Showing posts with label excrement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label excrement. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

in which my subconscious wins the Gross and Creepy prize

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Thursday, March 25, 2010

extremely gross (Warning: Excrement Ahead)

Due to some snooze-button-pushing this morning I had a lot of weird dreams, although I can hardly remember most of them now. The part I do remember is exceedingly gross. You've been warned.

I probably don't need to specify it by now, but the context was a group trip. I had arrived at some intermediate destination and was just hanging around and waiting until it was time to move on. The setting was a sort of complex of makeshift buildings that had sprung up around a train station in a rural setting (the next leg of the trip was going to be by train).

I had one of my dogs with me (the well-behaved, sweet pit bull, not the giant unruly doberman). She had just been wandering around the place while I was waiting, and I hadn't been supervising her all that closely. Apparently she had "done her business" and a guy working there was looking at the results. He called me over while he was stirring around in it (with some kind of utensil), and pointed out to me that there was a smallish white worm sticking out the end of one of the *ahem* pieces. He was concerned about possible health issues that this might indicate, and somewhat chiding in his manner that I should have let me dog be infected with parasites. He abandoned his utensil and started to dig through the mess much more energetically, picking the whole thing apart with his fingers and separating out the (numerous) little worms. To make things even more grotesque, his very vigorous separating action was spraying out bits of both excrement and worms in a 10-foot radius.

I was horrified, both at the presence of the worms and the fact that I and all my possessions were now covered with a light speckling of dog excrement. I was much more calm about it than I would have been in real life, though, exhibiting a positively zen detachment. I guess that was in part because concern for my dog's health (she seemed perfectly fine, by the way) override regard for my personal hygiene, and in part because I knew that I didn't have time to clean up before the train was supposed to leave.

Having accomplished the highly unrealistic feat of rising above and ignoring my dog-doo-spattered state, once the train had started moving I went into the bathroom and set about trying to clean myself up a little. A curious detail is that normally in dreams where I'm doing personal hygiene/appearance work I'm stressed out about it because I'm starting from a point of needing to do a lot of remedial work on various skin problems (flakes, blemishes, you name it; my dream skin is almost invariably pretty bad). In this dream, though, I didn't have any problems other than excrement. Even in the dream I realized that this was an unusual and positive twist on the usual pattern.

Friday, March 12, 2010

Hugely Embarrasing

ATTENTION: this dream contains several gross-out moments. I even considered not blogging this one, but we must be honest.

I dreamed that I was reporting to work at Whole Foods (no, I don't actually work there, but I've considered it). I needed to use the bathroom really badly, so I figured I'd go before my shift started. When I got to the bathroom, however, I discovered that it was more like a department store's dressing rooms, i.e. no toilets.

I really had to go at this point, so I figured (gross out moment #1) why not just go on the floor? I'll clean up afterward. Accordingly, I leaned against the wall in a corner and, um, went. This wasn't (gross out moment #2) just going "number one" either, if you get my drift.

So, now I had to clean up my mess. I found some paper towels and started to clean up, but I was keeping an eye on the clock, which was inching closer to 3 p.m., the time I was supposed to start work. At this point, the whole thing just got out of hand.

Every time I tried to initiate a part of the cleanup process, the mess spread to something else. I continued trying to clean up the floor with paper towels, but somehow, I managed to forget that I'd laid my keys and wallet on the floor nearby, and in my cleaning efforts, I'd managed to get the mess onto them. Then, in the course of cleaning other things, I forgot about the keys and put them into my pocket, which was gross.

At one point, I even managed to contaminate an enormous pile of fruits and vegetables: kale, bananas, carrots, apples, onions. I started trying to wash each one, but realized the futility of this effort. I ended up piling them into one of those coffin-sized rolling beer coolers to take care of later. The mess was all-encompassing and seemed to be expanding: all over the floor, the walls, and my hands, the pile of produce.

By this point, after piling the produce into the cooler, I realized that it was 3:08, which meant that I was late to work, but I still had to wash my hands.

I was so exhausted from worry and frantic (and futile) cleaning that I think I woke myself up at this point.

