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.

more celebrity appearances

Well. I'm tempted to restate my lack of real interest in celebrities, but since they keep showing up, I guess it would sound like a case of "doth protest too much". Here are the latest two cameo appearances.

The other night I dreamed that I was transitioning to a group living arrangement (of course). I suppose I was in school, because it was rather dorm-like, but I don't remember the details. I was supposed to be sharing accommodations with Chloe Sevigny, which startled me a little--didn't she have enough money to live in a place of her own? After my initial surprise, I thought she might be an interesting roommate. She seemed interesting, nice enough, and I figured she would probably have interesting taste and introduce me to interesting people. Being an introvert who has a hard time meeting people, the idea of a built-in source of acquaintances appealed to me.

I was still in the process of beginning to move my possessions in when Chloe presented me with an itemized rundown of all the food that she estimated I'd consumed or would consume within a certain time period. This included groceries and eating out, and I was floored by her attention to detail. It was all listed by item, estimated serving size, and price--including estimated tax. The estimated-tax part rankled me a little, and I started to think that maybe her financial fastidiousness was going to be a pain.

++++++++++++++++++

I'm not completely sure who last night's cameo was. It was either Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler, or a hybrid thereof. My husband and I were in the process of establishing ourselves in yet another group-living arrangement* (sharing a house, I think; we had our own space, at least, but it was within a larger dwelling). We had pretty much settled in, and our dogs--our real-life Doberman and a dream German Shepherd--had too, making themselves comfortable on a top bunk that our Doberman would never be able to jump up on. Despite some climate-control issues (no heat?), it was a fairly comfortable arrangement, and we took a break with a movie.

The movie was some kind of comedy featuring a gone-to-seed boys' band. They were singing a semi-choreographed song in which they wandered around a vacant lot. The lyrics included something about "until my hips get soft", which puzzled me--I wasn't sure if it was meant to be a sexy double-entendre or a wry commentary on their age (they were all 40-/50-something). They were dressed in either jeans/black leather getups or track suit/gold jewelry ensembles, and the Ben Stiller/ Adam Sandler hybrid sported a spectacularly ugly hairdo: slightly bleached (orangey) dark hair on top, curly but brushed out to fluffiness, and a darker, gelled longer layer (mulletlike but equally long all around) consisting of tiny, bouncy little curls. I was transfixed by its ugliness.



*WHAT is UP with this? What unconscious fixation keeps making me dream about group living arrangements? Am I going to have to join a kibbutz to exorcise this?

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.

stressful heist

I had a very stressful dream last night. My husband was working for some industrial company (mining? petroleum refinery? chemicals?) in a lower/middle management and/or possibly security capacity. For some reason I was there with him at the main office. No one else was around, so it was just the two of us. I'm not sure where the office people were, but it was clear that they would be gone for a while.

In the middle of our uneventful office visit, there was a loud explosion from the direction of the factory/mine/refinery. From the sound of it, no one was going to make it out of there alive. I asked him what it was and he replied "kryptonite" (??). He then sprang into action, although I couldn't determine whether this action was premeditated or a spur-of-the-moment idea. Apparently there was a huge amount of the company's capital just stored in cash in the office (??). He filled up two or three paper Whole Foods bags (again, ??) with what supposedly amounted to 400 million (billion?) dollars.

I found this sudden turn of events disturbing in the extreme. First of all, the idea that he was going to try to make off with this enormous amount of money was alarming both on an ethical and a practical level. How did he think we would ever get away with such a thing? And then there was the disturbing question of whether he had known about or somehow been involved in the explosion, which was such a terrible idea that I didn't want to dwell on it.

I guess my hesitation and nay-saying cost us some time, and we didn't end up leaving right away (I also argued that skipping the country at the exact time of the explosion and disappearance of the cash would make us look way too suspect and that it was better to stick around for a while to lessen suspicion on us; I think I was also hoping to talk him out of his scheme). I also pointed out that any business who kept large quantities of cash would be foolish not to mark the bills somehow, and that the first bill we attempted to spend would get us caught.

