Tsunami

I'm pretty sure I was reading some Lacan-esque French theory, something about a sea lion/regular lion and a polar bear, and recognizing the Other or some such business. I'm not sure if I was studying this while at the beach, or if the elaborate literary metaphor sort of just came alive for me, but at some point I was definitely being rocked by the waves.

The tide on this U-shaped beach was coming in, though, and I decided I was done with the water. When the waves pulled back, a whitish pebbly beach was revealed at the bottom of the U, and I ran across to get the backpack(s) and corkscrew (?!) that I'd left there on a ledge. Back on the other side, the door to the hotel/apartment/dorm was locked, so a beach employee (?!) kindly let me in. It was an odd sort of industrial-looking stairwell, so as she was in there with me, I asked her whether I'd be able to get out on my floor. She was assuring me that I would, just as she received a message, which I couldn't decipher, on her radio.

"Up!" she said to me. "Up! Run!"

"What happened?" I asked, as I started up the stairs. "What is it?"

"Up, up!" she shouted, pushing me. "Go!"

I was struck by the realization that we were trying to make it to higher ground, because a tsunami was coming. I tried to run faster, taking two steps at a time, but my legs were tired and then we started to run into crowds in the stairwell, also trying to get up to higher ground. They were quite orderly and not pushing or shoving--primarily just polite and a bit bemused.

Suddenly it got darker in the stairwell, and I realized the wave was coming. There was a window in the stairwell, separated by a gap of several feet from where I stood on the stairs. As I looked out, I saw a wall of water rising, in incredible colors--glowing sage-y green, then golden, then red. It reached up to a few inches above the window, and then sank, and I thought, with relief, that we were all going to be fine. But then came what I instantly knew was the Second Wave, higher than the first, and I could feel the foundations of the building shaking. This wave filled the window with incredible sparkling droplets of water, glowing red. I thought to myself that I might well die, but even if it did, it would be after seeing the most beautiful scene of my life--and that it would be okay.

the mechanics of dream crying

I had the saddest dream last night. So sad, in fact, that I woke myself up crying (or maybe the dog barking woke me up; it was simultaneous). My husband and I were living (with other people, of course--I couldn't possibly have a dream in which I don't live in a group arrangement) in a rooftop apartment. It was really just a small box-shaped one-room building with extremely low ceilings, on top of the flat roof of an older building. I think the building itself contained a mixture of offices and apartments, and it wasn't in great shape.

We had been out and about and were returning home, if you can call such a living arrangement "home". It had been raining, and as we neared the top of the stairs leading to the roof, I noticed water pouring down the stairs from the rooftop. I made a note to let the building manager know (incidentally, the same guy who manages the building at my real-life office). It didn't really occur to me to be worried until we came out onto the roof and saw that it was completely flooded, almost up to the wall around the edges, which was about six feet tall. We could still walk through the water easily, but it was threatening to fill up the apartment to roof level. When we went inside, everyone was confusedly trying to gather up their things to evacuate. I looked around for our dogs with an increasingly sinking feeling. I asked someone about them, and just as they started to answer I brushed up against what was obviously one of their bodies floating around under the surface of the water*.

Of course no one had thought or had time to rescue our dogs, and it was terrible to think about them struggling to keep their heads above water in the middle of the crowded bunkbed setup (the room was filled with bunkbeds like a summer camp). I felt terrible realizing that if we had been there we could easily have gotten them out of there, and terrible in a different way thinking that if the roof had had proper drainage this wouldn't have happened at all.

I've always kind of wondered about the mechanics of crying in dreams, in those cases where you wake yourself up sobbing violently--how long are you actually crying in "real time" (it always seems to me like I cry for hours in the dream), and are real tears coming out? I still have no conclusion, but found it interesting that I woke up with tears in my eyes (but not streaming down my face) after what seemed like ages of crying. I also woke up slowly enough to note that I was gasping, sob-like, but my sleeping partner is a heavy enough sleeper that I've never been able to get an outside observation of whether I'm actually sobbing or just gasping.

Anyway, it was a harrowing dream, and I was very glad to hear the dogs barking when I woke up from it.


*This seems like a weird detail, that they would be floating around at a 3' depth, but I don't know enough about the physics of water and dog corpses to say whether it's really inaccurate. Another weird physics-related detail was that after we had removed the dog corpses from the flooded rooftop I was carrying them around in a garbage bag, casually slung over my shoulder--all 170 pounds of them, which I would surely not be able to do in real life, especially if racked by sobs.

Which reminds me of another gorily specific detail: I was carrying the dogs around because I hoped to find someone to flay them and preserve their hides for me, and also to remove and clean up their skulls so I could keep them as mementos**. When my husband expressed dismay at this weird and excessive desire, I said, "but think, don't you know any hunters who could do it? It would be easy for a hunter who was used to processing deer!"


