Tornadoes and fraternizing

I was at work and in my dream, we were on the 12th floor (in real life it's the 7th).  There are ceiling to floor windows. The wind was picking up I looked out the window, and saw black clouds swirling very fast. The whole sky was dark and in seconds, a tornado was produced. The funnel swirled from the sky to the ground. It was long and narrow, and it was very vivid in my dream. The wind was whistling and I remembered thinking "this doesn't sound like the freight train as people so often describe it." The winds sounded like high pitched whistling. A man who works in my office in real life, Steve, is someone I have a crush on. In my dream, I saw him jump down to the floor with a frightened look on his face as the tornado was right outside our window. He was wearing a light blue button down shirt, and put his hands over his head. I did the same. I was so excited to see a tornado, but then realized we're on the 12th floor and I feared the building would collapse. It went by us without any damage.  I remember saying "I can now cross that off my bucket list. I've always wanted to see a tornado" to one of my coworkers.

I was then walking up stairs in a residence, they had carpet on them.  Steve was sitting on a couch by himself, with a large window behind him. He smiled when he saw me, and asked me to come over. His teeth are perfect and white, his hair very short an always kept nice, light brown in color and blue eyes. He took his shirt off, and exposed his hairy chest. I felt giggly and strangely comfortable with him. He smiled at me throughout the dream. I was sitting on his lap facing him, when my coworker Sandy came upstairs. Steve covered himself with a shirt, and she didn't notice he had taken it off. She asked if I knew whether or not the Christmas tree outside was still standing after the storm. I told her I would go and check.

I walked outside onto a concrete patio, and saw a sting of lights and a pole, but it appeared the tree had been stripped down to nearly nothing.  I turned around and saw lights that were black, looked burned, and were attached to shorter pole going down to the ground as if they previously served a decorative purpose. I came back in and told her what I'd found.  She said she wanted to go back out and see if the video games that were left outside were still there. She said they were clipped to the side of the house. In my mind, I envisioned them to look like green plastic clips holding a video game case when she told me about them.

Steve was yelling something downstairs to another person who asked him a question. I can't remember what he was saying. I just remember him constantly smiling at me, taking his shirt off again and we were holding each other. The person he was yelling to was coming up the stairs, when I woke up.

The crush

I had a dream I was at a guy named Kyle's house. In real life, I've always had a wicked infatuation crush on him. There were men  all around drinking and laughing, all of them in jeans and tshirts. I was hanging on Kyle a lot and I couldn't stop smiling. We were looking at and adoring each other. There was no doubt about what was our minds.

He was drinking Jack Daniels. I smelled it and immediately I felt like I was going to vomit. I needed water. I grabbed a plastic cup out of the cabinet and when I tried to fill it, I noticed there were frozen green beans in it. I dumped them in the sink and didn't want anyone to know, so I pushed them into the disposal. I filled the cup while pushing the green beans down and drank some water. They were all laughing and doing shots, raising the glasses to "toast" one another.

I walked back over and said "I used to be able to drink it but now the smell makes me sick." We were all talking, I remember thinking one guy looked familiar but I couldn't remember his name. I hinted to Kyle I wanted to go to his room. He smiled, and his gorgeous face with perfect white teeth reminded me why I always had this crush. We walked up carpeted stairs. He turned on a light and this room was full of plastic partitions with blankets and no pillows. I thought" there's no privacy? You sleep with other people here? No mattresses??" He leaned in to kiss me, we smiled at one another and I said "you're a much different person since you got rid of Candi (his ex)."

He took my hand and led me to a different room that looked like a hostel. It had bunk beds and all of them were made up nicely. He said he had to pay $40 to sleep there. I said I could pay it but I only had a credit card with me, I had no cash. We started to kiss again and a crowd of people flooded into the room. I sat down on a bed and noticed a second later a girl was there behind me. I apologized and went to move, she touched my arm and said it was ok. She had a warm smile and big eyes. I told Kyle I left my purse downstairs and I was worried about leaving it there. I asked the girl if the homeless people would be offended if I went to get it, I didn't want them to think I didn't trust them. She said "oh no not at all, but they would never take anything from your purse."  Then I woke up.

Brits in drag

I don't have time right now to describe the other night's extremely trippy dream featuring a gigantic moth man (yes!), or the movie/crime mystery dream loosely inspired by The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. In the interest of not falling behind again, though, here is last night's dream.

