weird combination

In all this time I haven't posted, of course I've had a lot of dreams. Last night's were particularly impressive, though. First, I had a terrible dream about my husband getting shot in the head. We were somewhere with a group of very young people (I don't know if we were as young in the dream, or just out of place). We were hanging around in a semi-derelict house, and one of the guys had a gun. He started messing around with it, shooting out the door at something outside. In theory it wasn't supposed to be dangerous because he was just shooting at a target, but somehow he accidentally shot my husband in the back of the head.

I don't need to go on about how awful that was, because it's self-evident. He was still alive, though, so the awfulness just escalated. The kids freaked out and didn't want to take responsibility (didn't even want to call 911). Of course I immediately started to try to stanch the blood (of which there was surprisingly little) and call 911. I failed at first at calling because I kept getting distracted with my first-aid attempts. Then, every time I tried to dial I couldn't get it right. I accidentally entered the wrong sequence of numbers, an extra number appeared at the end, I accidentally erased all the numbers, I pushed the wrong button, I accidentally hung up on the dispatcher, etc. etc. I couldn't find my own phone, which had fallen down somewhere, and kept trying on a variety of phones that were lying around, none of which I could figure out how to use (usually it was the crucial "call" button that I couldn't locate). Finally I decided to look for help on foot, while simultaneously trying to prevent the kids from burying my still-alive husband to hide the evidence of their accident. I eventually ran into some people outside who seemed helpful and competent. I think at that point I must have woken up and realized that he hadn't actually been shot, because I don't remember how it ended.

The other part was considerably less harrowing. I was composing poetry, which is something that I think I've dreamed occasionally before*. Usually when that happens I can't remember any of it in the morning, but this time I remembered part of it. It was a medium-sized poem, so at least half of it is probably gone for good. The missing part was along the same lines. I think it was inspired in part by some recent thinking about my personality and priorities and how to deal with people with conflicting personalities and priorities; and in part by a book I've been reading about slowness. Anyway, this is all I remember:

Manifesto

We reserve the right to dawdle, to hem and haw, to hedge.

We write poetry in our dreams, and knowing that it was graven once in the gray folds of our unconscious is enough.

We are not waiting for happiness.

We know it when we see it.

I found the dream really interesting and amusing, because I remember the thought process I went through choosing the wording there, including a debate about whether the word "graven" was too stilted (I'm still very much on the fence about that). I think the lines that came more easily were the ones I forgot.

*In real life, I haven't dabbled in poetry since late adolescence, when I think one is contractually obligated to do so.

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.

On a Boat

Of a series of varied and complicated dreams the other night, the one scene that stands out relatively vividly is this one:

I was on a boat--some sort of covered, but otherwise open, deck--with a bunch of other people. A thunderstorm came up suddenly and the lightning was beautiful against the dark clouds. The waves picked up and tossed us around a bit, but it wasn't a problem. What was a problem was that when a particularly big wave receded, it revealed that we were about to tumble over a narrow ledge that hadn't been visible under the large waves, and were going to fall maybe 60 feet to the surf below.

I crouched down into what I thought of as an emergency impact kind of pose, with my head between my knees, as we went over the ledge. We fell for several seconds--longer than I'd anticipated--and landed a bit jarringly, but safely, in the waves below. Then I woke up.

crocodiles and mobsters cont.

(cont.)

Part 3:

I was now out somewhere with a group of people, including the friend and some random dream characters of a wide range of ages and ethnicities. We were in a big concrete building on an upper floor--it was a very bare, industrial sort of building, all metal and concrete and very Soviet Eastern Europe. We must have been on a guided tour, because we had all entered a rather dodgy-looking restroom (this was part of the tour, not a bathroom break). About that time, I realized that we were being guided in there by Russian mobsters. They did the requisite yelling ("get down! Shut up!" etc.), and I dove into the first available stall. Unfortunately it turned out to not have a door, so my hopes of crouching on the toilet to avoid detection were dashed.

