a room with while watching this through the windows was understandably freaked out about it, since the movie situation so clearly mirrored her own. I wasn't as concerned because I had the impression that I was just there as a bystander and not implicated.

I don't know why my subconscious seems to have it in for me lately. I haven't been feeling particularly disturbed in real life. [I'm also loath to add yet another tag for "murder", "crime", "organized crime", etc. because it makes it look like I'm obsessed with violent deaths.]

slices of arm

Background: we have a young but very large dog who usually stays outside. It was unusually cold last night, so we let him sleep inside, but due to his boisterousness and inability to leave our other dog alone, we had to leave him in a crate, which he protested very mightily by making loud anguished noises off and on throughout the night. I think this contributed to my having one of my All-Time Most Gruesome Dreams.

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This dream was influenced by those Japanese movies in which a series of people die after learning that they're "next in line" [generally this is due to a vengeful ghost, but there was no ghost in my dream; the cause of the deaths wasn't explored at all]. I was in an indoor public swimming pool (?). I think everyone was fully clothed in the pool, to one extent or another. I was stressed about something that had happened earlier in the dream and already on edge. I noticed that a rockabilly-type girl near me had started to act strangely. She acted agitated and I somehow understood that she was perceiving music that only she could perceive, and that this was her information that she was to be the next victim. I think that she was also supposed to pick the subsequent victim on learning of her victimhood, although this was a little hazy.

Anyway, the rockabilly girl focused her attention on me, probably because I was the closest person. She started pointing at me and becoming more and more agitated. Then she took out a knife and started shaving slices off her left upper arm, like you would slice one of those Spanish hams. She then put them on top of my head, which i found horrible and reacted to somewhat hysterically. Weirdly, there was no spurting blood--the slices came off very neatly, like a food product.

clothes and dogs (but no dogs in clothes)

I had a couple of tangentially clothes-related dreams last week. The directly clothes-related one was one of those I have periodically where I'm getting ready to go on a group trip (yes, again). I was younger, college age, and was getting ready to go on a trip to Paris with an assortment of girls I've known at various times in my life (everyone in the dream was college age). The interesting thing was that instead of the usual scrabbling around through very disparate and bizarre (and often child-size) items, all of the available clothes were really great. They were all interesting and well-made and went together perfectly and were perfect for the place and season. It was one of the best clothes dreams I've had in a while. Looking back on it, the clothes in the dream were significantly more elaborate and frilly than what I normally like, but in the dream they were perfect.

While all the girls were running around assembling clothes, a guy I know showed up, apparently also bound for Paris. In real life he's not at all a fan of "girliness", and apparently this was true in the dream too. He stood around for a couple of minutes looking bemused (and about 6 inches taller than in real life), then quietly disappeared from the girly fray. It's a good thing, because after that the action shifted to an Anthropologie-like store where several girls were examining handmade jewelry with plans to make similar items.

The other dream involved an investigation into a killing spree. I was just a spectator, but it wasn't an overtly "movie" dream. The detectives were investigating on several fronts. There was an animal expert who was "interviewing" pit bulls by sitting on their backs as they lay on the floor and talking to them (I'm not sure how forthcoming they were, but the police seemed to set a lot of stock in this method, even though the killer was human). The head detective was apparently not a pit bull fan. He said, "in this investigation we've discovered that there are pit bulls ALL OVER L.A. It's scary!"

The other special investigator brought in was...Anna Wintour (yes, the editor of Vogue). She was specializing in interpreting for the interrogation process. They said she had been "working a lot with Puerto Ricans". I guess she got tired of fashion and decided to branch out, although this was apparently just a side gig, in addition to Vogue.

the Floodlight Murderer

I had a really grisly dream snippet the other morning. I think it was unrelated to whatever I had been dreaming before, but there was apparently a serial killer on the loose. He was leaving his victims propped up in upright positions (most with expressions of shock on their faces), with a big hole cut out of the middle. In the hole, he left a big floodlight-type flashlight as his trademark (not on, just sticking out of the hole). I told my husband about it and he was somewhat offended because we have a flashlight just like that, and thought I was making him out to be The Bad Guy (although he was not one of the suspects). Oddly, I didn't find this dream all that alarming; it was more like idly watching one of those crime programs on TV--actually, it was significantly less alarming than those programs.


[Out of 5 dreams tagged "murder", 4 are mine; and the only two dealing with serial killers are mine. What is my problem?]

crime and punishment

I had a terrible dream last night--I dreamed that my husband and I were on vacation and driving a rented truck (don't know why) into a grassy parking lot to retrieve our own truck. When we got in sight of our own truck, we saw that someone was breaking into it. We didn't want to let on that it was our vehicle because we didn't want to provoke any violence, so we turned around and left to call the police. For some reason the would-be thief jumped onto the running board of our rental truck and tried to get in (provoking one of those racing-to-lock-the-door-but-my-fingers-won't-move-fast moments). I guess he fell off, because the next thing I can remember is that we had taken refuge in an unoccupied house. We had locked all the doors when I realized that the miscreant (joined now by his wife!) had climbed up on a porch roof in front of a second-story window and were getting ready to crawl in the window. My only option was to push them both off the roof, so I did, and they landed with a splat on the ground. I was extremely upset about having killed someone, even in self-defense, and started crying hysterically (including something about how the woman was really beautiful and I wished I hadn't had to kill her, and I was afraid people would think I'd killed her because she was beautiful). A policeman who came to check on the crime scene said that she had been killed immediately, but it looked to him like her husband hadn't died immediately.

Oh, it was awful! I hardly ever have gruesome dreams like that.

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A less gruesome but still neurotic dream is this one I had the other morning, in two parts. The first part was something I've dreamed variations of before. I was with my husband at some wedding-type event involving public sit-down eating, and he fell immediately and obviously in love with some girl that was there. She was cute enough, and she seemed like a nice, well-adjusted person, but she had extremely hairy arms! Not hairy in a normal girl-with-hairy-arms way--she had fuzz standing up at least 3/4 of an inch on her upper arms, like a halo. It didn't seem to affect his regard for her, though, because he sat down beside her, forcing me to sit on the other side of her and try to act serene and secure while she held forth on what a wonderful friend Sean Penn was (another question--what are all these celebrities doing in my dreams lately?).

So I woke up grumpy and insecure, and since I had time before work I went back to sleep and dreamed about seducing a scientist. He and a colleague were setting up for a reenactment of one of "the early microwave parties"*, I saw him, and that was pretty much all it took for him to fall head-over-heels for me. Ha! Retribution!

*These were apparently house parties held in the early-to-mid eighties at which the two scientists demonstrated their innovative microwave/computer prototype. Although looking back, this guy would have only been about 15 at the time, so there must have been a logistical error in my dream.