I woke up around the time that the police were starting to swarm around the place (amazingly, they didn't nab us immediately; I don't know what became of the paper bags full of cash, but they were still somehow in our possession). Then I kept drifting in and out of sleep, anxiously concocting strategies to keep us from getting arrested--plant a bill or two on an unsuspecting passerby? Drop a bill in a place where it was likely to be picked up and spent by someone else (I was very preoccupied with the whole marked-bill scenario)? I was afraid we were condemned to a fugitive life and would never actually be able to spend any of the money--so it was obviously better to just abandon the whole idea while we were still somewhat uninvolved.

squalid group living

I guess this dream was prompted by our recent housekeeping woes (as in, lack of) and our attempts to find a leather couch that the dogs won't dirty up so much. We (my husband and I) were sharing a house with some other people, a couple of different parties consisting of two or three people. All of them were Asian (I think one party was Indian and the other, with more members, was Korean). All were either students or had "knowledge economy" type jobs*.

Anyway, my husband and I had the living room as our area, and we had never properly moved in so everything was a huge mess (you know what happens when you've run out of steam in the end stages of a move and haven't found a proper place for everything). To make things worse, we had our two dogs with us--I think they were in an indoor-outdoor living situation, and the doberman had been inside.

[At some point in the middle of this dream, the dwelling curiously transitioned into a huge construction-parts warehouse; even while dreaming I was aware that this was my subconscious's way of voicing its displeasure/overwhelm at our real-life messy house.]

Back in the actual house (not warehouse), I was trying to tidy up while my husband, who had a cold, was lying on the couch watching TV. I wasn't really upset by his lack of help because he was sick**, but I was completely overwhelmed and questioning the utility of my endeavor. I had just discovered that the dog had thrown up in several places after chewing on a rawhide (so it was that whitish, milky post-rawhide throw-up that will be familiar to dog owners).

I was trying to find something to clean up the mess (and not finding a rag, of course). In the adjacent kitchen, a couple of the Koreans were eating their breakfast, like perfect little robots: get out the food, dish it into one dish, eat it all quickly in a focused manner, quickly rinse single dish and single glass. This only increased my feelings of inferiority, since I have never been able to eat so neatly and with such little production of dirty dishes.

Breakfast tidily put away, one of the Koreans grabbed his backpack (without fumbling, of course) and started to very quickly navigate the piles of junk on his way out the front door. I panicked and tried to warn him about the dog-vomit piles, but couldn't get it out fast enough. He landed in the biggest one with his clean be-socked foot***. He was too polite to register more than the briefest expression of surprise and discomfit before he whooshed out the door, sweeping up his shoes in one smooth motion.

I never did find a rag to clean up the vomit, I just sunk into self-recrimination and amazement that the tidy Asians hadn't already kicked us out, then woke up.


*Yeah, my subconscious hews closely to racial stereotypes.
**This does at least show a departure from the trope where I start yelling at assorted family members because I'm doing all the housework.
***Because, being clean, he didn't wear shoes in the house.

war of the gender stereotypes

In one part of my dream night before last, I was driving in a nice, leafy urban neighborhood. Suddenly there was a loud explosion not too far in front of me, and I realized it was a car exploding. The explosion was very dramatic, with lots of dark gray smoke, and it completely vaporized the car--no subsequent burning car, practically no debris, nothing. There was an object where the car had been, and I realized with some alarm that it was the woman who had been driving. She was in remarkably good shape seeing that the car had been destroyed, but it was obvious she was seriously injured (although there wasn't really any blood; there hardly ever seems to be any blood in even my most violent dreams). Several passersby ran up to her, and I guess I did too, because I remember looking down at her feebly moving her arms and whispering, "help me!". A couple of proactive types were hovering over her, so I figured the most useful thing for me to do would be to call 911 (not being a proactive type myself). I went back to the car and started dialing, but my hands were shaking so badly that it took about 10 tries to get to the operator; each time I would either mis-dial, accidentally hang up, accidentally press the button for the internet browser, etc. It was very alarming, a new twist on that dream where you can't lock the door against the pursuing Bad Guy.

The next thing I remember, I was in an unfamiliar house where I lived (temporarily, I think) with my parents in addition to my husband. Things are a little hazy here, but there was some yelling between me and my mother and/or my husband--I can't remember who was yelling at who, although I think I was giving as good as I got.

