the mechanics of dream crying

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

in which my subconscious wins the Gross and Creepy prize

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

swimming contest

The setting for this dream was the default group/institution setting, kind of a cross between a short-term academic program and summer camp. I think everyone, including me, was a teenager, although it didn't register as being a change in age.

The only thing I remember very well is that the people in charge were organizing an athletic contest. Apparently this was a tradition for the group, and the centerpiece of the tradition was a long-distance, cold-weather swimming contest. The location was at the edge of a lake or maybe the ocean, in a Scandinavian-like climate. I think it might have been winter to boot--at least it wasn't summery, and the water was very cold.

The adults in charge of the contest were gathering people up to participate, and when they came to me they insinuated that it wasn't a big deal, something they had done for years, and not even all that difficult. I must have signed myself up, because when they came around on subsequent rounds they asked if I was getting ready for the competition. I tried to find out more about it and began to realize that I might not want to do it after all. Every time the sign-up lady came out with another informational tidbit about it it sounded more daunting. I had just assumed that we were supposed to wear swimsuits, but then she mentioned that we should wear at least two swimsuits, and probably socks. I looked down and realized that I was wearing a pea-green competition-style suit over a darker green retro halter suit with shirring. I kind of liked them both, especially the retro one, and wondered vaguely where I had gotten them*.

It had gotten near enough to the race time that people were lining up at the edge of the dock (in all kinds of weird clothing combinations), and I was getting a little apprehensive. The organizer lady came around again, and asked me if I was sure I wanted to compete. I asked what the distance was and she hemmed and hawed, but then said that it would be about an hour and a half of swimming in frigid water. I said, "Oh, in that case I'd better not. I could swim for an hour and a half, but I couldn't compete for an hour and a half." I think I was also wanting to put on some regular clothes by that time, and picturing young competitors dropping off mid-race and sinking slowly to a watery grave. The organizer was fine with my withdrawal, and I thought the staff were displaying a weird and irresponsible mix of cavalier disregard for safety on one hand and a stifling tendency to assume my incapacity on the other.

There was another part of the dream involving a very nifty old house in the middle of the desert that had been converted into a restaurant/museum and was supposedly haunted; and an episode involving rapidly rising floodwater about which I was very unconcerned--but I don't remember much about either.



*oddly, I didn't wonder why I was in good enough shape to be wandering around unselfconsciously in a swimsuit, or swimsuits, as the case may be.

Overflow

I was in a full public restroom. I went into one of the stalls that had just been vacated, and the woman had left her red baseball cap on the hook, so I handed it back to her. I was putting toilet paper on the seat when the automatic flush went off. It went off again as I tried to arrange the paper, and this time it filled the toilet to the edge of the seat and the water looked murky. At this point, I had a dilemma: did I leave the stall and say that although I hadn't even used the toilet, it was now perilously close to overflowing? Would I be believed, since I'd been in there a minute or two and had apparently already flushed twice?

I decided to stay... but the toilet flushed again and began overflowing. I crammed myself up against the door, as far as possible from the font, which still splashed me a little. It did this a few more times, flooding into the surrounding stalls. I thought I could hear people talking about it. Finally the toilet settled to a normal water level and I decided I could risk using it. Just then, my alarm went off. What a relief!

Before that, I had been in a field in a car with my parents. There was a dog that charged us and that we determined must be "part horse" because it was so big (though friendly). A cow charged us, too, but was thwarted by a patio door, or something like that. And finally, a creepy guy came up to the car to offer us advice, but we only rolled the windows down partway because we couldn't figure out if he was good or evil.

It was once we'd gotten back into civilization that the toilet incident occurred.

sienna the prankster

{Another celebrity snippet, from over Christmas. I swear, the only exposure to celebrities I have is while waiting at the supermarket or (the other day) for my car to be repaired. Really.}

I was staying at my parents' house, and I think there were quite a few other people staying there, including, for no immediately apparent reason, Sienna Miller. I was in the living room and looked out the window to see the whole yard awash in torrents of water. The water was probably only calf-deep but was really roiling. I ran outside to see what was going on, and Sienna Miller was behind the house laughing gleefully. She explained to me that she had set up an elaborate system of pipes and gravity-powered channels so that the yard could be instantaneously and spectacularly flooded when the water was turned on. She was very proud of her handiwork. It turned out that she had a reputation for this sort of thing*, although I guess my parents didn't know it when they accepted her as a houseguest. When the water was turned off, the floodwater magically drained away almost instantly.

*The implication being that it was an indication of a volatile and unstable personality. There was a background idea that she was staying at my parents' house on a sort of mental-break retreat.