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.