The mobsters singled me out for some reason and yelled something at me. I'm not really clear on what happened next because it was very quick, but I realized that a grenade had been unpinned and it would behoove me to get out of there. I had a very weird sensation of simultaneous extreme fear and complete fearlessness, and for once my dream running was very effective (probably faster and with more coordination than in real life). I ran right past them and out the door to try to get out of range of the grenade.

I dashed out into a hallway and out the door, which led me to a long concrete exterior staircase with no railing (this was probably at about a 5th-floor level). At this point I realized that the bathroom mobsters had let me go knowing that they had companions outside the building who could take me out. I got to the bottom of the stairs and started running across an open space of packed dirt (there were buildings all around similar to the one I'd come out of, all deserted). I knew that there were mobsters around, but I also realized that I had to keep running even though the open space left me vulnerable to being picked off.

At about this point, I think I was caught by one of them, but this is where things got weird. Because when I realized that I was being caught, I also realized that this was a movie dream, and my perspective shifted to outside myself. When it shifted, I saw that I wasn't really me, but a much smaller teenager with long dark hair and bangs. This smaller "me" started belting out a song and I realized, "great, I've gotten myself trapped in a musical". [I'm not a real-life fan of musicals; I find it disconcerting how they burst into song at random times.] I tried to put the movie/dream on fast forward so I wouldn't have to listen to the songs and could get to the end faster, and it worked.

a dream? or an encounter with the devil? hmm...

last night i had a series of off-the-wall, intense dreams. but the only one i can vividly remember was a dream (?) where i was lying in bed, half asleep, in the hotel room where i was staying at in real life. suddenly i felt someone crawl over me in bed and then wrap himself around me. i could feel the weight and warmth of his body. his hands were positioned on my head and neck. i was so panicked that i couldn't move or scream. my body ached from the fear and shock. i knew he was there to do something awful to me and i wondered if this is how my life would end.

and then i woke up.

movie #1 in an upcoming apocalyptic franchise

I had one of the most elaborate "movie" dreams I can remember last night. Interestingly, although it didn't last that long, the plot followed the conventional story path to an extent that none of my other remembered movie dreams have.

The beginning was fairly separated from the dreams before it (which I can only barely remember, except that a couple of old friends who recently visited me in real life were there for a visit), but I want to say that part of the previous dream involved planning to go see a movie--I could be wrong about that, though.

At any rate, there was a definite beginning to the "movie" part. It was clearly a movie, although at the same time it was participatory--I was right there in the action, participating. I was seated on some concrete steps going up to a building, in a residential neighborhood with wide streets. There were several early-20s girls there with me on the steps, and nothing much was going on. There was a girl from my elementary school there, and she was petting my doberman, who was collapsed on her lap in immobile ecstasy from all the attention [I have a hard time imagining this person appreciating a very large dog in real life].

Suddenly, one by one, all of us were overtaken by a feeling of intense dread, and just after that a sensation of loss of bodily control, like everything was slowing down and we couldn't move our limbs--but at the same time, our bodies seemed to be contorting themselves of their own accord. It was very scary. At the moment when everyone had realized that something terrible and mysterious was happening, a mist crept toward the building from the other side of the street*.

This situation lasted an indefinable amount of time, and slowly everyone went back to normal, although we were still very freaked out. Then I heard sirens from several approaching police cars (from the direction the mist had come from, coincidentally). I was crossing the street when they approached, and was nervous about getting run over, when I noticed a circa-1960s blue Bronco approaching very fast. The young woman driving it seemed to be having some kind of violent spasm, and she then drove right into a tree, very fast, completely crushing the car. Just then I realized that similar things were happening to people in other cars all over the city (and possibly to pedestrians too): people were suddenly going completely crazy and becoming out-of-control in a savage, destructive way.

The next thing I can remember is being in a room resembling a cross between an old classroom, an "alternative" coffee house, and a warehouse. There were scaffolding-like things hanging from the ceiling, which I think may have been set lighting (this is important later). The room was full of the carefully diverse combination of people one sees in apocalyptic movies [the "people who would never normally associate are thrown together in a disaster" trope as plot device]. My husband was there, and it was obvious that we were both there as observer/participants and not really as "characters". I was a little annoyed with him for some reason, and sitting a few seats away--I thought he was being hyperactive and disruptive.

