so random

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

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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).

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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!].

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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.

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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.

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*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.

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.

gross and girly

I dreamed the other night that I was staying with my husband at my parents' house (they weren't there). I had apparently disposed of some leftovers (a lot of beans, and some other miscellaneous food) in the upstairs bathroom toilet, but hadn't flushed for some reason that seemed perfectly legitimate at the time.

Three girls in their mid to late 20s were there, for some reason I can't remember. Neither of us knew them, but their presence there had been pre-arranged through some sort of lodging swap program. We had just gotten home from somewhere, and I had decided that it was the perfect time to broach the subject with him of whether or not we were ever going to have kids. I have no idea why I found this the ideal time, especially with the three visitors in the house, but I was convinced it was the perfect opportunity, so I cornered him on the piano bench and started questioning him.

He wasn't as forthcoming as I had expected, and the conversation soon fizzled out. I was walking around the house doing chores, and he was in the living room messing with his phone. I ascertained that he was calling, or trying to call, a girl, and got very disturbed about this--especially since I took it as a reaction to my effort to get him to decide on the procreation question.

I decided to just stay upstairs and occupy myself with things and let him call whoever he wanted. I would then react as warranted to whatever ended up happening. Alarmingly, though, I looked over the second floor balcony and saw the three female visitors lounging in the living room in see-through 1950s lingerie (all three of them had very vintage/rockabilly hair and makeup). Great, my husband is in the living room making a "booty call" while surrounded with three women in various states of undress, looking like Suicide Girls itching for an orgy! I was quite unhappy but determined to maintain my sangfroid. The most annoying thing was my impression that I was expected to waltz down there and join in their orgy with them (even though said orgy had not started and was possibly only a figment of my imagination).

I went into the bathroom fuming and flushed the toilet. Unfortunately, though, the garbage had sat in there long enough to start getting fizzy, and the whole thing blew and splattered all over the place when I tried to flush it. There were little bits of decomposing garbage all over, including on my eyelashes. I went out to inform the charming group below that the toilet had exploded and that I was going to have to clean the whole bathroom and then take a shower (what better way to discourage them from including me in their orgy?).

I never did get my shower, although I did get the bits of slime rinsed off my face. The girls had come upstairs and I gradually caught on that they did not, in fact, intend to involve our couple in an orgy. On realizing that, I started to warm to them and we ended up in my old room talking about vintage clothes, various sewing and crafty things, and selling on etsy. I started rooting around in my old dresser and came up with handfuls of really neat old pajamas--lots of hand-embroidered silk and that kind of thing.

The whole encounter turned out rather pleasant, except that after having rinsed my face I hadn't put on any lotion, so my face was very tight and itchy. Also, I realized that since my parents weren't there--and since the girls weren't there to engage in an orgy--we had three separate bedrooms to lodge them in. The only problem was that the other two bedrooms available hadn't been cleaned in quite some time and were crawling with dust bunnies, which I found very embarrassing. (Garbage-spattered clothing and dried-up face showing messy and dirty lodging space to very cute, put-together visitors. Great.) I don't even want to think about what this dream says about me or my sense of self, but once again I've managed to generate a surreal and unwholesome list of labels.

extremely gross (Warning: Excrement Ahead)

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

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

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

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

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

Hugely Embarrasing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

contradictory messages from my subconscious

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

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

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

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

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


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

Bugs

For some reason, I was trying to ignite a yellow chair in my living room, which in reality I like quite well. I was using either a candle or a lighter, and there were some charred spots, but I really wasn't making any headway. Then I looked down and saw that some cinders had fallen onto the floor. As I watched, there was movement amongst them, and tiny black bugs, and horrible spiders whose filament-like legs were almost transparent, started moving out from under the chair toward me.

I freaked out and started this full-on, ululating screaming as I attacked them with a broom (which I decided I would also burn when I was done).

Some of the spiders had sprung very thin bubbles on top of/around themselves, like tiny parachutes. When I looked at the havoc I'd wrought with my broom, what I saw were some of those collapsed bubbles (though larger now, and more like plastic cling film), and not insect corpses, but tiny, grotesque doll figurines.

I think this was a fairly direct response to the box elder bug invasion that's been taking place in my apartment over the past few weeks. And, no joke, as I was writing that last paragraph, I discovered one crawling on my toe. Ewwww.

gross and racist?

I had the most weirdly detailed dream the other night. I was planning a trip to New York with my parents (weird in itself), and arranging everything beforehand online. I had arranged for several nights of lodging and several meals, and going back through and rechecking things to be sure everything was taken care of and made sense.

I realized that I had gone a little over budget and decided to pare some meals and just plan on eating them from street vendors. The one planned meal that I was really scrutinizing was a charity thing. It was a meal/presentation that demonstrated all kinds of elements of a program for poor kids in some African country. It was run by a very friendly looking middle-aged couple, and the more I looked at their website the more confused I got. There was a "menu" breaking down the experience into all possible components: actual meal, appetizers, craft session with children, presentation, etc. etc. etc. It was all itemized and I realized that if you went for the whole thing you could end up spending a fortune. Also, I wasn't sure my parents would want all that interaction instead of just a plain meal.

