The pregnant lady

In my dream, I am pregnant. I’m not exactly sure how far along I am, but I know that my belly gets in the way of things like steering wheels, tables, other people, and being close to anything.

            Because of this, the outdoor café table at which I sit is far enough away that I have to look up from the book I’m reading to reach for my cup of tea. I notice a man in a suit in the ironwrought chair across from me. His appearance does not stir any emotional response in me at first except for a mild surprise. I immediately understand why.

            This man is the devil.

            He sits straight-backed and still in the chair, one leg cocked and resting on the other. His hair is sleek, slicked, curly and dark. His skin is pale but not noticeably so; the crisp cream-colored suit he wears compliments his strong, sturdy frame nicely.

            The only inhumanity that betrays him is his eyes: they are bright bluewhite, as if his brain were an electrical plant gone AWOL. His face is no face and every face; handsome but indistinguishable. He does not blink. He does not smile.

            I don’t either.

            “Hi,” I say, closing my book.

            “Hi,” he says in a rich, silky purr.

            I know this man well. We’re past small talk.

            He reaches out an unblemished hand and picks up my teacup. He moves with a fluid, unbroken grace that only exists for him. He sips, never taking his wild, lurid eyes off mine.

            Later, as we talk, I realize that there is steam rising from my cup where there wasn’t before. Every so often I check. The tea never cools. I don’t touch the cup again.

            “Your child will have a good singing voice,” he says in his own sweet baritone that nearly drove me out of my mind with need for him. “Your child will have good eyesight and gentle hands. It will grow wise and compassionate. It will love easily and be loved by nearly everyone close to it.”

            “Nearly everyone?” I ask, the answer dangling just out of reach on the hinge of my mind.

            He nods once, slowly. For the first time since he sat down, his eyes stray from me. I look at him now in profile.  As he speaks, I watch with interest the words riding out of his mouth on a heat shimmer so intense it blurs the color of the space behind him into a watery grey.

            “Your child has nothing to prove to you. But you won’t remember that.”

            I cock my head. I am not angry or defensive or even confused. I am curious.

            The baby kicks me high in the ribs once.

            “I would never ask it to prove anything to me. Unless I were teaching it how to argue.”

            The devil sighs. Twin blasts of heat billow out from his flared nostrils. The air distorted by the heat is mesmerizing. There is no breeze in the cool spring morning, but I catch a whiff of burning leaves.

            He returns his face to me, etched in lines of sadness. Those lines look foreign, alien, on the plain white clay of his skin. His eyes spark with something that is not sadness. It is not greed or rage or lust or envy or hunger or pride. It is not human; it is not emotion. All I know is what it is not. His eyes spark and glitter, and the not-knowing is the water that urges the feeling of unease into full, queasy bloom. It is never outright fear, not around him.

            “What do you gain from having this child?” He asks.

            “The knowledge of another part of myself,” I reply.

            The baby kicks me again, this time low.

            The devil stands up, not even a whisper of silk on silk accompanying his movement. It is then that I notice a song playing softly through the speakers on the café’s eaves:

                        Time it took us

                        To where the water was

                        That’s what the water gave me

                        And time goes quicker

                        Between the two of us

                        Oh, my love, don’t forsake me

                        Take what the water gave me

This song would be playing throughout the rest of the dream.

            The devil rests a hand on my shoulder. My eyes trail up the length of his arm. The suit fits him so well there is barely a fold or a ridge. He’s got his eyes on me, those cold-burning blue eyes, those eyes that have seen the firstborn chaos of the universe, those eyes made of entropy. They uncouple me from the hook of reality.

            When I surface from the moorless depths of disassociation, I am sitting at the edge of a large lake at dusk. I breathe in the dimness, but my lungs cannot expand.

            Partially because the darkness is thick and sticky and it coats my lungs like tar. Partially because the baby has grown so big that it presses against my diaphragm. I cough, but it does no good.

            Darkness drops fully like water from a bucket and I look for the source of my unease.  To calm myself, I begin humming under my breath.

                        Lay me down

                        Let the only sound be the overflow

                        Pockets full of stones

                        Lay me down

                        Let the only sound be the overflow

It’s a struggle to stand. I keep stepping on the gauzy, flowing dress I find myself in. It feels wonderful against my skin, but it’s little comfort. With the smell of rotting lake all around me and cold mud sucking at my knees and feet, I am immobilized by the mire in my mind.