An older Asian man started to address the group, and it became clear that in this scenario, the U.S. and possibly the whole world had been taken over by China, making up a sort of mega-dictatorship. The man had a professorly air, and was talking about his life's work of designing and implementing a self-sustaining underwater city. He had a really beautiful 3-d model in carved wood showing the structure: like a globe composed of an organic framework, with a lot of little hanging lily-pad-like elements for the various components needed to make up the city. I'm not really sure if the model was physically there or if it was one of those hologram things sci-fi directors are so fond of using in movies.

Anyway, as the man explained his concept I slowly became aware that this was actually the dictator (he was also an engineer, as evidenced by the "P.E." after his name**). I got the impression that he hadn't really harbored ambitions of becoming Dictator of the World, but was one of those extremely cerebral people who was completely absorbed in his mission (the underwater city) and that he had been channeled into dictatorship by other parties who thought he would be the best choice.

The only other thing of note that happened while we were all in the room was that a young Japanese artist hung himself from the ceiling scaffolding. I'm not sure exactly why he did it, but it was an act of protest of some sort.

After that, the end of the movie showed a young couple arriving at their upstairs apartment (sort of an above-garage apartment in an old house in a neighborhood with a slightly gone-to-seed San Francisco vibe). It was understood that they had reached safety, at least for the moment--the perfect ending for the first installment of an apocalyptic franchise! It's hard to explain, but of course the couple was a parallel version of my husband and me.

At the very end of the dream, I saw the title art for the movie. There was a dark red background and a couple of shadowy faces. The name of the movie was incomprehensible. I couldn't figure out if it was some kind of symbol (Greek, maybe?), or if it was a very short, invented two-letter word or name. At any rate, it was in a stylized, slightly fuzzed-at-the-edges gothic calligraphy.



*I'm pretty sure this has to do with my noting this dvd cover at Blockbuster the other day.
**Yes, I work in an engineering office.

***************************
And stay tuned for a dream from a few nights ago featuring a camero appearance by Lars von Trier.

Dogs and Blood

I had another nasty dream last night. Lately I haven't been remembering my dreams, but this one was vivid.

I dreamed that my boyfriend and I were sitting on the ground, watching two dogs playing. As we watched, it became clear that it wasn't really playing anymore, but was turning into a fight. One dog looked much smaller or weaker than the other, and seemed to be losing the fight, but suddenly he just launched himself forward and grabbed the other dog's paw in his jaws.

He set his legs, and shook his head a bit, but didn't let go. Suddenly he growled loudly, and I knew that he was going to rip the paw off. BNB and I were really freaking out and we both turned away just before he made one massive effort and tore the paw off.

Somehow I knew what had happened without seeing it in the dream. The smaller dog was standing there in a pool of blood, holding the paw in his mouth and panting. The other dog was shivering on the ground, lying in his own blood.

I was shaking in the dream and a bit shaken when I woke up.

More crying

I had a night full of nightmares last night. One involved someone following me through what was ostensibly my building at work, but was much larger and more echoey. I was walking as fast as I could without appearing to walk fast, but he just kept gaining on me. I hurried to open my locker (we have to leave our stuff in lockers at work) and as I was closing it, he was behind me. I just hissed "get away," and ran out the doors onto the steps, which were much longer than my real workplace. More like the US Capitol building. I was running down the stairs, hoping I wouldn't trip, but he was behind me.

The other nightmare was more definable. At one point, I was working in a store when guy came up asking for help. He placed his hands on the counter and leaned over to ask me. He told me he was Canadian, so I made some kind of inane joke, all while noticing that his fingers were blunt appendages with pale skin and a light coating of fur.