**I probably shouldn't confess this, but I have considered in real life (although purely theoretically) the possibility of keeping the skull of a dead pet as a memento (in my defense, the hide idea hadn't occurred to me), although I'm sure I wouldn't due to a lack of butchering/taxidermy skills/cast-iron emotional constitution, and the fact that I don't know any local hunters.

Soldiers and Ponies

This is my first time posting on this blog, so let me warn you that I take absolutely no responsibility for what my pre/subconscious decides to make me dream about. I have stopped asking why I dream like I do. I just write the most detailed ones down. That being said, happy reading!

The dream began in the midst of a gunfight between two small groups of soldiers. It got a little odd when I realized the enemy had decided to occupy and fortify my childhood home in the middle of the North Carolina suburbs. Instead of the slightly rusted chain link fence that surrounded the back yard, I and my company of four were balked by a new glittering razorwire fence around the whole property. The front of my mind was occupied by the plan we’d come up with for infiltrating the “compound”, but a tiny mouse-voice in the back of my mind glanced around, tapped ceaselessly for attention and peeped “Hey, um. This shouldn’t be happening. Not in broad springtime daylight. Not in this neighborhood. Where are the neighbors?”

 “They’re all dead, of course. These bastards killed them all,” my “rational sense” replied. “Which is why we have to get in there and neutralize them.”

My team and I approached my house from the west; from behind the nine-foot-tall screen of magnolia bushes my elderly neighbors had planted to protect themselves from our two loud, overzealous dogs.

The razorwire fence stood just on the other side of the bushes. We crept close to the heavily-guarded gate, our M-16s at the ready. There was no door, only a gap like a missing tooth in the run of the fence. One of my fellows poked his rifle through the bushes and shot blindly; he took out two of the guards. The remaining two watched their comrades flop to the ground like dead fish, then opened fire on the bushes. I broke cover and ran at the two guards. I pointed my M-16 and shot one guard in the chest at point-blank range. He flew back in a spray of blood. The last remaining guard turned his M-9 (handgun) on me and we stared down each others’ barrels for a minute or so until I shot him high in the belly. He made a whiny sound like he’d just been interrupted and did not appreciate it. I could feel my fellows getting antsy behind me; I told them to go take the house. They burst out from the bushes and ran screaming at the house. They were instantly mown down by several M-240 machine guns. The sound was earsplitting, like steel popcorn in a tin bucket.

The wounded guard staggered, moaning, and I realized that I had shot him in the worst possible place besides maybe the groin. With a preternaturally accurate sense of geometry (and anatomy) I only possess in dreams, I calculated that my bullet had hit his stomach, large intestine, and lodged in his left kidney. No major blood vessels were damaged, so he would not bleed out quickly.

So I dropped my M-16 and approached the soldier with my hands up in an indication of harmlessness. He, wild-eyed like a trapped fox, tried to point his M-9 at me but his hand was shaking violently. I gently took the handgun and shushed him like a mother. He quieted, let out a huge, relieved sigh and said, “My name is Geoff. I’m going to die soon.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I began leading him around the interior perimeter of the fence, (somehow) out of range of the M-240s at the house, toward the driveway, which leads to the backyard. He stopped directly in front of the house. “Hang on,” he panted bashfully, painfully. “I gotta pee.”

Does it have to be now? I thought, eyeing the multiple gun barrels peeking out of the boarded house windows like the black malevolent eyes of night animals. But I didn’t verbally protest, knowing this is probably one of the last acts this dying man would undertake. Nobody should die with a full bladder.

So I disentangled myself from him and held him steady as he unbuckled his ammo belt and unbuttoned his fly. After I asked him if he’s okay to stand on his own, I politely turned away and let him do his business.

Geoff whimpered and grunted like a baby animal behind me and I felt a pang of sympathy so profound I nearly pulled his M-9 from my belt to end his misery. But my sympathy was riven in half by a shriek so otherworldly I almost realized I was dreaming. I turned to see Geoff’s face contorted with horror and pain. His urine stream was a watery red, laced with ribbons of near-black. It wasn’t trickling out steadily like urine does; it was spraying out like water from a showerhead, so forcefully that a cloud of fine spray appeared around the head of Geoff’s penis.

As if to add flavor to my growing alarm, a wind sprang up and blew the blood-laced urine onto me. I was showered with it, soaked with it, drenched with it. I let out a screech of my own and immediately regretted opening my mouth.

I suddenly bolted up the driveway toward the house, still bristling with guns, prepared in the back of my mind to be blown away, and not entirely satisfied by dying covered in a dying man’s bodily fluids.

I burst through the gate separating the back from the front lawn and ran to the hose curled up there by the back door.

My mind at this point underwent a curious halving. One half, temporarily taking control of my body, was obsessed only with getting Geoff’s blood/urine off me. The other half, waiting patiently and quietly in the back, wondered why I wasn’t being shot at and planned how to get in and retake the house in my parents’ name. After all, it was their goddamn house.

