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.

movie dream

I had a weird "movie" dream last night (one of those where the story isn't really about you and seems to be like experiencing a movie instead of watching it). All I really remember was a marital-infidelity storyline. A woman with heavy eye makeup and almost-80s-style braided hair had discovered her husband having an affair when they both [husband and wife] happened to be in the same hotel in Vietnam, unbeknownst to each other. The husband questioned how she could have found out, and there was a flashback to the wife (still with very heavy eye makeup) swimming in an infinity pool at a hotel. Then the camera panned to the man, cavorting with a January Jones lookalike. The wife slowly swam over to get a better view, practically next to them, but the dallying couple was oblivious to her presence. Then she went upstairs to her room, visibly disturbed. There were some interesting interior decoration/architectural details like openwork walls/screens, and the lighting was moodily done.

Then there was another storyline that was no longer a movie, about a neighboring house burning down. We lived somewhere in the deep south, and everything was very soggy, so I'm not sure how the house managed to burn down so completely while wet.

making out! arrows! squirrels!

I think I'm stressed about having to sell a car, because I had yet another straying-husband dream last night. I hadn't had any of these for ages, but now this is the second one recently. There wasn't a lot of detail, but apparently he had "made out" (really, those were his words) with some girl "for an hour", and she had then written her phone number (sloppily! bad handwriting!), once on the side of his stomach, with an arrow pointing down in the general direction of his privates, and once on the side of his neck with an arrow pointing toward his ear.

There weren't a lot of other details, but somehow I had to confront the girl in a dingy room with my parents and a bunch of frat boys. The frat boys were laughing at me while guzzling beers; the girl started crying (and consequently made me feel guilty) and saying she didn't know he was married; and my mother told my husband to kiss this other girl (I was shocked and then she said, very dramatically, "You are kissing her goodbye!").

Of course this gets me a little bit of sympathy from him when I recount them, but these are getting old! I'm tired of waking up grumpy.

On a more positive (surreal?) note, my mother told me she had a dream about my grandmother turning into a squirrel.

crime and punishment

I had a terrible dream last night--I dreamed that my husband and I were on vacation and driving a rented truck (don't know why) into a grassy parking lot to retrieve our own truck. When we got in sight of our own truck, we saw that someone was breaking into it. We didn't want to let on that it was our vehicle because we didn't want to provoke any violence, so we turned around and left to call the police. For some reason the would-be thief jumped onto the running board of our rental truck and tried to get in (provoking one of those racing-to-lock-the-door-but-my-fingers-won't-move-fast moments). I guess he fell off, because the next thing I can remember is that we had taken refuge in an unoccupied house. We had locked all the doors when I realized that the miscreant (joined now by his wife!) had climbed up on a porch roof in front of a second-story window and were getting ready to crawl in the window. My only option was to push them both off the roof, so I did, and they landed with a splat on the ground. I was extremely upset about having killed someone, even in self-defense, and started crying hysterically (including something about how the woman was really beautiful and I wished I hadn't had to kill her, and I was afraid people would think I'd killed her because she was beautiful). A policeman who came to check on the crime scene said that she had been killed immediately, but it looked to him like her husband hadn't died immediately.

Oh, it was awful! I hardly ever have gruesome dreams like that.

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A less gruesome but still neurotic dream is this one I had the other morning, in two parts. The first part was something I've dreamed variations of before. I was with my husband at some wedding-type event involving public sit-down eating, and he fell immediately and obviously in love with some girl that was there. She was cute enough, and she seemed like a nice, well-adjusted person, but she had extremely hairy arms! Not hairy in a normal girl-with-hairy-arms way--she had fuzz standing up at least 3/4 of an inch on her upper arms, like a halo. It didn't seem to affect his regard for her, though, because he sat down beside her, forcing me to sit on the other side of her and try to act serene and secure while she held forth on what a wonderful friend Sean Penn was (another question--what are all these celebrities doing in my dreams lately?).

So I woke up grumpy and insecure, and since I had time before work I went back to sleep and dreamed about seducing a scientist. He and a colleague were setting up for a reenactment of one of "the early microwave parties"*, I saw him, and that was pretty much all it took for him to fall head-over-heels for me. Ha! Retribution!

*These were apparently house parties held in the early-to-mid eighties at which the two scientists demonstrated their innovative microwave/computer prototype. Although looking back, this guy would have only been about 15 at the time, so there must have been a logistical error in my dream.

posting on behalf of my better half

my husband doesn't know i'm posting this, and i hope that he won't care! ;)

he told me that he slept terribly last night, thanks to me. in his dream we were at an outdoor party. i was outside talking to another man. my husband was inside the home, but standing at the door watching me (spying in my opinion). he said he heard me saying to this man "you can't do that, my husband is here" and then he leaned over to kiss me.

in the dream we broke up. like that's it... the end of our marriage.