Apart from fighting with family members, I was making some kind of concoction of onions, corn, canned beans, and some other miscellaneous ingredients. I went off to take a break while it was cooking, and ended up watching the ultimate chick flick on a tv in a spare room. Diane Lane, or a reasonable facsimile, was the female lead, and Viggo Mortensen (or, again, a doppelganger) was the male lead. She was falling into his arms (of course), and there was some of that requisite chick-flick music-less slow-dancing around the room. She got very emotional and started talking about how lonely she had been, and he said something totally unrealistic (but very chick-flicky) about how now she would never have to be lonely again because he was there to love her. I was simultaneously enthralled and disgusted, and also a little disgusted at myself because I realized that I wouldn't, in theory, at all mind a world in which people said that kind of thing to me (Viggo's line, not Diane's); although I could do without the slow-dancing-around-the-room stuff.

After the chick flick, I saw an iphone-like cell phone lying around and started messing with it (I think it belonged to my husband, who was off at work). There was an animated movie on it, and I guess I figured it would be a palate-cleanser after the extreme romance-novel thing I'd just watched. The drawing style was interesting, very stylized and a little more hand-drawn and raw than typical anime style. I don't remember the story line at all, but Calvin and Hobbes made a cameo appearance.

some non-gory but brutal violence, and an excessive amount of detail

I'm completely overwhelmed by all the dreams I've had lately. For one thing, I feel like I've only remembered a tiny percentage of fragments; for another, they've been insanely and excessively detailed (noticeably more than usual, which is saying a lot). I guess I'll just start with some snippets in no particular order and see how far I get.

++++++++++++++++++++

This morning before work (in real life) I logged in to Yahoo IM in hopes of talking to a friend in a faraway time zone who's been wanting to chat for a while. Then I realized that I was falling asleep, so I turned the volume way up on the computer in hopes of waking up with the little window-opening noise if he tried to chat with me. That's the real-life background.

In the dream, I was sleeping in my house (except that of course it was slightly different, both in the house's characteristics and the location, which was more wooded). In the dream I also had the computer on while I slept (for the same reason), so I was sleeping a bit fitfully. [I find it weird when dreams parallel real life so closely, especially when I dream that I'm asleep.] I ended up waking up to find that my husband had been there, which surprised me since he had already gone to work and is usually way too busy to come back home. He was trying to sleep in a gigantic king-size bed in a different bedroom (our house had morphed again), and said that he had come home the previous morning too.

That was the boring part. I got into bed intending to sleep some more, and woke up to hear strange sounds outside. We got up and looked out the window, and finally figured out that it was a disgruntled former coworker of my husband, shooting randomly with a shotgun (it must have been a pretty wimpy shotgun, because the sounds weren't very loud). We weren't sure what to do, but before we had decided on a course of action I heard noises in the house. He had somehow gotten inside and was waving his gun around, ranting and raving. I went out into the living room, and he shot wildly and missed the side of my head. Obviously something had to be done, so I picked up a greenish marble cutting board (not something we own) and gave him several solid blows to the head. He slumped over a countertop and I hit him several more times, very much in the way you'd crush a cockroach to be sure it was dead (there was no gore, at least). Then I produced a small pistol out of the blue (we don't have a pistol either) and shot him in the temple to be really sure--no gore there, either. The pistol was just as wimpy as his shotgun--no kick, and not much noise. It occurred to me to wonder why I hadn't found a bigger gun, but this one seemed to have done the job.

Of course after that I was stressed about what to do, not to mention extremely disturbed at having just killed someone (in self-defense, but still, the repeated head-bashing was a little much). Fortunately my alarm went off then.

++++++++++++++++++

Another recent dream involved living in a dorm modeled loosely after my high-school dorm (where, thankfully, I didn't actually have to live). The rooms were very small and the hallways were narrow, and it was set up so that people in the hallway could peek through large cracks in western-saloon type doors and see what was going on in the bathrooms. There wasn't much of a plot, just an overwhelming amount of stuff all over--my stuff, other people's stuff, just all kinds of objects crammed into every available space. At one point I took a bath in some random stranger's bathtub, and the bathroom was chock full of all kinds of toiletries and shampoo. After that I visited my sister in her room and spent some time going through her selection of jewelry, which was a lot of ethnic and vintage stuff. I remember a necklace of jet beads carved into the shape of rosebuds, almost like a rosary, and a curious thing from Czechoslovakia: an egg-shaped container of very thin wood with decorative painting. I opened it up to find that it was full of tiny pins out of the same very thin wood, in lots of different shapes (people, geometric shapes, etc.), meant to be combined in different configurations. I was extremely impressed with her collection.