            The moon is broken and sickly, gives off a drunken yellow light that does not illuminate but confuses. I grab at something near me upon which the light sizzles like sluggish oil. It’s an oar.  I pry myself out of the swamp by clawing up its length. My legs are rubbery and uncooperative, so I stand swaying for a moment, resting a hand on my belly and feeling the mud squelch up between my bare toes.

            I can’t catch my breath. But years of dealing with asthma have taught me not to panic and gasp, so I don’t.

            In, out, in, out, in, out.

            There are soft voices behind me. Familiar familial voices.

            Oh no.

            The thought sparks in my head and lights a flame of fear. I know what this means. When I dream of water, I dream of drowning.

            There is a log cabin set several dozen feet back from the lake. Lights burn fitfully in the windows, casting shadows that leap like rabid things over the walls. The voices inside are risen in song. I open the screen door and the flickering candlelight flays me. I cringe and squint and am assaulted by life, foaming at the mouth. My family, extended, adopted, all, is crammed into the cabin. They are exuberant, they are wild, they are loud and completely unlike themselves. They dance as if there is nothing left for them in the world. There is gravity here, and it grabs at my chest, wanting me.

            “Hey!” I scream into the light, the heat, the rush, the motion, the oppressing life. “The water is rising! You have to get out! Get out! Get out!”

            I lean as far in as my arms will let me, my hands holding onto the outside edge of the doorframe for dear life. For a moment, the terror of getting lost in the press of bodies overwhelms the sick, sinking knowledge of the water behind me.

            Nobody hears me. Suddenly, my feet are cold. I jump and look down. Water, ankle deep. Moonlight slathers itself on the little lapping ripples like rancid butter. Still gripping the doorframe with both hands, I twist my neck as far as it will go. The grass is gone. The gravel path from the lake to the house is gone. The creeping fingers of the lake have taken it all. The darkness, I realize then, did not grow down from the sky. It grew up from the water like vines and infected the world. The smell of decay, of murky, evil water, gets thicker. I feel it trickling into the hollow spaces in me, filling me, making me feel heavy and awkward.

            I hear singing in my head:

 They took your loved ones
But returned them in exchange for you
But would you have it any other way?
Would you have it any other way?
You couldn't have it any other way

I rend myself from the doorframe of the cabin and shut the door against the painful light inside, against the rising liquid darkness outside. I pray that my family is safe from the water inside the cabin. I hope that the energy they create will be enough to fight the water back. I cannot help them now.

            The water is knee-deep. My dress is no longer gauzy and light but floppy and sloppy. I slog back toward where the bank of the lake used to be. My leg bumps something. I reach down into the freezing black, curving my back so that my chest doesn’t touch the surface, and pull up the oar I used to help me stand. The water drips off the oar onto my arm and it’s not water but a condensation, a concentration, of the darkness. It leaves oily trails on my arm.

            There is a small wooden canoe to match the oar, but it’s way out on the lake. Yards away. To reach it, I’d have to swim.

            I lay my hand on my belly. The baby has been quiet for a long time. I worry for it. Will my heat be enough to keep it alive in the impossible cold of the water? Will the weight of it, plus the weight of the darkness in my lungs and the weight of the dress drag me to the bottom?

                                   

Lay me down
Let the only sound be the overflow
Pockets full of stones
Lay me down
Let the only sound be the overflow

The water reaches lustfully for my hips. As I wade toward the canoe, I keep an ear trained back toward the cabin. The terrible cold rips the breath from my lungs. It swallows my belly. The baby does not kick. The water licks my neck. I fight the air for breath.

            In, out, in, out, in, out.

            Kick.

            I kick.

            I’ve lost the bottom; I float now, kicking to keep my head above the grabby little waves. Soon, my legs disappear into the numbing black. So I wave my arms and, despite what I’d feared the most, I reach the canoe. The devil is sitting in it. I know it’s him because his eyes slice through the darkness like knives made of electricity. They seem to scream at me. He sings:

Oh, poor Atlas
The world’s a beast of a burden
You’ve been holding on a long time
And all this longing
And the ships are left to rust
That’s what the water gave us

            I know better than to reach out a hand to him. I cling to the side of the canoe. I am past cold, past shivering, and I know that if I don’t get out of the water, both the baby and I will die.

