Snippets

This morning I have a nasty cold--curse distance-run-induced immune-drop, coupled with sleeping only on planes/in airports the next day! Anyway, I ended up sleeping about 11 hours last night, and here are a few of the fragments of dreams I remember:

• I was at the beach with my nuclear family. I had a bunch of stuff on the sand by the shore, including a rolling suitcase, and as the tide came in, my stuff started to get wet. My sister and I went to clean up and change our clothes. There was a little shower up from the water; I remember thinking of it as a "freshwater" shower. We walked down a long hallway to the bathroom, where I waited for her while she got ready.
• At some point, my brother came back down the long hallway, with a new haircut. It was pretty strange--kind of like what you might get if you crossed maybe 90s-era Elton John with Edward the Vampire--but I thought it was cute. I asked who had done it, and he said "Guess." I realized that my sister must have cut it for him in the bathroom. He wasn't exactly thrilled with it, but it had a lot of product in it, so I encouraged him that it would all work out and be attractive.
• I went to my friends' house, and when I got there she was trying to get the baby (much smaller than she is in real life) to sleep. She motioned for me to be quiet and said that she needed me to help, and that I should sit down on the couch. I did, and she put the nearly-sleeping baby into my arms, where she did fall asleep.
• I was online, looking at some sort of strange uber-Facebook/Myspace/iGoogle/blog/chat thing. I was surfing through people's very elaborate, visually overstimulating pages, and realized that my ex-boyfriend was online, too. I could tell this by posts he'd made in the past few minutes, or by the stat counter on my blog, or by comments he'd left on other people's walls. I was online, too, so he could see that. I was thinking about how I maybe felt ready to talk to him again, though I wasn't sure I wanted to take the initiative. I just wanted him to contact me. Then I heard him say, over some strange voice-chat thing, my name, and something to the effect that he knew I was online. I woke up before I had fully decided whether or not I wanted to talk to him.
  

why so much plaid? and why are my dreams always so long and detailed?

I had a between-snooze-function dream this morning that had several threads.

The first thread involved trying to juggle the care of two dogs (to anyone who's talked to me lately, that won't come as a surprise since it's a real-life issue). We were living in a very spartan mid-century concrete house with a fenced yard that seemed divided into several parts, most of which I hadn't been in. We were discussing how to sufficiently exercise the dogs when I remembered that my husband had bought a really nice black vintage-style bike that was parked in the communal parking area, and I suggested that we ride bikes with the dogs so they could run and get more exercise. There was a back-and-forth on whether he had actually bought a bike and then forgotten about it, and whether, if so, the black bike in the parking lot was the one he had bought and not someone else's.

Then, inside the house, my sister and husband were doing an experiment on the effectiveness of Google. They chose as their subject a guy we know who has gone by several different names in his life, and they were comparing the results coming up for each name. One of the results was a video montage of his life, of the sort that people show at graduations and funerals. I only really remember two snippets of it. In the first he was about 12, at a Bar Mitzvah type occasion, wearing a red-and-green plaid jacket and matching plaid bowtie and looking very young and happy. In the other snippet he was adult, very hirsute (bushy hair and beard), and holding forth on some controversial subject in front of a group of people. In this one he was also wearing a loud plaid jacket and an unmatching also-loud plaid scarf. I had the impression that this bit of video was not something that should be readily available and that he might get himself into some sort of Homeland-Security-related trouble over it, not least because the bushy beard made him look like a candidate for profiling.

As we were looking at this video the surroundings changed and we were suddenly in a Target-like clothing store (still at a desk looking at the computer). The store also housed the office where I work, with people's desks mixed in here and there with the merchandise. My coworkers were walking back and forth purposefully, getting engineering-related things done, and my boss had a little office off to the side, the sort that you would imagine the manager of a small store having.

In the dream (and above all in real life), it was time for me to get ready to go to work, but I was reluctant to do the preparatory rituals and I wanted to watch the video of the plaid-clad friend with earphones so I could actually hear what he was going on about. So I went into my boss's office and told him I'd like to take a couple of hours of sick time and come to work later, if that was okay. He readily agreed, and I puttered around the store for a while, most notably running laps back and forth between the racks with the feeling that I was getting some really good exercise [on later reflection I realized that people were giving me really annoyed looks].

Around this time (still in the store) I met a girl with a really interesting sweater she had knitted. It was big and cozy, with a fair-isle pattern over most of it. The sleeves were kind of big and gathered on the shoulders and partway down the front, and she had very cleverly incorporated pockets into the side seams so she could stow away her hands. I really liked the idea and wanted to make a similar one for myself. I also suddenly had a vision of a completely different type of sweater, very much like this one. On thinking about it, the stitch pattern that was in this sweater wouldn't even be possible, but it was very pretty.