The dorm then changed a little bit, and I was in an upstairs room helping Curly Sue (who actually had to live in the aforementioned high-school dorm!) move to a different facility. It turned out that she had been incarcerated for some not-too-serious offense and was graduating to a lower-security facility. It can't have been anything too serious, because her mother was there helping with the move, and she didn't seem too disturbed about her daughter's crime/incarceration. Also, in conversation with them I remembered that my dad had recently had a similar stint behind bars.

The funny random detail here is that she was wearing several hats (literally, not figuratively). She had layered two or three knit caps of various textures on her head, and she changed these at least once during the dream. The consistent thing was that the hat on top was always just balanced rakishly on top of the others, not pulled down over her head. I found it curious and didn't completely comprehend the reason she offhandedly gave for her distinctive headgear styling, but I let it drop.

++++++++++++++++++

That's just a couple; maybe I'll give it another try later. Stay tuned for not just one but TWO dust-ups in thrift stores; an anthropological exploration of either Afghanistan or Macedonia, depending on which part of the dream you believe; and an outpouring of emotion for an adoptive father (??).

a dream about a dream about a dream

I've been having a terrible time remembering my dreams lately. I keep waking up, noting something, thinking "there's no way I'll forget this", and then forgetting it. Last night's dream, though, I could have done with forgetting.

To start with, I had a terrible time going to sleep, which is unusual for me. My fingers kept falling asleep while I was still awake, which prompted me to fidget, which woke up my grumpy sleep companion, who was also apparently not sleeping as deeply as usual.

That was the real-life part. I realized that I was fidgeting a lot and disturbing the sleep of the bed's other occupant, and this started blending into my dream: I started to dream that we were sleeping, in our usual bed, and that I was moving around a lot. He (in the dream, and possibly also in real life) kept waking up and making progressively more irritated growling noises. Of course the more I tried to stay still, the harder I found it. This dream went on and on, punctuated by short periods of waking that mirrored what was going on in the dream. At one point, I woke up and realized that I had been dreaming that I was dreaming about a bad night's sleep. To add insult to injury, our dogs kept barking (in real life), which is something they don't normally do at night.

I finally woke up not long before it was time to get up, realized I was cold, and added some covers to my side of the bed. After that I must have slept better, because I then dreamed that, twenty minutes before we were due to get up, my husband woke up, looked at me, and said, "well, then, let's just order some breakfast from IHOP" (which is an odd choice, because neither of us likes IHOP). We started discussing menu options, and I was relieved that he had decided not to blame his sleepless night on me.

The real-life post-script is that, on actually getting up, I realized that the whole horrible night of sleeplessness wasn't really my fault. For the next hour, both dogs continued to have barking fits indicating that there was some kind of animal nearby (the neighbor dogs were doing it when ours weren't), and I realized that they had been doing it for most of the night. Of course that didn't give me back my lost sleep.

yuck.

It's been a really long time since I had a variation on this dream, but just before waking up this morning I dreamed that my husband was openly ogling someone right in front of me.

I don't know what the context was, but we were seated at a table somewhere, maybe at some kind of outdoor event. To my left was a Diane Kruger lookalike. In addition to being incredibly beautiful and completely flawless, she seemed to have a perfect personality (unlike grumpy, neurotic ol' me). I think I had made a little superficial conversation with her because she was just so nice that I couldn't be antisocial and ignore her.

After we had exchanged a couple of sentences, my husband leaned over from his position on my right and started brazenly ogling Ms. Kruger-lookalike. I'm not sure if he actually spoke directly to her, but he was clearly completely smitten and I had hopelessly lost the battle of comparisons. I don't remember if I objected verbally to his ogling or if he just saw that I was disturbed, but in response to my irritation he started in on a list of her virtues and my deficiencies.

Up to this point the dream followed the usual template, but whereas usually I just slink off and disappear to nurse my hurt feelings elsewhere, this time I practically exploded. I first ranted at him that he was being really rude to Ms. Kruger-lookalike by ogling her so brazenly. Then I may have added that I didn't cotton well to his ogling of her either--I'm not sure if I verbalized that. I do remember going into his flaws, although I don't remember what any of them were other than a failure to do the dishes. I think I went so far as to say that I wasn't sure I loved him anymore. The whole dream was extremely disturbing, and the aftertaste was pretty disturbing as well.