Later, I was sneaking into a movie late and there was some confrontation over the placement of my head. Apparently I was being difficult and placed my head directly in front of a woman's view. Every time she tried to move, I also moved. I didn't think I was being difficult.

Eventually, I ended up back at my apartment, where my boyfriend was frantically writing in the office (as he's been doing for the last week, working to a deadline). He was clearly angry with me, but I didn't know why. I noticed that the office was totally empty except for his desk, chair, and computer. The walls were bare, the rug was gone, and all of my stuff was missing. I was afraid to ask him about my stuff, but I was worried about it.

He snapped that he needed to reduce the distractions, so he threw away all of my stuff. He also managed to convey that I had done something really stupid and he was very angry at me. I couldn't understand what I'd done. I tried to ask him, but he just said he had to get his work done.

I went out into the hallway, but I didn't know what to do. I was very upset and was starting to cry. I kind of wanted him to hear me crying, so maybe he'd feel sorry about being angry with me. He came out of the office and started shouting at me that I was just pretending to cry, and that I was being distracting. This naturally made me cry harder, and I woke myself up by sobbing out loud.

My sweet boyfriend, who has never done anything like his dream self, was understandably freaked out.

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.]

Totalitarian States and gender-stereotyped bathrooms

I had a rather alarming dream last week. I was carrying around a couple of grocery bags of stuff, at least some of which needed to be gotten rid of. I'm not sure whether I was planning on just dropping it off somewhere or whether I was going to give it to someone. I needed to stop in at the post office, which is where things got complicated.

In this dream, post offices were highly guarded, secure locations--I think they had started offering additional services, along the line of the passport services they already offer but necessitating tighter security (also, this dream was rather Totalitarian State, as you'll see later on). I was at a back service entrance, trying to figure out what to do with my bags of rejects. I couldn't bring them inside with me because of security issues, but I didn't even see a trash bin to dump them in. There was a pile of discarded stuff (a mix of outdated office equipment and just plain trash), but no official trash bin, so I guessed that it would be okay to leave them there while I went inside (and maybe forever, I thought, although I felt guilty about dumping them there sans trash bin).

There was a security guard involved in getting into the service entrance, too, and at first he seemed willing to let me in. Then things got bad really quickly. I don't know if he had actually seen me leave my bags with the pile of trash or if he just suspected, but he got very stern and started wielding the Long Arm of the Law and became very officious in his close inspection of my ID. The really alarming thing was that I realized that it wasn't my ID--it had been switched, planted, I suspected, by him or by an associate.

I don't remember the details, but there was some sort of knocking-about of a relatively mild nature but still very scary. I tried to protest that a false ID had been planted on me, but of course that only excited more suspicion and anger. Finally another security guard who had come from another area and who apparently had more authority intervened and let me go. The whole thing was very alarming, and I left as quickly as I could, still anxious about the items I had left by the door.

Then I was with my husband, somewhere in Europe. The location was ostensibly Geneva [I was talking about how pretty it was and how I missed it], although it didn't really look like the actual city, but more like how I imagine Stockholm or Copenhagen. There were a lot of 18th- and 19th-century buildings, some of them pink or yellow, and open stone plazas, mostly empty of people. It was really beautiful, and the fall atmosphere and cloudy day added to the appeal.

As we were standing in a plaza deciding what to do next, I realized that I should take advantage of the lull in activity to find a bathroom. We were next to some sort of museum, and I thought that would be a good option. I started looking around, but only found the men's restroom, and I decided to use it for the sake of speed (I was worried about my husband getting annoyed because I was taking too long, because he had already protested my preemptive and possibly unnecessary trip). It was extremely dirty, though, and there were two or three menacing looking young hoods in hoodies (!), which made me a little nervous. I decided to take my dog inside as a deterrent, hoping that she wouldn't betray her non-mean nature by being friendly to them [this is my real-life dog, who, being a pit bull with cropped ears, looks very mean at first]. Then I tried to find a suitable toilet, but they were all either clogged with paper or the seats were all dirty and wet. I wasted quite a bit of time trying to decide the best candidate for cleaning up a little, but finally gave up in despair, they were all so awful. I decided that it might be more time-efficient to just look a little harder for the women's restroom.

