ugh and ugh

I've had several unpleasant dreams lately. Here are a couple (breaking them up so as not to overload the tag limit).

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I was on yet another group trip, this time to Hong Kong, with a group made up largely of young and youngish Asian women. We had just arrived, and our first stop was a large park on the top of hill so high it might better be called a mountain. There was a spectacular view, and the mountain/hill itself was covered with green vegetation. The park was very touristy, with a gigantic parking lot, a bus station (we came by bus), and lots of touristy amenities.

Instead of confining ourselves to gawking at the scenery, we were supposed to doing a craft activity. It was one of those very specific, structured projects with little room for individual variation (I think some kind of paper folding was involved). I had been vigorously reproached by the tour guide for my clumsy American lack of politesse, grace, and social nicety, and I was trying desperately to prove my worthiness by perfectly executing the craft project. This backfired on me, though, since as a result of my care I took too long and was still working on it when the rest of the group had finished. Of course the guide was unhappy about my slowness.

After the craft fiasco, we all went to a restaurant to eat lunch. Because I had been so focused on my project, I hadn't changed my money at the nearby exchange kiosk like everyone else had, so I had no Chinese money. Since the whole place was so extremely touristy, I was clinging to the hope that they might accept payment in dollars. On entering the restaurant, which was cafeteria style, I realized that wouldn't be an option, but the extremely nice girl in front of me in line offered to pay and I could pay her back later.

So all seemed to be going reasonably well, until I tripped with my plate of food and spilled it all over. I was confused at this unexpected catastrophe, and went to get a refill. I was so shaken by my showy accident (food went all over) that I didn't stop to think that they would want payment for my replacement food. I guess I consumed it, because the next thing I remember was a confrontation with a cleaver-wielding chef who demanded payment (and not in dollars). He insinuated that I would be pursued by gangsters if I didn't pay up.

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In another unpleasant dream, I was working as a secretary in a large and somewhat weird building. My boss was the woman who in real life is the boss for the business occupying the first two floors of my real-life office building. We all have the impression that she's much stricter than her predecessor, although that's not based on a lot of data.

I was working away, although my job (like my actual, real-life job) didn't require a whole lot. I wasn't actively loafing, so I had no reason to be on the lookout for a scolding of any kind, but the boss came looking for me, extremely angry. She started ranting and raving about how I couldn't "control the infrastructure". I finally realized that she was referring to some cars that were parked illegally downstairs, one in an actual space and a couple in a grassy area next to a sidewalk. None of these cars were in places where I could have seen them from any of the windows--I would have to have been outside, and thus not inside doing my job. I tried to tell her this, but there was no reasoning with her, and she insinuated that I might lose my job over not having called a tow truck*.


*In my real-life job we have limited parking space, and it falls to me to call the tow truck, which I must admit I sometimes do with relish if the car is expensive and parked directly in front of the very visible "no parking" sign. There has been some hinting on the part of a coworker that I'm mean for calling the tow truck (I actually have only called a very few times, and never for very battered, run-down cars that, to my mind, indicate someone operating on less than a full share of resources); other people are perhaps more strict than me regarding cars that don't belong there, so I feel like I'll be seen as not doing my job if I don't deal with it when a car is parked in one of our spots. Apparently this car-towing thing causes me angst than I might have thought.

crocodiles and mobsters cont.

(cont.)

Part 3:

I was now out somewhere with a group of people, including the friend and some random dream characters of a wide range of ages and ethnicities. We were in a big concrete building on an upper floor--it was a very bare, industrial sort of building, all metal and concrete and very Soviet Eastern Europe. We must have been on a guided tour, because we had all entered a rather dodgy-looking restroom (this was part of the tour, not a bathroom break). About that time, I realized that we were being guided in there by Russian mobsters. They did the requisite yelling ("get down! Shut up!" etc.), and I dove into the first available stall. Unfortunately it turned out to not have a door, so my hopes of crouching on the toilet to avoid detection were dashed.

The mobsters singled me out for some reason and yelled something at me. I'm not really clear on what happened next because it was very quick, but I realized that a grenade had been unpinned and it would behoove me to get out of there. I had a very weird sensation of simultaneous extreme fear and complete fearlessness, and for once my dream running was very effective (probably faster and with more coordination than in real life). I ran right past them and out the door to try to get out of range of the grenade.

I dashed out into a hallway and out the door, which led me to a long concrete exterior staircase with no railing (this was probably at about a 5th-floor level). At this point I realized that the bathroom mobsters had let me go knowing that they had companions outside the building who could take me out. I got to the bottom of the stairs and started running across an open space of packed dirt (there were buildings all around similar to the one I'd come out of, all deserted). I knew that there were mobsters around, but I also realized that I had to keep running even though the open space left me vulnerable to being picked off.