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.

mystery and intrigue!

I had a really somewhat delightful dream this morning, spanning a couple of snooze-button pushes. It's a bit hazy, but it was a very plot-twisty cloak-and-dagger sort of thing. In the beginning I think I was in a group setting, maybe a school dorm. I was going out to run some errands (for me and/or others, I'm not sure) and get something to eat. This took me to an old Asian neighborhood, very much like how I would picture an old city neighborhood in China: very narrow, warren-like streets really only suitable for pedestrians and bikes/carts.

I went into a business that seemed to be partly food-based and also a front for some other, slightly sinister enterprise. In the course of a short conversation with the people working in there, it became apparent that I had somehow been peripherally drawn into a conflict/intrigue involving a Korean group and a Chinese group. It was never clear who the groups were or what they stood for, respectively, but they were a combination of underground political movement and organized crime group.

I think I was involved on two levels: one was a specific job that I was requested to do (by what group or who, I have no idea, nor do I know what the job was), and the other was a growing journalistic/investigative curiosity and a desire to figure out what was going on and who was doing what. I got very excited indulging fantasies of "cracking" the case and "breaking" the story, and wondered how it could have taken me so long to realize that my true calling was as a spy (I was absolutely certain of that).

After leaving the Asian neighborhood, I found myself in an old apartment building, in a living room with people talking and coming and going. They were all young, and seemed to be radical underground political activists of some sort. I wasn't really involved, just there and observing (a sign that espionage was my true calling was my uncanny ability to not attract attention). The neatest part of the dream occurred during this mini-episode, and consisted partly of what was actually happening in front of me and partly of my mental images of things that had happened before that. I was watching a young man and simultaneously an image of another young man I had seen before. It slowly dawned on me that the two were the same person, but came across as completely different people through his ability to project a completely different persona just with a change in clothing, accessories, and hairstyle. It was a wonderful ah-ha moment, both because of his transformative skill and because of my delight in piecing together the fact that he was a double agent.

I arrived home ("home" being a neat old house where we apparently lived), and my husband was there puttering around in the kitchen*. I indicated to him that I needed some time to think, undisturbed, because I was on the verge of piecing together the various pieces of the puzzle to figure out exactly what was going on.

The whole thing had a wonderful atmosphere of intrigue, adventure, and danger, although the sense of danger was more enjoyable than scary. And the settings were very detailed and atmospheric too--if it were a movie I would have given a good rating to the props/costuming/cinematography people. My snooze button went off a couple of times, and each time I was determined to return to the story so I could see what was going to happen next (unfortunately I didn't ultimately figure out the mystery). The ironic part is that when watching movies involving organized crime and political intrigue, it takes a great deal of concentration for me to figure out what's going on.


*This is not someone who normally putters in the kitchen, so I don't know where that came from.

more and more ugh

The string of unpleasant dreams is continuing unbroken. The other night I dreamed that my husband and I were both undergoing some sort of hazing/trial period for a fraternity and sorority, respectively. And just before I woke up this morning, I was dreaming that a pleasant neighbor we had recently met (in the dream, not in real life) had abruptly committed suicide. In fact, I think it was the horror of that that jolted me awake.

in which my subconscious's superego punishes my subconscious's id

The other night I dreamed that my husband had branched out at work into managing not just landscaping stuff but computer/software/marketing things. It wasn't clear how he had gotten this particular project, but it seemed like he had maybe taken it over from another manager who wasn't getting things done. He was excited about having such a big project; it was something for a huge, important company, and although I didn't really get what it was, it was something fundamental like managing orders or something. That's the boring part, though. The funny part was that he introduced me to the guy who was going to be his assistant in charge of all the computer aspects: it was Sam Worthington, in a wheelchair, no less. He was grinning affably and seemed about as happy about the job as my husband was.