I found the women's restroom just around the corner, and it was completely different. It was the cleanest bathroom I'd ever seen, everything spotless and deodorized. It was all decorated with purple walls and gold trim, everything matching everything else, and the walls were covered with black-and-white pictures of Hollywood starlets from the 30s and 40s. I thought that was a weird touch. Apparently it was maintained by some kind of women's association, because there were signs (with a corny jingle that I regrettably can't remember) reminding members to clean up, and visitors of the members' hard work on their behalf.

I had happily done my business and come out of the stall when I saw that a small Italian woman had come in (how I knew she was Italian, I don't know). I was nervous that she would be alarmed by my dog and make a big scene about me having her with me, but instead she said, "Oh! A pit bull! I love pit bulls!" and started going on about the merits of pit bulls.

Coyote

This dream has really disturbed me. I still feel out of sorts.

I dreamed that I was walking home in a pair of cheap pink flip-flops (I own these as pool shower shoes). I was walking through the woods and was annoyed with myself for wearing flip-flops because they were already hurting my feet and there was still a long way to go.

In my peripheral vision, I noticed a gray coyote walking on my left side. It startled me, but I wasn't scared because they're usually so skittish. I walked a bit more, then turned suddenly and made a loud noise, clapping my hands and shouting so as to scare him off. He flinched, but didn't run away. He just kept walking on my left, about 10 feet away.

I tried to ignore him, but he kept getting closer and closer. I wasn't sure if he had malicious intentions, or if he just wanted to play. Whenever I would look over at him, he would kind of grin by opening his mouth a bit. I couldn't tell if it was evil or not.

Finally, I thought I'd try to get him to chase a stick and while he was away, I'd figure out a way to escape (by this point, I definitely wanted to get away). I broke a stick off a log lying on the ground. I kind of showed it to him and then threw it as hard as I could. The coyote watched it fly away, but he didn't chase it. He just watched it fall. While he was watching it fall, I bent down and picked up another stick, one with a big knobby lump on the end. I carried it by my right side, parallel to my leg so he couldn't really see it.

By this point, everything was very weird and disturbing. The coyote was standing on his back legs, walking upright. I realized that I had to pretend that everything was good and fun, so I was laughing and grinning at him. We ended up holding hands and skipping along together, laughing, while I desperately tried to plan how to get away.

Finally, I decided that he couldn't come to my house. I knew he was plotting something scary and I couldn't get him to go away. I decided to hit him with the knobby stick and knock him unconscious. I took a big swing, but just as I did, he turned his head to look at something and I missed. I was so scared that he would notice that I had tried to hurt him. I was still pretending that I was happily skipping along with him.

Finally, I tried again, using our clasped hands as a pivot point to get more force. This time I hit him on the front of the head. I realized, though, that my stick wasn't heavy enough to knock him out for long, so I kept beating at his head until I knew he was dead.

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.

breaking and entering

Speaking of dreams in which people are out of character, I had one last night in which my parents were completely out of character (they're normally extremely law-abiding and very concerned with propriety).

We (parents, me, sister, and possibly grandmother; I don't remember either of the sons-in-law being there) were on a road trip somewhere in rural southern or central Arkansas. Apparently no one had planned for lodging, and it was getting late. Since it was so rural, there were no hotels around, so my parents stopped at a little cluster of houses in the middle of the woods. Somehow it was decided that one of the houses was where we would spend the night. I'm not sure how this was decided, but I was so taken aback that I didn't even question the decision at first, thinking surely they would come to their senses.

They started unloading the car and carrying things into the house, which was fully furnished and clearly lived in. They were commenting on the furnishings and dishes in a matter-of-fact way, and my mother started puttering in the kitchen, although she seemed a little disapproving of the cookware. My dad removed a screen from one of the windows, saying that it was double-screened for winter, and since it was no longer winter the screen should be removed. I thought at first that he was getting ready to do some repair work, which I had mixed feelings about. On one hand, this wasn't his house; on the other hand, maybe he was looking at it as payment for staying there.