I shed my helmet, ammo belt, pack, boots, socks, and tore off my fatigues until I was completely naked. I pointed the hose at my face, had a curious double image of a gun barrel and Geoff’s penis, then the painfully cold water hit me.  I scrubbed madly at my face, my neck, arms, hair, hands, body. The water smelled sweet and earthy and I attempted to inhale it to get the acid tang of blood and urine out of my nose. This of course resulted in a racking spasm of coughs as I realized rather quickly that my lungs would not accept water as a usable source of oxygen. This broke me out of the panic-circle, and I turned off the water. Shivering, panting, sodden and naked (but clean), I stood there and let the halves of my mind swap places. Where were the soldiers? Why hadn’t they shot at me? The back door wasn’t barred. Could I get in?

I began to poke around the back of the house and found a small, newly overturned mound of earth beside the air conditioning unit. I dug like a dog and unearthed a gallon-size Ziploc bag full of magazines. Svelte women in various degrees of undress graced every single cover. I chuckled to myself. “Looks like I found my enemy’s porn stash.”

Suddenly I remembered Geoff. I had left him out in the middle of the front yard, pissing blood and screaming like a nine year old girl! I stood up and, with no regard for the soldiers and guns in the house, scurried out of the back yard and back down the driveway.

Poor Geoff was right where I’d left him, still holding his penis, which by now was just dribbling thick dark blood. He was barely upright; his shoulders and head sagged deeply. I approached him gingerly, eyeing his penis, ready to bolt if it were to start spraying again.

“I’m sorry I ran away,” I said softly, again at a loss for words. I was no good at dealing with dying people.

“’S okay,” he slurred and struggled to lift his head.

I stood there clueless for a moment, then remembered the stack of magazines in my hands.  “Hey, look,” I said to Geoff cheerily, holding out a copy of Playboy. “Titties.”

He managed a small half-smile, his eyes resting on something that was not the magazine. “Yes ma’am.”

            I struggled to follow his gaze, then realized why. He’d been looking at me. I had not reclothed myself after my hose-bath. Mortified and mortified that I’d been mortified by a dying man, I clapped the stack of magazines over my naked breast.

“Uh, I’m… I’m gonna go back up to the house to find clothes… and you some water.”

Without waiting for a reply from Geoff, I skittered back up the driveway.

At this point the dream shifted to a nighttime newly fallen. I remained in my driveway, but the house had reverted to its proper place as my parents’ house and childhood home. The chain link fence separating the front from the back yard was still intact, so I lifted the catch and opened the gate. At its familiar clink-chuk sound, my little sister turned. I smiled and waved; she waved back from her place sitting on the grass just beyond the driveway. I sat down beside her (fully clothed) and followed her eyes to a place cradled in darkness on the far side of our neighbors’ yard.

In waking reality, our neighbors to the left had planted the magnolias; our neighbors to the right had just used the portion of our fence that bordered their yard to start a fence of their own.  In dream reality, the partition between yards was no longer there. Neither was the fence between our neighbors’ and their neighbors’ yards. Ours was the end of a five-house-long strip of fenced backyard.

As I realized what stood in that pocket of darkness, the purpose of this backyard strip became clear. It was a makeshift paddock to contain two horses.

My sister and I watched them move and graze. The adrenaline-soaked anxiety that had laced the first part of my dream (a very distant memory now, like I’d dreamed it and was now awake) was eased by the presence of family and animals, but not entirely abolished. What was left was a diluted sense of unease which is, if you’ve read accounts of my other dreams, the default setting in which I operate.

“It’s so cruel to keep them here like this,” my sister said and sighed.

I agreed.  I wasn’t entirely sure which of our neighbors owned these animals, but nobody ought to be keeping two large beasts of burden in a tiny suburban neighborhood.

“Let’s get them outta here,” my sister said, the weight of conviction in her voice. We stood and gently approached the horses. They were both bay (which in Layman’s terms means their coats were deep brown except for their legs and the tips of their ears, which were black like their manes and tails). One was far larger than the other. The larger one had traces of Shire in its conformation (body shape). The smaller one, with feathered feet like its companion, was cutely ponyish, but not too small to ride. My sister ran her hands over the Shire’s glossy coat and cooed to it with something like reverence. It stood sedately, letting itself be talked to and caressed. The ponyish bay seemed to size me up and deem me worthy. Of what I wasn’t sure, but it allowed me to climb on its back once I’d helped my sister clamber onto the Shire. I leaned over and unlatched the gate and we rode the horses west down our street, away from the main part of town.

I noticed a tiny constant clicking slightly below the clip clop of hoofbeats on asphalt. I turned and saw three mongrel dogs, all the same shade of mutt-brown, all low, quiet and frightened. The clicking was the sound of their claws as they trotted. I smiled warmly down at them, mentally inviting them to stay; we’d find food for them soon.

My sister yelped.

“What?!”

She pointed; I looked. Several men were running toward us, guns leveled.

“Run!” I called to my sister and wheeled my pony around, but my sister had trouble turning the Shire without a bridle, since she was smaller than me and it was bigger than my pony.

