Dear Stress, Let's Break Up

I think this was a stress dream.  I'm a college senior and things have been a little overwhelming lately.  On the last day of the semester before the holidays, I got sick.  I had a fever for 2 days, a cold for 2 days, and then felt very woozy on the fifth day.  The next week was fine, and I got to enjoy the lack of responsibility.  The third and final week before school - my heat went out, I lost a tooth, and had to have a locksmith come out to fix my doorknobs.  The following week I went back to school and was immediately overwhelmed with the massive amount of work I'll have to do this semester.  It's all been very stressful.

*******

I was at home trying to get some homework done when there was a knock at the front door.  It was a handyman, and he got right to work.  Whatever he was doing was noisy, and I couldn't focus on my homework.  I'd gone grocery shopping earlier in the day and had a few things I hadn't gotten around to putting away yet sitting on the table.  I'm not sure what the handyman was fixing, but he wasn't working in the kitchen.  For some reason, I asked him if the groceries were in his way.  He came in to look at them and said no, but that I really needed to put the cleaning solution away so that my children wouldn't get into it.  I told him that I didn't have any children, but that I would put it away anyway.  I opened the cupboard door under the kitchen sink and discovered a puddle of water.  I stared at it for several seconds, then decided I needed to contact a plumber.  I sat down on a chair in the living room with a cell phone and phone book.  After making a few phone calls, I looked down at the cell in my hands.  It was an older version flip phone.  I thought to myself, "I am clearly not one of the cool kids with a cell phone like this!"  

*******

And that was that!

We need to talk, but first let's make pies!

No one has posted here in a long while, so I thought that I would, and hopefully other people will start to again as well.

My father passed away about 3.5 years ago.  Every now and again, I'll see him in a dream.  He almost never says anything and often seems to just be in the background observing.  This is my most recent dream that included him.  He was wearing the jean jacket and the hat that my mom gave me after his death.

*****

I was in the kitchen doing something (not sure what exactly) when I heard someone knocking on my door from the garage.  I opened the door and found my mom standing there wearing one of my lacy, see through summer shirts and no jacket in the middle of winter.  Her red corvette (that she had Y-E-A-R-S ago) was parked in my garage.  I was wondering where my car was and how she got her car into my garage without the garage door opener.  She pushed her way in and said that we needed to talk, but first she needed to make pies.  

I don't really remember her actually making the pies, mostly I just remember them being almost finished and about ready to bake.  She made about 5 of them.  While she was working, I asked her what was so important that she needed to discuss.  She said she wouldn't get into it until after the pies were done baking.  I looked out the kitchen window and saw my dad sitting on a lawn chair out in the back yard in the snow.  I didn't see his face, just his back, but I knew it was him.  I asked my mom why my dad didn't come into the house.  I don't remember her answer, but that's the last thing I remember before waking up.   

scary rednecks

I may be having another run of unpleasant dreams, because I had one last night that was really scary, although it probably won't sound scary. Trust me, it was terrifying.

I was out somewhere in the country with some members of my family. I don't remember exactly who was there other than my mother, but I think my sister, grandmother, and some other random people were with us (yeah, I guess it counts as a group trip). I was walking by myself down a very narrow, deserted country road. It was very pretty, running between wide fields on one side and a hillside on the other, and I was completely relaxed (I think I was even picking wildflowers).

I wasn't expecting a car to come along, so when one did I was completely taken off guard. I didn't even see it until it was level with me, and the road was so narrow that it brushed me as it went past (very slowly). I wasn't too alarmed until I noticed that not only had they slowed way down when they passed me, but they were coming to a complete stop. The driver and passenger got out, and I saw that they were a couple. Normally this would reassure me, but they were horrifying, very Menacing-Redneck-from-a-horror-movie*. The man was tall and skinny with stringy blond hair and a trucker cap, and the woman was one of those skinny, withered long-term smokers/drinkers/druggers of indeterminate age. They were both very weathered, but the woman was a bit more horrifying, with big, buggy, glassy gray eyes.

I couldn't figure out why they were after me or what they intended to do with me, but they were clearly on the hunt. They chased me around the car several times, although how they didn't catch me I don't know, since I was doing that extreme slow-motion heavy-limb running that always happens in scary dreams.

I don't remember how I managed to elude them, but the next thing I can remember is being in a car with my various family members and still being terrified and traumatized. They didn't really take it seriously, since they hadn't been there to face the redneck specters. One interesting detail of this car ride is that I was in the passenger's seat, but my mother, who had previously been driving, was in the back seat. She said, "oh, it's no big deal, just steer from the passenger's seat"**. I wondered how I was supposed to deal with braking and shifting from the passenger's seat, but I think the car just rolled to a stop without any problems.

The next thing I remember is arriving at a house, still with assorted family members in tow. We were all hungry and needed to eat, but for some reason a restaurant wasn't a consideration. We had uncooked food, so we just entered a house (inhabited) and I went straight to the kitchen and started heating water***. Some of my party voiced misgivings with this, but I waved it off like taking over someone's kitchen without permission was a perfectly acceptable thing to do. I think I was still under the impression that my trauma with the rednecks gave me carte blanche to do whatever necessary for survival.