Monday, February 22, 2010

contradictory messages from my subconscious

I had a weird variation on the choosing-clothes dream last night. I dreamed that I was in a church boarding school environment* and there was going to be one of those "banquets" that happens every so often at schools that don't condone dancing and thus can't have a school dance. I was more or less my actual age, so I'm not sure what I was doing at the school--I think everyone else was more or less my actual age too, so logistically that was weird.

The really weird part, though, was that I actually had an appropriate outfit picked out, it fit fine, and I was completely relaxed and even kind of looking forward to the event, if for nothing else because I really liked the outfit. It was a floor-length, vaguely 70s dress--maybe strapless--with interesting construction. The cloth was very thin black silk with large, bright-colored slightly abstract watercolor flowers (mostly various shades of red and orange, with some gold and green). There were several layers of fabric, with slightly ruffly pieces sticking out here and there, and it fit me really well. I'm not sure what shoes I was going to wear (I remember rejecting a pair of red eelskin boots I actually own as being too wintry), but the shoes went great with the dress, and I was going to carry a red eelskin clutch (also an item that I actually own).

I was feeling pretty satisfied and slightly surprised that my outfit had come together, when I heard that the event had been postponed because of a tragedy that had befallen a girl's family (someone I actually went to school with). A building that the family ran a business in had burned down recently, and now their house had burned down too, so the banquet was being postponed as a gesture of respect for their loss.

The next I can remember, I was driving a big truck, very much like a huge SUV we actually used to have**. I needed to park it at some business, and on arriving I was a little dismayed at the lack of sufficiently capacious parking. I drove around to the back and found that there were more empty spaces back there. I aimed for a space marked "SUV" that was wider than the others, but instead found myself headed into one marked "small car". I thought, "well, maybe I can at least center it in here since the spaces on both sides are empty. I started to brake, and was alarmed to find that although it was slowing down it was definitely not stopping; in fact, it kept going and I eased right off the edge of the lot and landed (rather gently) on a lower parking area. To add insult to injry, while this lack of braking control was going on, I was also experiencing a lack of bowel control!

I can't believe my subconscious is this sadistic; first it teases me with an "I'm-in-control-and-not-having-a-wardrobe-crisis" plotline, then it throws an out-of-control car AND bowels at me.


*What's with these constant school-flashback dreams?
**This SUV has figured in my dreams at least once before, in a similar role--I'm having a hard time driving it/stopping it.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

doggy diarrhea and edward gorey

** Warning: this dream contains graphic excrement and may not be appropriate for all readers. **

This was a variation on a theme I've dreamed before. I was living with my parents, sister, and grandmother (I don't remember any spouses for my sister and me, but it's possible they were there too). Somehow I had gotten myself into a position where I was doing 99% of the housework without realizing it--cooking, meal cleanup, laundry, cleaning, everything. All of the family members were sitting around the living room reading* and I was wandering around trying figure out what to do next and wishing I had time to do some project for myself, or my own reading. The dog was laying on the couch, and I realized that something wasn't quite right with her backside. On closer inspection, I saw that she was smeared with the remains of diarrhea. At first I thought none of it had gotten on the couch, and I was panicking about how to try to get her off the couch without dirtying it. I started freaking out and yelling incoherently about dog doo and having to move her, and that they needed to help me, but everyone just glanced up vaguely and went right back to their reading. Then I saw that there was a big plop of excrement that had landed in between the two couch sections, and that really set me off. I started yelling and hyperventilating, which got the dog all riled up so that she spread little bits of yellowish pea-soup-resembling doo all over everything.

Of course that got me even more agitated, and I yelled and yelled and yelled about how I was doing ALL the work for everyone, even washing their dirty laundry, and did they really think that was fair, and how had this happened, and why wouldn't anyone help me with anything, and how could they live with themselves, and why didn't they notice that dog excrement, and why did they think it was okay that *I* was going to have to be the one to clean up all the little bits smeared all around.

They just looked at me with mild surprise and concern, made a few lame excuses for not helping, and a couple of them just left the room to get away from my yelling, implying that the problem was that I was unhinged.

Then my alarm went off, and in my hazy, feeble attempts to stop hyperventilating and wake up, my brain abruptly started making up Edward Gorey-esque doggerel: "J is for Jacob, who exhibited pluck; I is for Ivan, who ran out of luck."



*My family's default setting in real life.