A single roaring shot ripped the night-quiet apart. The Shire shied, stepped back, wavered, snorted, and fell. Like a stone monument. Agonizingly slowly. I prayed that since my sister had no stirrups to tangle her feet, she could jump clear of the falling ton-and-a-quarter of horse without being crushed, but instead of jumping, she froze with fear and watched herself fall with her horse.

I vaulted off my pony and began to yell for my sister. I reached the part of her that wasn’t trapped beneath the massive horse just as my wake-up alarm began to chime. Her eyes were closed and a pool of blood began to seep out from behind her head. Then I woke up.

Bits and Pieces

I haven't remembered any full dreams lately, just bits and pieces. 

I dreamed about this guy with spiked hair and he was clean shaven. Later on in the dream, his hair was long and straight but he had what looked like dreadlocks hanging down from his mustache. It sounds pretty gross but in the dream, I thought it looked pretty cool.

***

I was blogging and noticed that I had 9 unmoderated comments.  For some reason, Blogger no longer sent comments to your email so I had to go to the website to read them.  Blogger had changed things around quite a bit and I wasn't familiar with how to navigate through the website.  I clicked on the link I thought would allow me to view and approve the comments but it just took me to another screen with yet another link.  I clicked on that link and it took me to a third page with another link.  I clicked on that and it took me back to the first page.  I kept going through the same three pages repeatedly but I couldn't ever seem to get to the comments moderation page.  I eventually became frustrated and gave up.

***

I think I was volunteering at an old folks home.  I'm not sure what my duties were there specifically but I witnessed this sad event. 

There was an old man and an old woman sitting in chairs across the room from one another.  The old man sat on the edge of his seat leaning forward, and the old woman did too.  The man asked the woman to marry him.  She excitedly said yes and the man got up and walked over to the woman.  They embraced for a moment and may have even shared a kiss.  I don't really remember there being a ring given.  The woman's chair suddenly turned into a small sofa with just enough room for the two of them to sit on.  They sat together holding hands.  Then man put his head on her shoulder.  I thought at first it was a sweet gesture of his affection towards her.  I seemingly got distracted by something and looked away for several minutes.  When I turned back to the senior couple, I realized the man was dead. 

more group trips, and a trompe-l'oeil bird

My brain is back to its old tricks, apparently--I had another group trip dream last night. It was a combination group trip/family reunion. All of the extended family members from my dad's side had met at some location far from where anyone lived. The first part of the dream involved some socializing with older relatives. Then someone tried to do an organized activity, and encouraged us to break up into groups of 3 or 4 (I've never been all that keen on activities involving a structured forming into groups). For some reason, a real-life friend (Curly Sue, as it happens) was also there at the reunion, so we formed a group with two of my younger cousins. In real life, one is my age and one is a few years younger, but in the dream they were teenagers, probably because I haven't seen them for years. We started talking to them, and I was aware that I was feeling happy about being the cool older relative (and simultaneously really annoyed at both the feeling and the awareness of the feeling; my self-analyzer just won't ever leave me alone!).

After that, the group broke up pretty quickly and people started leaving. I guess we had planned to have a "friends" outing after the family reunion, because I was supposed to meet another real-life friend. I did some random wandering around, and then Curly Sue and I met her at a cafe that bore a strange resemblance to a cross between a laundromat and a Chinese restaurant.

This friend recently had a baby in real life, but in the dream she had apparently, in addition to having her real-life baby, had another baby who was still-born. She started talking about how she was looking forward to the second coming (of Christ, that is) because then her baby would "rise first" with a wave of other babies who had been still-born. In real life I'm not quite clear on the various Christian denominations' views on this, but in the dream she held a view that was supposedly the "evangelical view". She said that she and her husband hadn't thought they had any particular religious views, until the birth of the still-born baby, and then, very abruptly, they "saw the light" (she worded it more gracefully than that) and suddenly started subscribing to this mainstream theology. She even had a printout of something referring to the mass resurrection of still-born babies, some sort of liturgical thing printed out on the typical half-page paper with poor copy quality. I think both Curly Sue and I were a bit surprised at this, but she made it clear that she hadn't become a hardcore conservative and was still her old, open-minded self, so we figured it was a good way for her to adjust to and accept the death of the baby.

After that, I went on a hike with the other friend (not Curly Sue), and we ended up on a very steep scaffolding-like section of trail above a boardwalk (almost Coney Island style, but with less people and more nature). There was an odd encounter with a little bird. It was hopping around, and I noticed it looked strange. I realized that the actual bird had been encased in a covering (made from an old sock!) painted to look like a bird. I managed to catch the bird and remove the covering. It was a bit unsettling, but the bird seemed to be happy either way (with or without the trompe-l'oeil covering).

Re-Do

A few weeks ago I had a dream that I woke up barely remembering. There was something about Britney Spears, and my friend Taryn from college, and maybe someone's grandma died. There was definitely a very long pier. Bit and pieces. Barely remembered fragments.