When I realized that they were serious about staying there, I started freaking out and saying that we had to leave right now because someone lived in the house and we could be charged with breaking and entering. When they weren't fazed by that, I brought up the possibility of the owner coming home late, finding his house full of strangers, and opening fire with his shotgun and killing us in our sleep. That didn't make much of an impression either, and I was more and more stressed about how to extricate myself from the situation. I was also disturbed at not getting any backup from my sister, who in real life is sensible and very cautious about anything that could provoke a violent reaction from a random stranger. She had shut down and wasn't saying anything, just wandering around almost invisibly in the sidelines (maybe looking to make her exit unnoticed?).

After we had been there for a while, with all the lights blazing and the windows opened, a police car drove by. It circled around, left, drove by again, and parked facing the house. The policeman just sat there staring at the house, with a civilian woman in the passenger's seat who looked like Grace Jones. I thought that surely that would move my parents to change their plans, but they remained calm in their bedtime preparations.

I don't remember how all that ended. I think it just phased into another story line. I was at work, looking at pictures (or footage?) with my boss. The pictures showed the bend in a creek that was supposedly part of a cave/creek system here in town. The bed was eroded stone with very steep edges, like a very miniature western river canyon, and the water was gushing through. He wanted me to go out and explore the creek system and take more pictures, but I was a little worried about the safety of getting into such rushing water. He said it was only about waist deep, but I thought he was being a little cavalier because he's a very tall and large person and would be a lot more stable in such a rapid current than a medium-sized person. I also wasn't excited about spending my free time on a work-related project, even one involving such beautiful scenery, and hoped he would forget about asking me.

In the other snippet, I was shopping with my mother, and it's only significant in a dream-analysis sense. She was rushing me along and didn't want me to look at some things I wanted to look at, which is one reason I don't shop with my significant other (the other reason being that I don't generally like shopping with anyone but myself). It's one of a few examples of dreams in which I transfer annoying husbandly traits to my mother, which I find odd.

guns?

I dreamed last night that I went to a big night-time outdoor fair-type event with my husband and another (female) friend. The friend was just your average dream person, no one I actually know. We had been walking around for a while and sat down in an area on the outskirts of the action where some small tables were set up with bar stools around them. My husband said he was going to go do something and would meet us back there. Right after he left, I started looking around and didn't like what I saw. We were surrounded by groups of men who were talking among themselves and staring at us menacingly. There was a sense that they didn't have our best interest in mind, and also that some kind of violence might shortly break out between them. Most of them seemed to be foreigners (from several different parts of the world), and I got the impression that they weren't there legally and that most of them made their living in illegitimate ways*.

The friend and I decided that we should leave immediately, but just as we were walking away I realized that in my hurry I had left my purse on the table. I ran back to get it, but was too late; a guy who worked for my husband [in the dream--I don't know how I knew he worked for him, but it was an established fact] had made off with it. He hadn't gotten far, so I started yelling and ran toward him, but he whipped out a pistol and started yelling back at me. I realized that it wasn't a good idea to get in a shouting match with an armed thief, so we got out of there.

We finally found my husband in a more crowded part of the fair. The guy might have been pursuing us, because he showed up just as I was trying to tell the story of what had happened. The thief brandished his pistol at the three of us, among a growing crowd, and suddenly my husband pulled a 12-gauge out of his jacket. [How does one conceal such a big gun in one's clothing, and why did he have it there?] He cocked it with that menacing CH-CHK sound, and the guy, seeing that his pistol didn't measure up to a Big Gun, ran away. I have no idea whether I got my purse back, though.

I much prefer clothing dreams to gun dreams.