Another very weird thing is that twice lately I've dreamed of being confronted with scarily aggressive young Hispanic guys. I have no idea where this came from, not having had any scary encounters at all lately, much less with young Hispanic guys.

In the first dream I was in a "bad" section of town late at night. I was at a grocery store or something (I don't know how I'd gotten there) and learned while in the store that this part of town was reputed to be full of aggressive young guys and wasn't safe for single females. I more or less shrugged it off and went out a back entrance into an alley, where I was immediately set upon by young Hispanic guys. I don't know if they actually said anything, but they were doing threatening things like staring and fingering knives. It was really rather like a zombie movie in the way they converged out of nowhere.

I guess I made it out of there unscathed, because the next thing I can remember is being in a decrepit large building, something that seemed like an abandoned institution that had been taken over by squatters. I think part of it was a rundown YMCA. There were still some vaguely threatening young men, but there were also non-threatening people around too. One of my coworkers was there, showing me a large room she had bought. It was really interesting: very long and narrow, with some round columns holding up the ceiling, and tiled all over with square tiles of all different colors. She was planning on taking out the columns, and I wondered if that was a good idea, because they might be load-bearing.

In the next room over there was a bathroom, with sinks in one area and showers in another. The sinks had been [sorry, extreme grossness warning] crapped in, for lack of a more delicate term.

Then last night I had a rather confused dream in which I was trapped in an institution. I think it may have been loosely based on a 70s science fiction movie we saw recently. There was also an element of those thrift store dreams I have every so often, with a couple of rooms full of old stuff. I don't think it was a store, more of a giveaway with free old things. I was trying on some clothes when I realized that there were glass windows into an adjacent room and I was being ogled* by a bunch of very short Hispanic guys of varying ages**. I was really annoyed and embarrassed, and hunched down to finish my changing and got out of there quick.

I think part of the reason for the changing of clothes might not have been just an interest in old clothing; there was a subplot involving escaping with a fellow internee, but it's all a blur. It was fairly exciting, though I wish I could remember if we had made it out successfully.


*I mean really ogled--think of the most extreme stereotypical Ogle expression/sound effect, and you'll get the picture.
**What is with this? Am I a closet racist or something?

i'm dating a mac

I had three wildly different dreams last night. I'll get the gross one out of the way first. WARNING: I'm not kidding when I say it's gross, so you might want to skip down to the second one if you're squeamish or eating. Really.

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There's not much of a story line to the gross one. I was standing in front of a toilet trying to get it to flush. I had tried a couple of times and it was sort of flushing, so I thought I'd risk it being clogged and try again. It started roiling around and suddenly (ack! I don't even want to type this.) erupted like a geyser. Not just the contents of the toilet, but what seemed like the contents of the entire municipal sewage system were spewing out in a 6-foot-high fountain, as if the toilet were projectile vomiting.

It was by far the grossest dream I've ever had, and I had mercifully forgotten about it until the local NPR station saw fit to mention a local sewage leak this morning and it all came flooding (har!) back.

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On to a more pleasant one now. I was in a group setting with an assortment of random dream people and a few former classmates (what is with this?). It was some sort of summer-camp-like environment (except it was winter), and I didn't really feel like being there but was obligated. I was a little sick or maybe just tired and depressed, and sitting next to my mother in a row of folding chairs, watching people getting ready to put on a skit. My mother started talking about some kind of show that a former classmate of mine was in, involving profanity. My mother said, "yes, he says, 'mmmmmghsfsajhgmmmmm' [mumbling]". I asked her to repeat herself and she mumbled again, only this time I made out that she was repeating a punch line containing The F-Word, and that she was mumbling it because she was embarassed to say it out loud. She said, "yes, it's vulgar, but it's so funny!" Which was completely out of character for my mother, who upbraided me once as a youngster for calling someone a brown-noser (which, in light of the previous dream, I can't blame her for).

By that time the performers were ready to perform their skit. I don't know who else was there, but it was a whole row of people seated on chairs on the stage, and in the middle was Justin Long (aka "I'm a Mac"). He kept looking at me during the performance, and when it was over he immediately came over and made it clear (how, I don't know; there wasn't much of an exchange of communication) that he was madly in love with me and that we were going to be dating. I was flattered, of course, especially since I thought I was looking pretty mediocre due to being tired and sick, but I wasn't quite sure how to feel about it.

I'm not sure whether I brought it up directly, but I was rather concerned about the fact that I was married and yet I was clearly supposed to be dating this person. He was cute, and quite persuasive, and completely dismissive of the idea that my being married was a problem. The only thing I could really think of to say as he put his arms around me was, "I was wondering how tall you were" (because he had always struck me as being rather short, which he was indeed in the dream, albeit a little taller than me). I was also confused by the fact that, to the extent that they noticed it, everyone seemed to think this little fling was really cute--even my mother seemed approving of it.