I was in school, although "school" was vaguely defined and included some of my coworkers* in vague capacities as fellow students and/or instructors. We were supposed to be putting together a paper/presentation, and the first group was going to start presenting later that day. Of course I still hadn't even settled on a topic. I had been fairly sure of a topic I can't remember now, involving serving food as part of the presentation. Then I decided that a topic involving Japan and serving sushi (which I'm not an expert on) would be better.

I was feeling okay about my presentation (although I didn't have any material), until I started to deal with the sushi-making. I looked at my raw materials (leftover long-grain rice with bits of carrot), and realized that it was all wrong and I would never be able to pull things together. After some desperate thinking [during which there was a mini subplot in which a boy I had a crush on in elementary school was now divorced with a kid or two and expressing interest, which was kind of flattering even though I thought he might just be looking for childcare], I came up with an idea. My topic would be "why do men in drag feature so prominently in British sketch-type comedies?"**

I thought this was a great topic because it was something I was personally curious about, but I had the wind taken out of my sails when I asked around and none of my fellow students had even seen Monty Python (not that I'm a huge Monty Python fan, but I figured everyone would at least know that reference). I then started doubting once again my choice of subjects, which brought on a full-blown crisis regarding inability to focus and commit to a decision. I hate it when my subconscious has to bring up and rub in these real-life character flaws.



*I've been having an inordinate, and annoying, number of coworker dream sightings.
**Prompted, no doubt, by my recent viewing of said British sketch-type comedy.

pop culture reference extravaganza!

I was in the middle of a very detailed and tiring dream when I woke up this morning, the sort that makes me intermittently raise my eyebrows in bemusement for the next half hour or so.

The dream began with--what else?--a group trip. I was traveling with my parents, sister, and some assorted people who popped up fuzzily in the periphery and then disappeared. We were staying at my ex-boyfriend's parents' house (not their real-life house, but an apartment influenced by some extended family members' apartments in Canada). I was sharing a bedroom (with whom, I can't remember; either my husband or my sister, I think) that I realized belonged to the parents, with a very large white bed and a setup including about three fans. The fans kept turning themselves on, even after being unplugged, which really freaked me out. I didn't want them on because I was cold, but it took me quite a while to work out how to get them completely off.

By the time I got the fan situation resolved it was almost time to get up and around, so I took a shower and was trying to figure out when and where would be best to do the rest of my morning remedial work (what is with this constant issue in dreams of trying to put myself together?). The other guests were starting to gather for breakfast, and there were a few minutes of that annoying back-and-forth about the best way to schedule breakfast and bathroom for all parties. There was that cumbersome feeling of too many people trying to move together.

I guess everyone managed to get ready, because we got to church (based on my parents' actual church, except with uneven, too-close-together rows of metal folding chairs instead of actual pews). I sat down next to a real-life coworker and my sister, but my sister got up at some point to sit with friends, and I was left with the coworker to my left and several empty seats between me and my mother. For some reason I was annoyed with her and wanted to ignore her for the duration of the service, but she kept talking to me about various things (notably whether I had a kleenex). I was uncharacteristically empty-handed in the dream, so I didn't have a kleenex, but she had sidled over in the kleenex search and was sitting next to me. I couldn't get rid of her, but wished she would go away because in the dream I was developing a bit of a mutual crush on the coworker* (sitting progressively closer together in a G-rated way, as is the usual pattern in my "crush" dreams).

The church service finally started, and a group of about 7-8 high school students got up to sing. It started out with an almost unbearable solo by the girl in the center: that almost-inaudible, reedy, breathy voice of a teenager who thinks she can sing because she sings along to music in her room. Soon the others joined in, which made it more bearable and added a bit more volume. They were all swaying and dancing to various degrees, which I found kind of charming ("aw, youthful exuberance"). I knew that my mother was going to freak out, though, and possibly get up and walk out. Their dancing soon coalesced into a routine, and when the group turned around I was startled to see that one of the girls was wearing a dress that amounted basically to an apron, so that her hot-pantsed backside was completely exposed when she turned around. She did a not-quite-expert version of a jiggling "booty dance". The whole effect was extremely jarring, although all I could think was, "that poor girl, why didn't anyone advise her against this?"

When the song ended, the entire audience booed, and a short, stocky, Chuck-D.-esque man in a military uniform took the stage. He began to rail against the dance piece, which he clearly hadn't appreciated either. And he had really not appreciated getting what amounted to a (very short) lap dance by Miss Hotpants/Apron.