*This part makes me feel like a closet racist. For the record, I think the vast majority of illegal residents make their living in perfectly legitimate, if underpaid ways.

another marriage/wedding related nightmare

i was moments away from walking down the aisle (as is always the case in these awful, awful dreams). the man i was about to marry was like 10 years older than me, a trucker, and had a tattoo (of what exactly i can't remember) on his right bicep. the man also had a young daughter, about three years old. side note: i think my dream husband-to-be was a combination of several guys who are married to various friends/acquaintances. he was this typical redneck character who would be my worst nightmare for a husband.

anyway, my mom was absolutely thrilled. she was so, so happy that her daughter was almost married. i, on the other hand, was panicked. another side note: the dream had this very heavy and sinking emotional quality to it. it felt less like waiting for something special to happen and much more like waiting for my life to be violently taken. i cannot express how deeply sad i felt in this dream. i was caught in this moment where i was trying to decide if i should accept my fate or run. in the dream i was overwhelmed with how happy the whole circumstance made my mother. i was also overwhelmed by the thought of pulling the plug on the wedding at the very last minute. i did love the the trucker guy's little girl and i remember she was making it especially difficult for me to stop the wedding from going forward.

right before i woke up, my dream-self remembered something that my mom had said to me in real life many years ago while watching oprah. she said something along the lines of: no matter how close you are to walking down the aisle, if you realize it's not what you want, you should stop everything rather than continue with the wedding just to save face. my dream-self felt like i had found an "out" that my mother couldn't argue with because they were her words of wisdom.

about this time i woke up with a start and in a sweat. i enjoyed a huge wave of relief as i realized it was all

just. a. dream.

(analyze that!)

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.]

Truckin'

I got back to my car after doing something, and it wouldn't start. I rolled down the hill I'd parked on in the alley, but because it was an automatic I couldn't compression start it, and came to a stop by a gas station. I figured I either needed a jump start or some gas, so I went in to the office to check about a jump first.

The man who came out to help me was named Stovlos, and he was old and short and round, with an accent. He went right to work on my car, which at some point became a huge U-Haul truck. He and his crew of young helpers were taking things apart and welding other things on while I wandered around the gas station.

At one point, there was a huge, maybe 10-foot high pile of pale tan teddy bears, with the movable joints, and all of these young people in bright green and red jackets (embroidered, I think, with the words Happy Holidays). Then the kids carted off the teddies before I could get a picture on my camera phone. But then the kids were walking through these tents, perusing tables like at a bazaar. I saw one pick up a paintbrush, and another pick up a blank wooden palette. I think they were supposed to be some sort of elves!

There was a display of sunglasses, and I tried on a huge pair with transparent pink frames, the lenses dark at the top and pink at the bottom. People who walked by laughed at (with) me. I looked in the mirror, and they were terrible! They made me look all squinchy. I was putting back a second pair when one of the young workers, the dark-haired one, came up to me, and I leaned back against him. He put his arm around my waist, and I let him walk with me until he went for the hem of my shirt, at which point I shook him off and went back to the truck.

Back at the truck, things were really apart, and I was nervous. It looked like they had cut some sort of hole in the ceiling in back--I guess to get to the attic! But as I was standing there, they managed to start the truck up. So we all got in; I think we were going to get some lunch and/or return the trailer. I figured I would treat since they had all worked so hard. Stovlos was driving, and I was sitting in the back of the truck with the blond helper, who wasn't as attractive as the dark-haired one, but was friendly in a shy way. I guess Stovlos couldn't turn the truck around, because he decided to back out of the alley, at top speed. The blond guy and I had windows we could look out of, and we seemed to be the only ones who could really see what was going on. At the end of the alley, before we hit the road, were gigantic--20 foot--asphalt hills and valleys, like a roller coaster. Stovlos hit them at high speed, and I was sure we were going to get high-centered or otherwise stuck, and screamed the whole time. Until we hit the road, and were fine. I looked over and the blond boy had tears in his eyes, so I hugged him and put my head on his shoulder and he reached up and played with my hair.