Perhaps I was feeling guilty about my glee that the spouse had an attractive sidekick, but the next part of the dream was extremely unpleasant. We lived in an old fixer-upper house in the country (although not our real-life house). I was rooting around in a cluttered room trying to find something when I saw a flash of color. It turned out to be a black-white-yellow-and-red reptile. At first I thought it was a coral snake and went through the little ditty in my head ["red and black, friend of Jack; red and yellow, kill a fellow"] and was alarmed to see that the red stripe was right next to the yellow stripe. Then I noticed that it had legs and thus couldn't be a snake. I was still thoroughly freaked out, though, assuming that it was some kind of equally poisonous "coral lizard". I jumped up on a chair like the stereotypical woman-confronted-with-a-mouse and tried to figure out what to do. There were three big dictionaries within reach, so I figured I could try crushing it with those. I hurled the first one at it, but it landed an inch or so away from the offending beast, prompting it to scuttle away.

Knowing that the "coral lizard" was hidden somewhere in all the junk was even more alarming, and I had no idea what to do. I knew I had to find it and kill it so one of our dogs didn't stumble on it and die (not to mention the humans). Then I looked around (still standing on the chair) and noticed that there were all kinds of big, dangerous-looking scorpions* and other insects on the walls. The whole thing was rather creepy, especially with the added layer of guilt at lusting** after my husband's coworker.

*The scorpions on the walls of my house do have some basis in reality.
**Yet another illustration of how embarrassingly G-rated my dreams tend to be: said "lusting" was really just the idea that he was cute and it would be kind of fun to make small talk with him.

very weird miscellany

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

get thee to a nunnery!

I had an interesting variation on the back-to-school/moving-into-a-dorm dream last night: I dreamed that I was going to be living in a convent! I wasn't actually planning on becoming a nun, but I was planning on living there for a year or so and studying. There were actually two convents side by side. One was modern, with great facilities and possibly a somewhat different theological orientation (although I'm not sure about that; maybe I was just going by the cushier environment). The one I was going to stay in, though, was pretty rudimentary, to the point of not even having hot water (?!). There was some uncertainty at first about which convent was in charge of my course of study, and I was a little disappointed to find that I would be in the primitive one. But then it occurred to me that I could view this as a supplement to my year of intense spiritual study and it would be very bracing and back-to-basics.

My husband* drove me and my belongings there to move into the dorm, and after some confusion about parking, we ended up parking on a nice flagstone patio that I'm pretty sure was not intended for parking (the flower pots and seating were a tip-off). We found my room and I started arranging my things; the rooms were more pleasant than I would have thought after seeing their primitive bathroom setup. My roommate was a Norwegian girl whose blog and flickr stream I sometimes visit, and she seemed very nice, so I was getting excited about my school year.

Just before waking up, I was talking to the person responsible for assigning work in the convent. He was telling me that I would be continuing my present job during the year, but launched into an ominous-sounding spiel about having "reevaluated the salary", and "in view of the present financial situation we have concluded..."--and then I woke up before I could find out how much (or rather how little) they were going to pay me. My husband pushed his snooze button and I tried halfheartedly to get myself back into the dream so I could end the suspense, but it didn't work.


*I find it highly amusing that my husband was cheerfully and supportively dropping me off for a year of separation in a convent.

put this one in your pipe, sigmund....

I had the weirdest [most Freudian?] dream last night, in which, somehow, both I and my mother were married to my husband. Also, in the dream he was prone to picking fights both with random strangers and spouses. The whole thing was very weird, and I could do without having more dreams like it. The only redeeming aspect of the dream was that after my (our?) husband ran off in a snit (because I/we got mad at him for picking fights with random strangers) we consoled ourselves by doing some flea-market shopping.

money problems

I had a really sad dream last night. It was sadder in retrospect than while I was dreaming. My husband and I were breaking up--I say "breaking up" because I think in the dream we weren't actually married. Apparently we had been having a lot of issues (in the dream) about money management and autonomy. The plan was to remain friends and pursue some kind of semi-together-but-not-romantic relationship. I was resigned to it, since in the dream I was worn out from our constant conflicts. I wasn't too sad until we encountered a situation where he needed some kind of little thing--maybe a snack? I was going to buy the item from a convenience store with a couple of dollars in quarters, but he stopped me and told me that if we weren't going to be a couple anymore I had to pay with my card so we could strictly divide expenses. I got rather upset and said, "But for something that costs $2? What if I just want to give it to you as a gift?"

Anyway, it was an unpleasant dream to have not long before waking up. I think that right after that, and just before waking up, I distracted myself by moving on to some clothing-related mini subplot.

Staying Cool

I had a horrible dream last night involving stabbing someone. This was not the first stabbing dream I've had, but I certainly hope it's the last.