Then last night I started having the same dream again. But this time, there was an instruction - I was supposed to change it, so that someone else couldn't trace it. I tried to make it more complicated, this time some of my cousins were involved, as well as an ex. I had to fake "them" out so that they couldn't find the body. Somehow the same pier was there, but this time there was a tall fence with barb wire.

And we went to the beach. While unpacking the trunk, my grandma told me that I had go get some toys for my cousins. Like maybe some handheld-gaming systems or a laptop or something. I balked - we were at the beach. Besides the fact that they'd get ruined by the sand, I thought they should have to enjoy the beach the way everyone else always had... a book and maybe a boogie board.

I woke up shortly after. I wonder if I did a good enough job of changing things up so that "they" didn't know what was going on. I wonder.

#did inception do this to me?

Demon Cat

My psyche totally made up for the last thoroughly uncharacteristic, but lovely and affirming, dream I posted here by waking me up this morning screaming. In the dream, if was a full-throttled anguished wail, but what actually woke me in real life was my own pitiful whimper.

A couple of my best friends were in town for my wedding (what?!)*, and he brought their daughter and cat to my apartment so that I could watch them for a while; I think his wife was sick. Almost immediately, though, this cat (which in real life is lovely) revealed itself to be an absolute demon. It went behind the TV and there was a theatrical flash of light blue light and a powering-down sound that indicated that the cat had chewed through the TV wires. The same thing happened and the computer went down. As I tried to catch and contain the cat, it chomped down hard on my left wrist and latched on. I tried blowing in its face, swatting it, flinging it off, and prying its jaws open, but it held on, and although I knew it was inflicting a pretty serious injury that would hurt a lot, I also didn't want to hurt the cat.

But then, then! It let go, only to dart into a large cage that had appeared on the floor and contained another couple of best friends' kitties. These kitties were somehow much smaller and more fragile, and the demon cat killed them almost instantly.**

This time I picked up the demon cat and sort of flung it to the floor. Even though it was nothing compared to the shaking that completely failed to loosen it when it had its teeth in my wrist, this time it, of course, suddenly died.

It was the realization that I was directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of basically all of my best friends' cats (though thank goodness my subconscious forgot the toddler in my care and thus allowed her to escape unscathed!), and the fear that David wouldn't love me any more after I'd killed all those animals, that woke me up howling. What an awful dream.

*This getting-married-oh-no! themed dream broke with convention, as the potential groom was my current boyfriend, it was a day or two before the wedding, and before my brain could totally freak out over the idea of getting married, it was interrupted by the antics of a demon cat.

**In real life, one of these kitties really is kind of demonic.

Devil at the Party

This was one of the dreams in which I'm sometimes observing the action, and sometimes a direct participant.

I dreamed I was at a party of some kind, with lots of people just sitting around in a living room or a patio. At first, I was sitting there, enjoying myself, but then I started to realize that a person sitting across from me was actually evil. This person seemed to shift from a man to a woman, so I couldn't say for sure which it was. But she/he was evil.

As I came to realize this, the devil just kept staring at me, and I knew that she/he knew that I'd figured it out. Somehow I feared that it could sort of read my mind.

Then I switched to observing. A younger kid went to the bathroom and figured out that the devil was at the party. He poked his head out of the bathroom and signaled to his mom to come to help him. But he really wanted to tell her about the evil person. She came to the bathroom and decided to give him a bath. But when she turned to get a towel, the boy seized up and just died instantly. She fished him out of the tub, where he'd sunk. She was scared and freaking out, but she knew she had to keep a low profile.

Then I was back in the living room. I knew what had happened in the bathroom, and then it suddenly became clear to me that the dead kid was really my sister. I started trying to signal to a friend that this evil person was in the room. I still suspected, however, that the evil person could read my mind. She/he just kept sitting across from me, wearing a small, ironic smile that was just for me. She/he knew that I was going to try to spread the word, but she/he also knew that I was afraid that more deaths would take place.

morbid curiosity and other things

last night's dream was prompted by some time i spent on facebook prior to going to sleep. through facebook i learned about a friend of friends who passed away on sunday. it appears he has had a rough couple of years emotionally and the death may have been a suicide or an accidental overdose... no one knows yet.

i never knew this man but morbid curiosity took over and i spent a good amount of time piecing together his story through the wonders (?) of social media. i was sad to learn that he left behind two young boys and that led me to dream about holding a sobbing boy in my arms as he mourned the loss of his father. it was a rather gut-wrenching dream. upon waking up i realized that this is the third (at least) dream i have had where i remember comforting a sobbing child.

*****

today i spent the day with the department i work with at a retreat. which means lots of time together in one room. when i came home i immediately fell asleep and had a dream that one of my coworkers was blind. my interaction with him as a blind man was very detailed and i thought it was a rather strange thing to dream.

Movie Roles

The other night I dreamed that I was in another Mel Gibson action movie (the odd part of that sentence is the last five words).