*It probably sounds from these dreams like I watch a lot of horror movies; I don't, but the ones I have tend to stick around in my subconscious. And at least 75% of them seem to feature Scary Rednecks.
**I've had this dream before, realizing that I'm in the passenger's seat of a moving vehicle with no one in the driver's seat. It's pretty obvious what that means, although I don't like the sounds of it. But frankly, I'm not sure I want to dig too deep into this new twist (my mother vacating the driver's seat). Seems a bit too Freudian for comfort.
***Wait a minute, I've dreamed this before too, except that my parents were the ones advocating breaking and entering, and I was the voice of reason.

Chico The Chihuahua

i go through phases with dreams.  i won't remember any at all for a very long time and then suddenly i'll start remembering them again.  and the ones i do remember are usually really odd.  like a recent one i just had where i went camping and some guy from dunkin doughnuts stopped by to deliver pancakes to us every morning.  'cuz yeah, i'm pretty sure that's a service they offer!
two nights ago i dreamt that i'd been gone all day and when i came home, i found some guy in my kitchen.  it wasn't someone i recognized from real life but i guess i knew him in my dream as i didn't seem surprised to see him.  anyways, he had my little chico on a cookie sheet and was getting ready to put him in the oven.  chico was just standing there on the cookie sheet with his little tail just a waggin'!  i told the guy no, i didn't want my little dog cooked and he said, "relax, i do this all the time!"  i woke up after that and made sure my little dog was still alive.
last night i dreamed I had some woman and her two kids over.  again, not sure who the woman was as i didn't recognize her from real life but i seemed to be friends with her in the dream.  so we're sitting there talking at my kitchen table when i realized that i hadn't seen chico in awhile.  i went to go check on him and discovered that he had broken his leg.  i was really upset and trying to clean up the blood that was coming out of his leg.  i told the woman one of her son's had hurt my dog but she didn't seem to be overly concerned about it.  i was upset by her attitude and told her i needed to take my dog to the vet and that she needed to pay for it since her son did this.  she didn't want to leave though, she wanted me to sit so we could talk some more.
i don't know where shiver (my other chihuahua) was in these dreams.  i really hope these dreams aren't a forewarning of something to come.  they were really bothersome.

trout fishing

I had some snippets the other night:

• I was on a trip with my parents, sister, grandmother and husband to Italy. We needed to find a place to stay, and everyone was embroiled in discussion about whether the place we had found was acceptable (it was one big room with summer-camp-style single beds) or whether we should try to find another place even though it was getting a little late. Instead of enjoying the fact that I was in Italy, all I could think of was what a pain the trip was going to be if every day involved so much negotiation and discussion.
• I was rooting around in a refrigerator that looked exactly like our refrigerator currently does in real life: haphazardly stuffed with bags of produce of varying age. This tired me out and disgusted me in its blatant imitation of the more prosaic aspects of my life.
• I was at work, and my boss wanted me to knit a few things. One of them was a sleeve-like object, and there was also a swatch or two. I'm not sure what these were to be used for, but it was apparently a critical part of a project (projects where I work have absolutely nothing to do with textiles of any sort). I was really stressed, but I couldn't think of a way to tell him that his expectations were unrealistic and I would never have time to finish knitting the things.

When I got to work I told my boss about the knitting dream, and he countered by saying that he had dreamed that he had a trout stream running through his house. His wife, though, was tired of trout and told him he needed to find a neighbor's house with a salmon stream (apparently all the houses in his neighborhood had fully stocked in-house streams).

Swinging

The best snippet of last night's dream, and maybe of this year's dreams to date, was me swinging on a rope swing. I don't know what it was attached to, but it was something very high and the rope was very long. As I swung out in a curving arc, hands clenched around the rope, I saw things far below me, as if I were in an airplane. I was going relatively slowly, but centrifugal force was pulling the rope outward. There was a sense of danger (I knew I had to hold on tightly), but also of complete exhilaration, like I was flying. It was incredible.

In another snippet, I realized I wasn't eating well because I was afraid of opening my refrigerator.

Alice In Wonderland

My friend came to pick me up and I told her I couldn't leave because I could only find one shoe. It was raining outside and I didn't want my feet to get wet. Finally she got frustrated with me and told me we were going to be late so to just bring the shoe with me.

She dropped me off at an old co-worker's house. In real life, this co-worker was someone that I had only worked with for just a couple of weeks and never really got a chance to know very well so I'm not sure why she would invite me to her house. I walked in and noticed that the entire house, floor to ceiling was covered in carpeting. After a quickie tour of her her home, I asked if I could use the bathroom because I still needed to put my shoe on. She told me I could use the one in the attic but I needed to squeeze through this hole to get through to the other side.

I climbed through and found myself in a restaurant. Everyone seemed to think I was their waitress and they were all quite upset with me. Some people were yelling because they hadn't gotten their food, others felt they'd waited too long for their bill, others wanted their drinks, etc. I walked around and found what I thought was the kitchen and found something else instead.

There seemed to be some kind of gathering of people here and I remember in the dream thinking that it was a dance but really, no one was dancing. People were just standing around socializing and having a good time. My mother was there but my father wasn't. I didn't recognize anyone else and my mother didn't seem to notice me there.

Every now and again I would look out the window and I'd see my deceased grandfather. He'd always smile and wave at me. I met him a few times although I never really got to know him growing up. At one point he seemed to be trying to show me something only I never quite caught on to what he was trying to tell me.

I'd like to think my grandfather was telling me he was watching over me and just saying "hi"