The first part of the dream was pretty inoffensive. I was supposed to be going to something referred to as a "charity gala" (yes, really) for some organization my husband was involved with. Once again, I was trying to figure out what to wear. A coworker's husband called and just kept on talking and talking and I was getting frustrated because I couldn't figure out how to get him off the phone so I could get on with my charity gala preparations.

Then I was at resort/hotel with my husband. I think we were there for a convention of some sort (not a charity gala!). The atmosphere was kind of 1960s, which came in handy later. The hotel was on a hillside with a pool overlooking a valley. At some point we were in a sort of auditorium with very steep steps up to the exit. The auditorium was fairly empty, and I think we were among the last to leave. We suddenly found ourselves facing several young guys dressed rather snazzily, who wouldn't let us pass--not overtly threatening at first, then becoming more so.

I realized that we were in some kind of life-threatening situation and it was a matter of us or them. I'm not sure if I grasped the plot against us, but there clearly was one, and these young men were clearly its executors. One of them pulled out a knife, and I either grabbed it from him or somehow produced one of my one. *****Warning: rather graphic stabbing content***** Before I could really think about it, I plunged mine into his abdomen, and here's the worst part: I remembered that in such a situation one was to twist the knife for maximum effectiveness, so I did. It was horrible! Just the same sensation as in the other stabbing dream.

As expected, the young man crumpled to the floor, and his companions ran off, although I figured they were just going for reinforcements. My husband had also had a knife in his hand, one of those utility knives (dark red with stainless steel), and he let it drop to the floor (I don't think he had done any stabbing; maybe some light slashing, but nothing fatal). I thought it was very unwise of him to just leave the incriminating weapon like that, but didn't say anything about it. Instead I carefully wiped off my knife (a burnt-orange Swiss Army knife) on the dead guy's shirt and stashed it away in my bag.

We high-tailed it out of the auditorium and into the adjacent parking garage. We knew we couldn't take our own car and would have to steal one for our getaway. My husband said, "so which car should we take?", to which I replied, "our yellow one, of course". He nodded sagely with an admiring look at my presence of mind.

About then we realized that an even better course of action would be to fly somewhere from the airport (the airport was attached to the resort complex). Our first impulse was to fly back home. We were already at the parting gate, talking to the girl at the counter [this is where the 1960s-era vibe came in handy; there was no security to speak of--also, everyone had 1960s hair and clothes]. Of course I realized that flying back home was the stupidest course of action possible and managed to calmly intercept my husband just as he was opening his mouth to buy tickets and somehow indicate to him that we needed to go somewhere else without exciting the suspicion of the ticket-counter girl. He immediately saw my point and congratulated me for being so smart (!), and proposed that we go to Detroit instead.

So I think I woke up just as I was thinking that Detroit was a pretty smart choice, being somewhat of a modern-day Wild West. Also I thought that with the depressed economy it might be easier to start from scratch there if we ended up having to stay. And then as I was further waking up but not fully awake I moved on to strategies for changing one's appearance fast and convincingly and Staying Cool [I had resisted, in the dream, telling my husband to Stay Cool because I rejected the phrase as too hackneyed, no matter how appropriate to the situation].

extreme changes of mood

I woke up in a great mood yesterday after dreaming several pleasant things (I don't think any of them involved Johnny Depp). The only thing I can really remember was that I had made a lot of headway on a freelance translation career and had been engaged to translate a real book, and a work of fiction at that! I was hopeful that this was going to be a launching pad for a specialization in translating fiction and that I would end up being one of those translators the merits of whose versions get debated in scholarly papers.

Last night's dream was awful. My husband and I had decided to take a little jaunt to Paris. I don't know where we were, but Paris was within driving distance. The only problem was that I wasn't dressed appropriately and couldn't figure out what to wear. I was very flustered and nothing was coming together, although I was pretty sure that my rose-colored turtleneck* needed to figure in somewhere. He got really annoyed really quickly and stormed out to drive away in the car because I was taking too long, ignoring my tearful entreaties to wait.

It turned out that he had only gone for a short drive because he was feeling antsy and didn't want to sit there while I had a closet meltdown, but it was still pretty harrowing. He came back after about 15 minutes, not mad at all, but I think I woke up before we could get to Paris.

*Notable because this is one of the very rare occasions when an item I actually own shows up in a getting-dressed dream.