Things didn't get a lot better after that. They started running a video showing a Jessica Alba lookalike clothed in a sort of leotard over a printed, almost-transparent full-body catsuit. The catsuit had a really beautiful pattern to it, a kind of leaves/flowers/wheat thing. The girl had water (rain?) running down over her, which was slowly dissolving the print/material of the catsuit (but not the leotard). I gradually caught on that it was an American Apparel ad, for a water-soluble catsuit (??). From what I could understand, it would dissolve and then reconstitute itself. They were hinting that this feature would be useful when one needed to pee, since you could just leave it on (?? yuck). The video ended with what I finally realized was a closeup of the model's (clothed, but barely) crotch.

The dubious church service being finally over, several members of the party went to a flea market. I love these flea-market dreams because they're always so detailed, but I can't remember many of the items I looked at. The thing that sticks out most was a beautiful, elaborately hand-embroidered pillowcase. One side was white embroidery on white, and the other side was a mixture of white, printed border, and white embroidery. The fabric was a loosely woven linen, which didn't seem either all that comfortable or very durable, and there were a couple of holes toward one end of it. What was really noteworthy about it, though, was its former owner: Anne Heche (??)**. While the completely white side had an elaborate embroidery saying "amor", the other side had "Anne Heche" embroidered on it. There was a note pinned to it saying, "soon to be Leah Anne Somebody-or-Other", from which I deduced that the pillowcase was part of the spoils of her relationship with Ellen Degeneres. There was another pillowcase-like object next to it, and I thought it might be Ellen's, and might be similarly beautiful (although I did think it might be a bit freaky to have a set of Ellen-and-Anne pillowcases on my bed). On closer inspection the object turned out to be not a pillowcase but a red Chinese towel. I first looked at the back side, and was thinking of buying it. On turning it over, though, I found that what had looked like two plain panels were actually two photorealistic renderings (in terrycloth?!) of a couple of celebrities in the style of mid-80s Glamour Shots (tm)***.

Sigh. I knew this one was going to go over the character limit for tags....

*Alert Readers should be assured that this is not a real-life development, although I do enjoy this person as a coworker because he tends toward a benign grumpiness that I find soothing.
**Where DO these random celebrities come from? They're never anyone I've actually been thinking about.
***Research reveals they're still in business!

oh boy (literally!)

My brain is definitely responding to my fear of having more adolescent dreams and/or dreams about young boys*. The very night after the washing-machine dream, I dreamed that I was in a church-ish setting. I think they were having church, but there were some other things going on too, garage-sale sort of things outside. There was an old wooden Middle-America church-ish building with a high porch, and the inside where the church service was actually taking place there was also a balcony in the entrance, where you could stay and look over the proceedings without committing yourself to going in and sitting down.

When I was still outside, I saw a very small boy with curly hair who appeared to be lost. I didn't see any corresponding adults around, so I thought I should try to help him find his people. As soon as I approached him he darted away and was replaced by an older boy, maybe 10 or 11, with straight dark hair.

This older boy also claimed to be lost, and although I didn't have quite the same urgent feelings of concern for him, he was still young enough that he should know where his parents were, and vice versa. So I walked around with him a little outside, and we didn't find any parents. We then went inside and stood on the balcony, and I started to get the distinct impression that he was sticking around more because he had a crush on me than anything else**. I wasn't sure what I should do, whether I should continue the [somewhat fruitless-seeming] search for his parents; whether I should just stand there and listen to him talk, thus encouraging him; or whether I should just start completely ignoring him and hope that he would go away. In the meantime I realized that he seemed older than he had outside, and that, indeed, his voice had changed from preadolescent to adolescent. This freaked me out a little.

An unrelated but interesting detail was that there were food vendors in the back of the church. Someone had converted an old chicken coop to a portable stand for selling what they called “oeufs caillés”***. They were eggs cooked somewhere between soft- and hard-boiled, in the unbroken shells, but when one got to the yolk it had been transformed into soft little spheres the size of the big tapioca pearls in bubble tea. There were two versions, just plain lightly sweetened, and chocolate (although the white in the chocolate version was still white). The operators of the stand had set it up so that it was self-service, thus cleverly avoiding offending anyone with compunctions about buying and selling in the church building. I thought the whole thing was very clever, although I wasn't sure how much I liked the eggs in question.