When I'm in the movie, I'm both a part of the plot and aware that it's a movie. This was a kind of home invasion movie in which Mel and I had to sneak into the house of the bad people. I was carrying a seriously big and bad-ass machine gun. It was huge and heavy, and I was worried about being able to use it while moving.

Mel and I started outside, where we loaded up our guns and split up. I entered the house through a bedroom on the first floor. I think this one had a woman in it, about my age, and I shot her with the gun. The bullets from the gun seemed to move in slow motion, even though I was trying to move very fast. I don't remember this scene very well, but I remember that the shooting didn't work, or my gun ran out of bullets, because I ended up having to smash her head over and over with a chair or something.

I proceeded on through the house, wondering what Mel was up to. Of course I was surprised by a young guy with a gun. He started shooting at me, and I could see the bullets moving in slow motion toward me. I couldn't feel anything hitting me, but I wondered if I was injured. I was shooting back at him, and I noticed again how heavy the gun was. I was kind of diving behind furniture and trying to keep shooting at him at the same time.

This guy wouldn' die, though. At one point, he was down and I walked over to him and shot directly down into his head and body and, thinking he was dead, I started to walk away. I looked back over my shoulder and saw him propping up on one elbow, trying to shoot me in the back. I had to run back and shoot him some more. I may have used a chair on him too.

I left the bedroom and started to creep quietly up a metal spiral staircase (just like the one at the back door of my apartment). I wasn't sure where this would lead, but I realized that since it was a movie, Mel was probably taking care of things in the other part of the house. I also thought about whether I was injured, but realized since I was in a movie, the injuries wouldn't last too long even if I was in fact injured.

Civil War Distress

This was part of a larger dream, which I don't remember. At some point, I was in the garage of my mom's old house with my boyfriend, B. We were just hanging around when we heard and saw someone hobble past on a crutch. This person was dressed in rags and was clearly injured very badly, with one foot/ankle wrapped in a very bloody bandage.

Somehow I knew that this was a victim or combatant in the Civil War (i.e. the American Civil War...don't ask me how that got mixed up in my dream), and that this person was a minority of some kind. Not black or white or anything, but more like an ethnic minority of Eastern Europe or something. Anyway, I realized that this guy (it was a young guy) had been gravely injured and was fleeing from combat. He looked just like you'd imagine an Ethiopian refugee might look on TV.

He hobbled past our door and didn't say anything to us, but we could tell he stopped just past the door, because he was making these moaning and whimpering sounds. We didn't know what to do because we could see when he walked by that his whole foot was nearly off, just sort of dangling by the tendon at the heel. You could see daylight through the ankle. And I think he was injured in other ways too.

Eventually he ended up inside the garage, where he started begging us to kill him because he was in so much pain and we couldn't do anything for his injuries. His hair was shaved close and he had huge eyes. He kept asking us to kill him, and crying.

Finally, I went to the garage shelf and got my revolver (??), went over to him and, before I could lose my nerve, I shot him in the head. He died immediately, and I felt kind of relieved for him. But then it occurred to us that it might not be viewed as a mercy killing by anyone else, including the law. We started trying to think of what to do with his body. We were going to bury it in the field, but there was a guy (from my workplace, oddly) out there making dry ice (??) right where we wanted to bury the body.

I was starting to get really upset when I woke up feeling very relieved that I didn't just kill someone.

mafia!

Last night's dream was the scariest in recent memory. Somehow my husband and I had gotten embroiled in the Mafia. I don't know how it happened, but we had been roped into helping them safeguard a huge amount of money. The money was stuffed in one of those bank envelopes* and put into a safe deposit box in a very fancy little bank, and we had the combination.

There were a lot of complicated details involved in the deal, but it was coming to a close and it was time for them to retrieve their money. I had been supposing that our involvement with them would end at the time they took the money away, but it was slowly dawning on me that we were in a very dangerous situation: we knew what they had done, and it wouldn't be wise of them to leave us around on blind trust that we wouldn't spill it to anyone.

The main three or so guys showed up at our house (a second-story apartment) with wives, children and aged relatives in tow. They were all milling around, the guys with gigantic firearms, and it seemed like the big crowd was a show of force. One of the Big Shots gestured to me and said that his wife was now going to give me instructions on how they were going to retrieve the money. She was a nondescript, skinny, washed-out blond with messy shoulder-length hair** and an air of resignation--like she might once have objected to all this mafia stuff but had become hardened over the years and was now not at all likely to help me get out of the almost-inevitable rubbing-out. She gave me a rundown of the procedures and asked me for the combination for the deposit box. I thought desperately, "Hey! I'll give them a made-up code and then we can go get the money for ourselves and run off with it." Then I realized that 1) the minute I had that thought, I simultaneously forgot the actual code; 2) she probably was asking me as a test--they couldn't possibly have been so stupid as to not take note themselves of the code; 3) my "forgetting" the code was going to look really suspicious. I recited a number that sounded familiar, but I said that I wasn't sure I was remembering it right. To try to look cooperative I said, "What happens if it's not right? You'll still be able to get it from the bank, right? Because I'm sorry, I'm really not sure if I'm remembering it right, and I can't find the paper I wrote it on." She just gave me an inscrutable look, which freaked me out even more.