            “You remind me of Ophelia in that dress,” the devil says. “Or the Lady of Shalott.”

            “The Lady of Shalott didn’t drown,” I say.

            “I’ll write your name round about the prow,” says the devil. “Then you can sing me your last song.”

            With some untouchable force that is brother to the darkness, the devil pries my frozen hands from the edge of the canoe. I swallow my panic, force it down into my gut to warm me, give me buoyancy, buy me time.

            The sick yellow-grey moonlight wanes. Only the high edges of things are lit, and even then they aren’t lit but painted with light. It drips from the tops of the trees and falls thickly onto the devil’s shoulders and head. He chuckles deeply as he carves my name into the inside of the canoe. That chuckle finishes what the water started; it crawls into my ears and piles up at the base of my brain, sinking me.

            I sing with the last breath I have:

She’s a cruel mistress
And a bargain must be made
But oh, my love, don’t forget me
I let the water take me

It’s peaceful in the deep.

The arms of the water are no longer crushing. They welcome now; they curl around me protectively as I curl around my belly. The fingers of the water no longer grope and want; they soothe me and smooth my hair and my dress.

            I rest in the black sanctuary. Now that I don’t have the sound of the devil or the cabin in my ears, I can hear the singing:

Lay me down
Let the only sound be the overflow
Pockets full of stones
Lay me down
Let the only sound be the overflow

            It seems to take hours to lift my head far enough to look up at the surface. The last bit of moonlight is fractured by the waves and sluggish fragments float down at me.  They never reach me because I’m sinking.

            I look forward to reaching the bottom. I’ll finally have somewhere still and quiet to rest my head.  

Is this what it feels like to give up? I ask myself.

            The baby kicks once, hard.

(Song: What The Water Gave Me by Florence + The Machine

Bits and Pieces

These are brief and vague but it's alls I've remembered lately.

i had worked really hard at putting together some kind of party, putting in lots of time and money to get it ready.  after sending out lots and lots of invitations and doing my best to get the word out about it, not a single person showed up.  i sat around the empty room looking around at all the decorations for a long time, feeling sorry for myself that no one was bothered to come.  i woke up feeling much the same way.

********

i was outside with a group of people at a park or something.  i don't know if i knew who they were or if they were just random dream people.  it seems like we were attending some kind of art faire, although i didn't really see any art or vendors anywhere.  it was really hot out and i was thinking that i should've brought a hat because i tend to get really vicious headaches from the sun (IRL and in the dream apparently).  i also remember being really thirsty but didn't seem to have any money to buy a drink.

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).

scary rednecks

I may be having another run of unpleasant dreams, because I had one last night that was really scary, although it probably won't sound scary. Trust me, it was terrifying.

I was out somewhere in the country with some members of my family. I don't remember exactly who was there other than my mother, but I think my sister, grandmother, and some other random people were with us (yeah, I guess it counts as a group trip). I was walking by myself down a very narrow, deserted country road. It was very pretty, running between wide fields on one side and a hillside on the other, and I was completely relaxed (I think I was even picking wildflowers).

I wasn't expecting a car to come along, so when one did I was completely taken off guard. I didn't even see it until it was level with me, and the road was so narrow that it brushed me as it went past (very slowly). I wasn't too alarmed until I noticed that not only had they slowed way down when they passed me, but they were coming to a complete stop. The driver and passenger got out, and I saw that they were a couple. Normally this would reassure me, but they were horrifying, very Menacing-Redneck-from-a-horror-movie*. The man was tall and skinny with stringy blond hair and a trucker cap, and the woman was one of those skinny, withered long-term smokers/drinkers/druggers of indeterminate age. They were both very weathered, but the woman was a bit more horrifying, with big, buggy, glassy gray eyes.

I couldn't figure out why they were after me or what they intended to do with me, but they were clearly on the hunt. They chased me around the car several times, although how they didn't catch me I don't know, since I was doing that extreme slow-motion heavy-limb running that always happens in scary dreams.