*Not that kind of dream. Really.
**Wait! This is the second dream I can recall dealing with underage boys having inappropriate crushes on me IN CHURCH. What is going on?
***I don't think such a thing exists. Literally it would be "curdled/clotted/coagulated eggs", and a search doesn't show up anything. However, there are "oeufs de caille", or quail eggs; but the eggs in the dream were definitely chicken, not quail****.
****Wait! Eggs. Is this whole thing really about my biological clock? Is my brain really that twisted that it's presenting me with these weird parallel themes of pursuit and procreation? Does my brain fancy itself a controversial Italian movie director from the 60s or something?

regressing

I hesitated all day about posting this because I think it's an embarrassing thing to dream, but it's so random that I'm going to go ahead and do it.

I don't know what the occasion was, exactly, but I was at some kind of big event being held in a school gym. Whatever the event began as, it was transitioning into a dress-up social occasion of the sort held by religious schools that can't hold a dance. I was somewhat younger in the dream than I actually am, and not married; and there were a lot of people from my old high school, although most of them were just faceless extras (all older than high-school-aged, like me).

When I found out that the event was going to turn dressy I turned my attention to what I should wear for it. Although I don't remember the creative act, I found myself in a dress that I had whipped up on the spot*, out of peach-colored silk, floor-length, and late-80s style (fitted bodice with a "v" at the waist, puffy sleeves--it should be noted that I was skinnier than my actual self in the dream and such a dress actually fit me properly). I was surprised at how good it had turned out, but once I tried it on for fit I kind of ran out of steam on hemming the sleeves and skirt, and was just wearing it unfinished and over a pair of pants.

That's not the really embarrassing part, though. Around that time I started talking to a guy from my high school class who I apparently had a crush on**. He was being very cute/funny/charming, and he put his arm around me as he made silly comments about a washer and dryer we were looking at. What he was saying wasn't even registering because I was so excited that he had his arm around me. Then he made a comment about how we could have that washer in our house if we got married, or something joking-but-not-joking in that vein. Then he mentioned Oklahoma and I realized with a start that he was a big family person and that if we were to get married I would have to spend a lot of time there, possibly even live in Oklahoma, which really gave me pause.

Anyway. The embarrassing thing is, who has such adolescent dreams? The whole thing reads like a 7th-grader's diary! ("And then we were looking at washers and dryers and he put his arm around me! I think he likes me!") And I thought admitting to the Johnny Depp dream was embarrassing. I'm not going to be surprised if in tonight's dream some boy gives me a note saying, "Do you like me? Check yes or no."


*The event was in a cross between a gym and a Best Buy store, complete with merchandise in random places, including sewing machines and other home appliances.
**Thinking about it this morning, I realized that there may have been an actual mutual crush at the time, but I was too clueless to pick up on either side of it.

Christian

I dreamed that I went on a date with Christian Bale. And because this was my dream, he was quiet and a little shy, intelligent and even a bit scholarly, and he liked me! I just wish I could remember more details.

I'd had this week's Entertainment Weekly on my floor, and had vaguely wondered whether Heath Ledger as the Joker would give me nightmares. I'm glad it worked the other way around! (Also thanks, probably, to yesterday's Christian Bale image search. Oh my goodness.)

Flirt

I dreamed I saved a boy from drowning by performing CPR.

I also dreamed that I saw my cute neighbor from Bowling Green, and flirted with him. Past dreams about him would generally involve me remembering that I had a boyfriend and then feeling guilty. Not this time!

Pregnancy and a Crush: Happiness all around

So..I have had two dreams over the last two nights that I can actually remember! I haven't been remembering my dreams for awhile now, so remembering these dreams is great news to me :)

The first dream I had was about a friend that I work with. She was pregnant in the dream, almost 8 months, and glowing. Once I saw her, I remembered that I have never felt a baby kicking inside the womb. So I asked her if I could touch her belly to feel the baby kick, and she said yes. Once I touched her stomach, the baby stopped kicking. I kept waiting for it to kick again, but it didn't. I was still excited anyway with the opportunity to try to feel a baby kicking in it's mother's stomach. It was a happy dream.

**********

The second dream I had was a little more exciting. I was walking in a store and knelt down to look a product (which I don't know, because I only remember seeing the white florescent lights and being in the greeting card section). All of a sudden, a man with dark brown hair climbs over me and starts to kiss me. (It was like the kiss between Toby McGuire and Kirsten Dunst in one of the Spiderman movies, where he is upside down and she is right side up, and removes his mask and kisses him.) It was a awesome kiss and apparently, I recognized the man in the dream as a current crush, however, I never saw his face in the dream. When I woke up I knew he wasn't a mysterious or random stranger, but I didn't recognize who it was in the dream either. Suffice i to say, this was a dream that was hard to wake up from.