The wife went off somewhere else, and the three or four Main Men lined up in a line in our dining room. They raised their huge machine guns toward the ceiling, and everyone reacted in a way that indicated that this was a traditional mafia way of celebrating the clenching of a deal. They fired several rounds into the ceiling, which I could see really made my husband mad (up until this, he had been somewhat excited about working with the mafia and impressed with their Coolness, which annoyed me because he was being juvenile and foolish; now I could see him mentally calculating the cost of replacing the drywall).

After that the extended family members started leaving. I saw the wife who had given me the instructions, and her hair had changed from messy, youngish and unintimidating to a frosted, stiff helmet. I thought that didn't bode well for our survival and that it was symbolic of a hardening of her attitude [for some reason I was still hoping that she might be the key, maybe convincing her husband to let us go].

The emptier the house got, the more freaked-out I was, because the main mafiosi were still hanging around in the dining room, glowering and posturing with their guns. There were still some scattered relatives around, and I realized that when they were gone the mafiosi were going to rub us out in a hail of gunfire. I briefly thought about trying to hide in the oven, in case the metal walls would be protective, but that was hardly the solution since they were practically in the kitchen [and for numerous other reasons that didn't occur to my dream incarnation; the only other objection I had to the oven idea was that the bullets would make shrapnel of the metal and the shrapnel would kill me if the bullets didn't].

My husband had disappeared into the bathroom just after the ceiling-strafing ceremony, and I went and knocked on the door. It seemed like he was either in the shower or getting ready to take a shower, and he didn't want to let me in. I persevered and opened the door a crack to see him dancing exuberantly and without a care in the world, in a pair of "eurotrash"-y jeans that he had gotten from the mafia guys, apparently having gotten over his anger about the bullet-riddled ceiling. I was really annoyed, and desperate to communicate the urgency of the situation. I said, "They're going to kill us!"***

He was pretty unimpressed. I tried to go very quickly through the whole scenario so he would see that the only logical outcome was that we were going to die if we didn't leave right now. I knew we didn't have much time, but saw that he was determined to keep dancing in the bathroom and then take a shower. I finally said I was going to try to get away, adding "I'm so scared I want to take a gun". I hoped that would finally alert him to the danger, since he knows I hate guns and wouldn't want to carry one unless it was really necessary. He seemed excited that I was taking an interest in weaponry and said, "Oh, in that case take the pistol. That's the best option for you." [Apparently we had a stash of guns in our freezer.]

I woke up around then, completely freaked out and also feeling guilty that I was going to bail out and leave him there to face an almost certain rubbing-out at the hands of the mafia guys.

*How can it have been that much if it fit in that small envelope? I'm disappointed in your reasoning process, subconscious!
**Interesting detail: all of the mafia women had the same shade of washed-out blond hair.
***Actually, I remember it was a mixture of French and English: "Ils vont nous SHOOT!" I think I was thinking they wouldn't understand French--so why did I say "shoot", the most tipping-off word of the sentence, in English?

[Once again, here I am using all the unsavory labels.]

canophagy?!

I can't take credit for this dream, but I found it dramatic and horrible enough to want to document. My husband dreamed that my parents were visiting and we were going to eat one of our dogs (the sweet, well-behaved one)! He had to kill her so she could be eaten, which he did by shooting the back of her head. I asked him if we actually ended up eating her, and he said he didn't know, because after that he had to go off and cry [he said he also wondered afterward, still in the dream, why we hadn't decided to eat the misbehaving dog instead]. What a terrible dream, especially for someone who hardly ever remembers his dreams!

Giant, Icky Spider

This was part of another dream that I've forgotten. My boyfriend and I were sitting on a bed in a bedroom while my sister was sleeping on a different bed. We were talking about something and then I noticed a gigantic spider crawling across the floor. It had black legs and a black head, but its body was bright yellow. The spider was at least as big as my hand, if not slightly bigger.

I immediately pointed it out, but I didn't scream; I wasn't too scared because we were not sitting on the floor and I didn't want to wake my sister. The spider crawled under another bed in the room. There was a tile floor, and we could hear each leg tapping on the floor because it was so big. The spider disappeared behind some boxes under the bed. Then a little, blond mouse skittered around the boxes under the bed. I knew that if it went behind the boxes, the spider would get it.