By the time I woke up I still hadn't come to any conclusion about how to deal with the fling with the Mac guy, and we had moved on to such racy activities as sliding across the gym floor on our stomachs. Oh, and there was a lot of hand-holding. Basically it was a 5th-grade level relationship, but it was a pretty self-esteem-boosting dream, what with the instant infatuation (I kept reminding myself that he probably had many attractive choices when it came to dating, including, of course, Drew Barrymore).

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The last dream was boring but extremely vivid and detailed visually. I was on my way to run an errand for work and had to stop and eat somewhere. I was so hungry I had gotten confused, and I couldn't decide whether to actually eat something or to get something at a juice/smoothie place. I parked my scooter (?!), with some difficulty, and went inside. It was a two-story building with the entrance on the second story because it was built on a hill. The side facing the street was full of frosted glass windows, and the rest of the walls that weren't frosted glass were covered with license plates. I thought it was an interesting look, but was frustrated because it would have been more interesting to look at the street activity than to stare at the milky whiteness of the windows. I finally decided to have a cherry/banana/chocolate smoothie, but I was having a terrible time getting any of the people at the counter to come take my order. I surmised that this was because they were all gay and didn't think women were worthy of their attention (?). The whole dream had a really stressful, confused feeling.

canophagy?!

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

doggy diarrhea and edward gorey

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

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

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

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

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



*My family's default setting in real life.

ugh

I dreamed last night that I thought it would be a great idea to go to summer camp as a teen camper. [I was somewhat younger in the dream than in real life (not married, I don't think), but definitely not young enough to be a teen camper.] My reasoning was, "I loved working at camp, and I only have a week available, so I'll go as a camper". I came to my senses as I was sitting in the bathroom, though, and started to panic because I didn't see any way of getting out of it. To add to my stress, I looked down and realized that there was urine all over the bathroom floor*, and the tons of misplaced items (clothes, paperwork, magazines) were getting all wet and soiled with it (let's just say it was not clear and watery and odorless, either). I woke up as I was desperately trying to mop it all up with toilet paper. Nice way to start my day.


*Not from me, just to be clear!

slices of arm

Background: we have a young but very large dog who usually stays outside. It was unusually cold last night, so we let him sleep inside, but due to his boisterousness and inability to leave our other dog alone, we had to leave him in a crate, which he protested very mightily by making loud anguished noises off and on throughout the night. I think this contributed to my having one of my All-Time Most Gruesome Dreams.

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This dream was influenced by those Japanese movies in which a series of people die after learning that they're "next in line" [generally this is due to a vengeful ghost, but there was no ghost in my dream; the cause of the deaths wasn't explored at all]. I was in an indoor public swimming pool (?). I think everyone was fully clothed in the pool, to one extent or another. I was stressed about something that had happened earlier in the dream and already on edge. I noticed that a rockabilly-type girl near me had started to act strangely. She acted agitated and I somehow understood that she was perceiving music that only she could perceive, and that this was her information that she was to be the next victim. I think that she was also supposed to pick the subsequent victim on learning of her victimhood, although this was a little hazy.

Anyway, the rockabilly girl focused her attention on me, probably because I was the closest person. She started pointing at me and becoming more and more agitated. Then she took out a knife and started shaving slices off her left upper arm, like you would slice one of those Spanish hams. She then put them on top of my head, which i found horrible and reacted to somewhat hysterically. Weirdly, there was no spurting blood--the slices came off very neatly, like a food product.

dog dreams

We got a dog the other day, after about a month of doing lotsandlotsandlots of dog research (online, books, going to see dogs in person). During the research process there were times when every time I closed my eyes I would see dogs of all kinds, as well as having actual dog-related dreams. I think I already posted one of my dog dreams, but I had another one a while back. My husband had been wanting a really huge, mean-looking dog, and in my dream we were on a trip in Europe. He had heard about a breeder who had dogs like what he was interested in, so we stopped by to look. The experience was pretty intimidating, first of all because to get into the building where the dogs were we had to enter a windowless old building with very low ceilings and a door so low we had to stoop to get in. Then we entered the area where the dogs were, and although they weren't trying to attack us or anything, they were really big and scary. After we left he said he wasn't sure anymore that he wanted that kind of dog.

Then this morning I was dreaming mixed-up moving- and dog-related dreams (we also just moved in real life). The big thing I remember was that there were several other dogs around, coming and going, most of them either very small breeds or puppies. Our dog was very well-behaved in the dream, but at one point I saw her sniffing at something and then eating it. Too late, I realized that she had eaten a cut-off dog paw! It was a little brown-and-white dog paw with a little bit of leg, and some sort of tag attached to it. In the dream there was a legitimate, non-gross reason why this paw had been detached from its owner (who wasn't present), but it was still highly alarming and appalling to see her consume it so nonchalantly. I was also concerned because the tag seemed to indicate that the paw was a specimen that needed to be preserved and catalogued.