I don't remember how I managed to elude them, but the next thing I can remember is being in a car with my various family members and still being terrified and traumatized. They didn't really take it seriously, since they hadn't been there to face the redneck specters. One interesting detail of this car ride is that I was in the passenger's seat, but my mother, who had previously been driving, was in the back seat. She said, "oh, it's no big deal, just steer from the passenger's seat"**. I wondered how I was supposed to deal with braking and shifting from the passenger's seat, but I think the car just rolled to a stop without any problems.

The next thing I remember is arriving at a house, still with assorted family members in tow. We were all hungry and needed to eat, but for some reason a restaurant wasn't a consideration. We had uncooked food, so we just entered a house (inhabited) and I went straight to the kitchen and started heating water***. Some of my party voiced misgivings with this, but I waved it off like taking over someone's kitchen without permission was a perfectly acceptable thing to do. I think I was still under the impression that my trauma with the rednecks gave me carte blanche to do whatever necessary for survival.


*It probably sounds from these dreams like I watch a lot of horror movies; I don't, but the ones I have tend to stick around in my subconscious. And at least 75% of them seem to feature Scary Rednecks.
**I've had this dream before, realizing that I'm in the passenger's seat of a moving vehicle with no one in the driver's seat. It's pretty obvious what that means, although I don't like the sounds of it. But frankly, I'm not sure I want to dig too deep into this new twist (my mother vacating the driver's seat). Seems a bit too Freudian for comfort.
***Wait a minute, I've dreamed this before too, except that my parents were the ones advocating breaking and entering, and I was the voice of reason.

so random

Last night's series of dreams wasn't very interesting as far as the storylines go, but there were some funny details.

******************************************

I was somewhere with my parents, sister, and grandmother. We had been on some kind of outing and were getting ready to leave. We were in a weird, railroad-tunnel type structure (wood, with an elevated table-/rail-like structure running down the middle, with a small space to either side of it). We had almost gotten to the exit of it when a large javelina appeared in front of me. Either she (it was a she) knocked me over or I had already been sitting down on the middle structure--either way, she was looming over me. I was quite alarmed, having heard that javelinas could do a lot of damage. My dad indicated to me that it was my family responsibility to restrain the javelina while they got away, and then I would be able to extract myself (he wasn't throwing me under the bus, exactly; it seemed like the most sensible approach since I was last in line). So a tussle with the javelina ensued, with her eventually down in the little space beside the rails and me trying to immobilize her with my feet. The funny part was that she was speaking the whole time, although I can't remember what she was saying. I was struck by her rich vocabulary, though, and her excellent command of language (really, it was impressive, especially for a javelina).

**********************************************

I was on a _______ (that's right, Alert Reader--group trip!). I was riding in a car and we were caravanning with another car. I don't really remember who else was there; probably a combination of past acquaintances and dream people. We drove up a very steep, winding road in some wooded hills/mountains and stopped at the apartment of a group member for a bathroom break. I went into the bathroom and started out with some freshening-up. I guess I was taking a while, because another group member came in (a girl I knew in the rather distant past) and started messing with the toilet. It was then that I noticed it wasn't an ordinary toilet. To begin with, because of the remote, hilly location it was some kind of special self-contained system, some sort of chemical toilet (she told me it was quite expensive). Also, it was "wheelchair-friendly", which meant that it had a rather complicated fold-out system that produced a ramp up to the toilet itself. She had helpfully decided to start converting the toilet back into the non-wheelchair version to speed things up for me. It was a rather cumbersome process, and--grossness alert--the fold-out portion had been covered with toilet paper lain flat that was soaked with urine [at least no excrement, but still, yuck!].

***************************************************

I was on my way home from work and debating whether or not to go to a party I'd been invited to. I was very tired and had pretty much decided not to go. I stopped at a little health-food-y juice place/cafe on the way home (not a real-life place), and ordered some kind of snack. They had already started to ring me up when I decided to get a coffee too and try to go to the party after all (which I ended up clutching, un-drunk, for a good part of the dream before finally drinking it and rather shamefacedly just leaving the empty cup somewhere).The party was at a house in the country, given by a girl* I had gone to elementary and high school with. I went into a bedroom and found about 4 girls dressed up in bizarre, makeshift costumes (including something vaguely Mongolian, over jeans and tennis shoes). That made me think it was a costume party, but then I found that it was only the host's sister and a few of her friends, and the real party was outside.