Sure enough, the mouse went behind the boxes and we heard the most horrible sounds: crunching, squealing (the mouse), scufflings, and finally, silence. I knew that the spider was slowly eating the mouse and I was really disgusted. My sister woke up and I tried to explain what I'd just seen.

this is it

we were driving down the freeway in my parent's van. my father was driving. my brother mason, his buddy, my mother, and i were in the van as well.

we came up to stretch of the freeway that was under construction. we were on an overpass and there was another freeway zig-zagging over top of us. everyone was driving really fast. in the confusion of the freeway construction, my father entered a lane that was not completed. we ended up on the edge of the overpass and on the outside of the barrier columns. basically, the concrete was only as wide as the wheels on the driver's side of the car. the rest of the car was hanging above traffic far down below. there were also columns to the left of us that prevented us from swerving back into a full lane. we were on a ledge.

this all happened very quickly and as soon as all of us became aware of the impossibility of the situation, we became very quiet and held our breath. my father continued to try to balance the van on the small strip of concrete, though we all knew that it wouldn't work for long. i began to take stock of the situation. i told myself that this is it. our lives were going to end. i was thankful that i was dying with family. i felt bad for my brother's buddy and his family who would be left behind to mourn him. i wondered about my brother mark who was not in the van and was thankful that he had a family of his own to carry on with. i told myself that everything was ok. everyone dies. i remembered wishing i didn't have to go now. but i also knew there was nothing i could do about it.

and then there was a break in the columns and my father was able to swerve us back into safety.

woke up.

intense.

Blood on the Street

I don't know if Strovska's recent dreams influenced mine, or if it was the five (!) squad cards my neighbor and I passed as we drove home from school yesterday, but either way my dreams also appear to be extremely suggestible.

I was on my lunch break from some training session, and I decided to go to the bookstore or library on my time off. As I approached an intersection that I now realize was probably a version of the one where my favorite coffee shop is located, the GPS device I was holding, and which was apparently giving me directions, narrated, in an increasingly wavering and eerily prophetic voice, that there was "blood on the street at [street name] and [street name]." It was rather disturbing, especially as it referenced a location close to me.

As I was waiting on the street corner, about to cross to my destination, an emergency vehicle with a bright white light flashing above its windshield came sailing through the intersection, I think with a siren going. As it passed, I saw there was a decal on its back window that looked like one of those "crossing" signs, except the animal in it was what at the time I think I identified as a marmoset. I now think it may have been a marmot.* Anyway, I figured it was the logo of the emergency rescue operation.

I entered the bookstore/library and started browsing the shelves. I noticed that most of the books had very worn spines. Then someone pointed out that someone (one of the professors/trainers from where I had just been) had set aside a book for me--there was a label with my name on it taped to the spine. Apparently it was a gift certificate, specifically so that I could get this book. It was on Vuillard, an artist I don't really know at all but in the dream seemed to like well enough. I took it up to the counter, and they rang it up for me. I had $1.60 left on the gift certificate.

Just before, I had remembered or been reminded (sirens?) of the violence ("blood on the street"), and had looked out the side window. In the alley, I could see a car and a person sort of bent over on the street, with his back sort of torn open and bloody. I told myself that I didn't really want that image in my head, so I looked away quickly.

As I looked out the huge picture windows at the front of the store, I could see that there had been a massive car accident. Five or six cars were strewn along the street, variously crumpled. There were big oily-looking patches of some fluid, from cars or bodies. Emergency personnel appeared to be draping sheets over bodies on the street. I could see that the building just down the block from the one I was in had been damaged, with its front window shattered.

Overall, one of the more disturbing dreams I've had in a while.

*The weird thing is that when I googled marmoset just now to find out what one is, a picture showed up that someone printed out and stuck on our office wall (the one with the two babies clinging to the fingers). I didn't know those were marmosets. I have seen marmots in person.

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.

Sarah Palin

Last night, I dreamed that I woke up in the morning to discover that Sarah Palin was dead. BNB told me this quite matter-of-factly, as though I should have known already. I was so shocked that it was hard to absorb this news, and I kept asking “Are you sure?” It turned out that she was stretched so thin from all this campaigning, overwork, and family concerns that she just died overnight. This morning I had to check the internet news, just to make sure it was a dream.

doggie nightmare

I had a terrible, terrible dream the other night (morning?) just before waking up. I dreamed that my husband and I were on a trip and were going to stay one night in an avant-garde hotel. We were shown our room, and walked in to look at it. It turned out to consist of an empty carpeted expanse that slanted toward a one- or two-story dropoff into a lobby below. No railing or anything. Above this expanse was a white loft for sleeping (no furniture anywhere, although that didn't strike me as strange at the time). We had our dog with us, and while we humans were up on the sleeping balcony the dog lost her coordination, started slipping toward the edge, and fell over it.

It was awful! Of course she was dead, and I was crying hysterically (suddenly my mother was there for some reason, and also crying hysterically). To add insult to injury the snooty young staff members started talking about how "no one would be stupid enough to have a dog with them here".

I sometimes have dreams like this where I'm sobbing hysterically and I'm always curious as to whether I'm actually sobbing/hiccuping. I half woke up as I was crying in the dream and noticed that I was just breathing normally, although it was strange to be awake while still doing deep "sleep breathing".