crocodiles and mobsters

I know I say this fairly often, but I really had the most exhausting dream just before waking up this morning. [This is Part 1 and Part 2, since blogger won't let me put in all the necessary labels. Part 3 is below.]

Part 1:

I had a plane ticket to go and visit a friend of mine. There was one connection, and for some reason I thought the hour or so was a huge amount of time. I left the airport and ended up in a national park near Houston (apocryphal as far as I know) known for its crocodiles. I had no car and no camping gear, but I had completely forgotten about my flight and was walking around the campground choosing a site. I felt slightly liberated by the idea of camping all alone, like I was doing something very brave and adult. I guess it was rather brave, since the campground was surrounded by a bayou (of very clear water, weirdly). The water came right up to the campsites, and the bottom sloped down very slowly, giving the impression that you were actually in the water while you were still on land. I didn't see any crocodiles, somewhat disappointingly.

Part 2:

Before I could settle on a campsite, I remembered that I was supposed to be making my connection flight and was now about three hours late for it. I was extremely unhappy with myself, and stressed out about what to do. I hemmed and hawed for a while, and then finally realized that I was actually at my friend's house, having somehow magically arrived there. For a while I was very confused and kept thinking that I still needed to arrange transportation to get there.

She lived in a weird building with a labyrinth of rooms and an assortment of people. At one point I found myself squeezed onto a couch with her (somewhat portly) father and some random young bearded and hatted musicians, all singing and boisterously celebrating their newly-released cd, the product of a collaboration with a lot of high-profile people (including Charlotte Gainsbourg). Her father was getting very excited about the music and the cd, and kept encroaching further into my personal space. It was all completely innocent, but I was getting very physically uncomfortable being squashed, and couldn't think of a way to extricate myself without making a scene. I think he was also shirtless, which added to the discomfort.

[continued below]

jumping on the snippet bandwagon

Here are some of my recent snippets (no full-scale plotlines for me lately):

• I was staying in my aunt and uncle's house with my parents (aunt and uncle weren't there). My dog (the giant, hyperactive one) was there too, and my mother had stayed up all night with him in the living room watching tv. To the average layperson, this wouldn't sound so funny, but the idea of my mother staying up all night watching random tv movies with my large dog is so unlikely as to be hilarious. I had woken up early and wanted to go out to do some sightseeing (apparently my aunt and uncle's house was in Italy!). My mother wasn't ready to leave the house after her all-nighter, and I was a little impatient. While waiting to see if she was going to accompany me I noticed that the bathroom shower stall was all dirty and scuzzy, and was self-righteously scandalized that they hadn't cleaned it for incoming guests*. I tried to use some Scrubbing Bubbles product on it, but was frustrated because it didn't foam properly. Then I gave up waiting for her and went out, where I bought some overpriced and weird-looking (orange?!) Spanish tortilla and some similarly overpriced coffee from a streetside stall manned by an old man.

• Then another night I had a dream in which I missed a train due to poor time management and ended up having to spend the night at a nearby anarchist commune. In the dream, I knew a lot of the people there from past periods of my life, although I'm not sure, apart from one or two, whether these were dream people or actual real-life acquaintances. I was just getting settled in and over my frustration at having missed my train when people started saying that I guy I do know in real life had come back from a long trip (the implication was that this had been some sort of meaningful quest). They were saying that he was going to rest up and decompress before coming out to mingle, and the implication was that he was some sort of returning hero.

• Then last night the only dream bit I remember was that I was supposed to do a science project (you know, like a science-fair/ science-class project). As expected, I didn't have much time left in which to do it, but I wasn't too worried because my plan was to have "Curly Sue" and her sister help me--wait for it--capture a small crocodile. That was going to be my science project, a captive miniature crocodile. I don't really know where the location of the dream was, but it was somewhat exotic and the ground was covered with a swampy groundcover. When you looked closely you could see that at close intervals in the groundcover there were tiny crocodiles in a dormant state. I knew that once I started trying to capture one it would become active, though, which was why I needed help. I figured it wouldn't be too hard with one person to grab and hold the body and the other person to grab the snout (?) and hold it shut; a third person for backup could be nice too. Unfortunately when Curly Sue and sister showed up (with their mother and possibly some other extended family members) they were considerably less enthusiastic about the enterprise than I had expected. Due to their lack of enthusiasm, I decided that I should go with my science project backup plan, an origami model of a double helix (here again, I was somewhat hazy about the actual details involved in its fabrication).

*Ironic considering the squalor in which I usually live.

musical soiree

One of the things I dreamed last night was that I was somehow dating Rufus Wainwright. "Dating" isn't really the right word. It was more like he paid attention to me a couple of times and then we were in an extremely unhealthy, dysfunctional relationship where I was a subordinate/assistant and spent the whole dream waiting for him to come back from somewhere. I was also really young in the dream, which I guess was why I didn't catch on to the unhealthiness of it; I just felt superior that I had somehow managed to make him interested in girls.

Then later I dreamed that I was on a tour with some assorted friends and family members. The big draw of the tour was to get up close and personal with crocodiles, which we did at one point when our boat landed at an abandoned man-made island (a sort of building on the water) which turned out to be overrun with crocodiles.

Shortly after getting back on the boat, people started talking about a game that was apparently all the rage, with a gimmicky name that I can't remember. It dawned on me that it was a cross between dueling and Russian roulette, and I expressed dismay at this being considered a good game. Someone informed that Shakira was a huge fan of it, as if that made it okay.