On going outside I found a rather overwhelming scene. There were several folding tables with handwritten game rules on large pieces of paper (lots of cross-outs and corrections), and a huge crowd of people participating in some arcane game that I couldn't begin to grasp. It involved forming a large circle (like duck-duck-goose) and moving around it. Some people landed on spots with big, elaborate, ugly porcelain figurines of fantastical animals that were the prizes--they seemed very excited about them and lifted them up in the air. I gave up on figuring out the game and just people-watched. The most interesting thing there was a greyhound in a pastel crocheted jacket--she was very sweet.

*************************************

The last tidbit featured Picasso as a washed-up artist looking to re-launch his career. Apparently he hadn't actually died, just stopped producing. He was showing a few recent "works" which seemed to fall far short of his previous output (including some typed pages--?). I wasn't quite sure what to tell him, but he seemed very excited about re-branding himself in a new, more corporate environment.

**************************************


*An interesting detail here was that the girl and her sister were (surely still are) very pretty in real life, and my parents were excessively fond (to my mind) of pointing out how pretty they were. In this dream, they both had rather bad skin. This makes me a bit ashamed of my subconscious for being schadenfreude-y, especially since I liked them in real life and we were friends, despite my parents' harping on their looks.

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!

creepy and out of character

I haven't been remembering a lot of my dreams lately, but I had a very unsettling one the other night. I was sitting around with my mom and grandma, and my mother had some old photos out. She started getting very agitated and talking about how my grandmother had tried to drown her when she was little. She had some photos of herself as a toddler and some other kids, playing in an irrigation canal*. At first glance they looked like cute old pictures of little kids having fun, but then she pointed to one that showed her lying face down in the water.

I had thought that she was just being ravingly paranoid, but the photo was pretty creepy. Even creepier was my grandma's reaction. She just sat there looking cold and scheming while my mom freaked out. [At this point I should interject that in real life my grandma is the nicest person in the world. She is almost 90, though, and in real life she has quite a bit of memory loss--but still an extremely nice, pleasant person. I've a few of these very disturbing dreams, though, where her real-life memory loss morphs into something weird and scary and she becomes a rather creepy figure. Which of course is disturbing in itself during the dream; and the fact that I'm even dreaming it is disturbing and a bit guilt-inducing.]


*I think she's mentioned playing in irrigation canals in her real-life childhood, but definitely no mention of near-drowning incidents.

very weird miscellany

It seemed like I woke up every 20 minutes or so last night thinking, "that was so weird. I have to remember that." Of course I forgot most of it, but I think the few I do remember are representative of the rest in weirdness.

• My husband was going to do some interplanetary travel. I'm not sure if I was going too, but at any rate I wasn't concerned or worried, just excited for him and the other two people who would be traveling in his little "pod". It was a very rudimentary metal construction divided into three stall-like compartments, almost like a flat-topped horse trailer, minus the wheels. Each stall had a round porthole-like window that the traveler could look out while en route. He and the other two travelers were getting inside the pod to accustom themselves, but not yet leaving. Oddly, I don't think there was even any glass on the windows. Apparently there had been such great advances in space travel that things like pressure and oxygen were no longer a concern.

• I was staying in a largeish cabin with my parents and sister in the woods somewhere, on a family vacation. I'm not sure who else might have been there, but I had the impression of more people there than just my nuclear family. At one point when we were all sitting around in the living room, I began to talk to the cat. It was a large, mottled gray cat with a slightly cartoonish air. I asked it some question of little consequence, and it answered me immediately as if to have a spoken interspecies conversation was completely normal. I looked around at my human companions and said, "See, that's why I like cats so much. They're so much more intelligent than dogs."*

• [Same setting, cabin in the woods, raised up on a very high foundation/stilts; on the front porch this time.] I was just loafing on the front porch when a redneck-ish man with a junior-high-age redneck-ish son sauntered onto the porch. I wasn't at all alarmed, because it felt like they had some business being there. I just kept reading my book, until I started to feel like the son was infringing a bit on my personal space by staring at me (the father was completely absorbed in the view of the woods and not paying any attention at all). The son said, a propos of nothing, "I'm kweeping!" which in this alternate dream universe meant, I knew, that he was *ahem* very excited**. I was pretty offended by his forward declaration and also didn't want to encourage his attentions, so I went back in the house without really saying anything. On one hand I didn't want to hurt his tender young feelings, but really! A few minutes later a [very corny] rejoinder came to me: "You're kweeping me out! I'm mawwied." [Get it? Think "mawwiage" from The Princess Bride.] I don't know where my brain comes up with these things, and I find it even more alarming that in the dream I considered it a brilliant example of l'esprit de l'escalier.