Once we hit the road, Stovlos kept driving backward, although it was easier on a smooth surface. Looking out the windows, we saw dolphins jumping out of the water! I think we were driving by Lake Michigan, so I don't know how there were dolphins there, but there were. We seemed to be heading north, but I had no idea where we were going or why, and decided just to go with it. I asked what time it was, and the blond guy told me it was 8:30. "Eight thirty a.m.?" I asked incredulously. "Cross my heart!" he responded, and I think he was actually serious. It was dusky outside, and I couldn't figure that one out. As we drove through the city, outside eateries were packed with people.

We finally stopped so that Stovlos could drive forward instead of backward. He came up to where the blond and I were sitting, which was then the front, and I scooted into the middle so that he could drive. He immediately started going, and nearly got us squashed between two lanes of traffic, as the right lane was ending. "The light was blue when I started," he said by way of explanation.

My exams start today at 10:00, and for an anxiety dream, this one wasn't actually so bad!

building! exploded!

i was at a roof-top party in downtown orlando. it was nighttime and it was a family-type party, or maybe a church family type party. my family was there but they were mingled in with everyone else. i was on the far side of the rooftop playing with a group of little kids. we had music blaring and we were dancing around and being all silly and jovial.

then, i caught a glimpse of something strange out of the corner of my eye. it was the sunbank building (i'm not even sure if it's still called 'sunbank' but it's the building with the pyramids on top that my old architecture firm employer's office is in) that was about a 1/2 mile away. i'm not sure why it caught my eye but i immediately knew that something bad was about to happen.

then, the building exploded. it was very loud and dramatic. and THEN the rest of downtown began to ripple like an ocean wave as a result of the explosion. the ripple was heading in our direction and i knew that when it hit us it would have terrible effects. i quickly grabbed the children around me and huddled into a corner with them waiting for the destruction. but the ripple stopped short of hitting us. it knocked out all of the power in the city and there was screaming and chaos all around but those of us on the rooftop were safe.

More water

Water keeps showing up in my dreams.

I dreamed that I was somehow selected, without my knowledge, to participate in the testing of a new set of locks on a river. To begin, I was left in a swampy, weedy, muddy part of a river system, alone in a sort of innertube with a rubber bottom. It was big enough for me to kneel in while holding onto some handles. So, I was just sitting in this swamp in the innertube, wondering what was going on.

I heard a strange sound and saw a wall of water crashing toward me. Apparently they had opened a part of the locks to let the water into this area where I was. I was pretty scared, assuming that I'd be killed by the rushing water. Instead, however, I was buoyed up on the wall of water. It was washing me back toward the locks and I was riding the waves. I was screaming, but it was pretty fun. I saw the mechanisms of the locks approaching and I was sure that I'd be sucked under, but somehow I ended up on the deck of the locks. Everyone was clapping and slapping me on the back.

I made my way to the locker rooms and realized that I was in charge of this little girl, whose mother was the next person (victim?) who would take the same ride that I had. It was my responsibility to get this girl ready for her mother's arrival, which was fast approaching. I had to wash her hair, which was short and very curly. I wished that I had curly hair. I was trying to get her to hurry up and rinse her hair in the shower before her mother returned.

the cell phone murderer

I took my cell phone on vacation to use as an alarm clock, and most of the times I set it at night I forget to choose a nice ringtone, so it ended up being that hideous AT&T default da-da-da/ da-da-da/ da-da-da-DUH! The last night we were there I had a terrible dream right before waking up, pretty blatantly stolen from Japanese horror-movie plots. I dreamed that there was some sort of serial killer afoot, and he has choosing his next victims based on a complicated equation generated by cell phone ringtones. When your phone went off, his computer-like brain would quickly analyze it to see if it matched up with the pattern he was looking for (kind of like the meter categorizations of hymns in the hymnbook). I don't know how he was capable of hearing all these cellphones going off, but apparently in addition to the computer-like brain he also had extraordinary aural perception.

Anyway, I was dreaming this for the first time just as my cellphone went off, and I had to grope for it, terrified, trying to shut it off before he could parse the rhythmic code and locate me. The worst thing is that I put it on "snooze" and had to repeat the terrified scrabble to turn it off when it went off again five minutes later.