• Then there was a very brief vignette, maybe a movie, in which a bimbo-ish blonde woman was threatening a used-car-salesmanly man*** with a ludicrously tiny gun, cocking it and holding it to his head. It was some kind of revenge thing for his ostensible past mistreatment of her, and I never did see what actually happened. I had the impression that she was all just hot air (and whether such a tiny gun could do any damage was another legitimate question).
  

*This coming from a person who in real life very much likes both cats and dogs.
**What can possibly be with this recurring theme of inappropriately young boys expressing interest in me?
***Although I know that there are many exceptions to this, my stock impression (based on extensive experience being dragged to car dealerships) is a stout man with a greasy, bloated face and moist, meaty hands with one or two large rings jammed on to his fat fingers.

Babies on the Brain

I don't remember much of my dream, but at least I'm remembering fragments again.

Last night I had a dream where my mom get pregnant. I was my age, my sister was her current age, and my mom was her age, and very very very excited to be pregnant. I didn't think for one minute that it was odd or unusual for her to be with child, I was just really happy to have another sibling.

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.

Snippets

This morning I have a nasty cold--curse distance-run-induced immune-drop, coupled with sleeping only on planes/in airports the next day! Anyway, I ended up sleeping about 11 hours last night, and here are a few of the fragments of dreams I remember:

• I was at the beach with my nuclear family. I had a bunch of stuff on the sand by the shore, including a rolling suitcase, and as the tide came in, my stuff started to get wet. My sister and I went to clean up and change our clothes. There was a little shower up from the water; I remember thinking of it as a "freshwater" shower. We walked down a long hallway to the bathroom, where I waited for her while she got ready.
• At some point, my brother came back down the long hallway, with a new haircut. It was pretty strange--kind of like what you might get if you crossed maybe 90s-era Elton John with Edward the Vampire--but I thought it was cute. I asked who had done it, and he said "Guess." I realized that my sister must have cut it for him in the bathroom. He wasn't exactly thrilled with it, but it had a lot of product in it, so I encouraged him that it would all work out and be attractive.
• I went to my friends' house, and when I got there she was trying to get the baby (much smaller than she is in real life) to sleep. She motioned for me to be quiet and said that she needed me to help, and that I should sit down on the couch. I did, and she put the nearly-sleeping baby into my arms, where she did fall asleep.
• I was online, looking at some sort of strange uber-Facebook/Myspace/iGoogle/blog/chat thing. I was surfing through people's very elaborate, visually overstimulating pages, and realized that my ex-boyfriend was online, too. I could tell this by posts he'd made in the past few minutes, or by the stat counter on my blog, or by comments he'd left on other people's walls. I was online, too, so he could see that. I was thinking about how I maybe felt ready to talk to him again, though I wasn't sure I wanted to take the initiative. I just wanted him to contact me. Then I heard him say, over some strange voice-chat thing, my name, and something to the effect that he knew I was online. I woke up before I had fully decided whether or not I wanted to talk to him.
  

packing and work stress

Right before I woke up I dreamed that I was on a trip with my husband and sister (maybe some other family members, but if so, not many). We were nearing the end of the trip and had to get our stuff packed up to go back home. We were in some kind of corporate conference-room-like place (middlebrow, not high-end) attached to a huge supermarket that was in turn in a mall. I guess we had been sleeping there, although there weren't any beds to be seen. My clothes had multiplied, and I had bought some things on the trip; there was no way I was going to get everything back in the suitcase, and I was stressed about it.

To further stress me, someone from my actual job came up and started telling me about the things she wanted me to buy at the supermarket. They were not necessary things at all, just things she happened to want, and I was irritated that she was asking for this when I was clearly busy (well, I was somewhat irritated that she was asking at all). I said, a bit too forcefully, "Yeah, yeah, yeah! I'll get it!" Then, alarmed by having shown my irritation so obviously, I tried to backpedal by adding, "I'm going to get one of those magnetic pads to put on the refrigerator too, so you guys can write down what you want on there."

Ugh.