At about this point, I think I was caught by one of them, but this is where things got weird. Because when I realized that I was being caught, I also realized that this was a movie dream, and my perspective shifted to outside myself. When it shifted, I saw that I wasn't really me, but a much smaller teenager with long dark hair and bangs. This smaller "me" started belting out a song and I realized, "great, I've gotten myself trapped in a musical". [I'm not a real-life fan of musicals; I find it disconcerting how they burst into song at random times.] I tried to put the movie/dream on fast forward so I wouldn't have to listen to the songs and could get to the end faster, and it worked.

my subconscious is an overachiever

Think of the creepiest, most icky, bound-to-stick-with-you-and-resurface-when-you-don't-want-it-to dream that you can think of, not involving violence. Now see if it comes close to this:

I dreamed that I found out my mother was a hermaphrodite.

I don't see how it could get much more traumatic than that and not involve violence.

And then the other night I dreamed about being pursued by the mafia. I performed a lot of daring gymnastic stunts that I would never be able to do in real life, including but not limited to climbing down the face of a balconied apartment building. That's really all I remember, but it went on for quite a while and was very scary. Also, food was involved somehow--I think the mafia were pursuing me over some kind of restaurant-business secret.

mafia!

Last night's dream was the scariest in recent memory. Somehow my husband and I had gotten embroiled in the Mafia. I don't know how it happened, but we had been roped into helping them safeguard a huge amount of money. The money was stuffed in one of those bank envelopes* and put into a safe deposit box in a very fancy little bank, and we had the combination.

There were a lot of complicated details involved in the deal, but it was coming to a close and it was time for them to retrieve their money. I had been supposing that our involvement with them would end at the time they took the money away, but it was slowly dawning on me that we were in a very dangerous situation: we knew what they had done, and it wouldn't be wise of them to leave us around on blind trust that we wouldn't spill it to anyone.

The main three or so guys showed up at our house (a second-story apartment) with wives, children and aged relatives in tow. They were all milling around, the guys with gigantic firearms, and it seemed like the big crowd was a show of force. One of the Big Shots gestured to me and said that his wife was now going to give me instructions on how they were going to retrieve the money. She was a nondescript, skinny, washed-out blond with messy shoulder-length hair** and an air of resignation--like she might once have objected to all this mafia stuff but had become hardened over the years and was now not at all likely to help me get out of the almost-inevitable rubbing-out. She gave me a rundown of the procedures and asked me for the combination for the deposit box. I thought desperately, "Hey! I'll give them a made-up code and then we can go get the money for ourselves and run off with it." Then I realized that 1) the minute I had that thought, I simultaneously forgot the actual code; 2) she probably was asking me as a test--they couldn't possibly have been so stupid as to not take note themselves of the code; 3) my "forgetting" the code was going to look really suspicious. I recited a number that sounded familiar, but I said that I wasn't sure I was remembering it right. To try to look cooperative I said, "What happens if it's not right? You'll still be able to get it from the bank, right? Because I'm sorry, I'm really not sure if I'm remembering it right, and I can't find the paper I wrote it on." She just gave me an inscrutable look, which freaked me out even more.

The wife went off somewhere else, and the three or four Main Men lined up in a line in our dining room. They raised their huge machine guns toward the ceiling, and everyone reacted in a way that indicated that this was a traditional mafia way of celebrating the clenching of a deal. They fired several rounds into the ceiling, which I could see really made my husband mad (up until this, he had been somewhat excited about working with the mafia and impressed with their Coolness, which annoyed me because he was being juvenile and foolish; now I could see him mentally calculating the cost of replacing the drywall).

After that the extended family members started leaving. I saw the wife who had given me the instructions, and her hair had changed from messy, youngish and unintimidating to a frosted, stiff helmet. I thought that didn't bode well for our survival and that it was symbolic of a hardening of her attitude [for some reason I was still hoping that she might be the key, maybe convincing her husband to let us go].

The emptier the house got, the more freaked-out I was, because the main mafiosi were still hanging around in the dining room, glowering and posturing with their guns. There were still some scattered relatives around, and I realized that when they were gone the mafiosi were going to rub us out in a hail of gunfire. I briefly thought about trying to hide in the oven, in case the metal walls would be protective, but that was hardly the solution since they were practically in the kitchen [and for numerous other reasons that didn't occur to my dream incarnation; the only other objection I had to the oven idea was that the bullets would make shrapnel of the metal and the shrapnel would kill me if the bullets didn't].

My husband had disappeared into the bathroom just after the ceiling-strafing ceremony, and I went and knocked on the door. It seemed like he was either in the shower or getting ready to take a shower, and he didn't want to let me in. I persevered and opened the door a crack to see him dancing exuberantly and without a care in the world, in a pair of "eurotrash"-y jeans that he had gotten from the mafia guys, apparently having gotten over his anger about the bullet-riddled ceiling. I was really annoyed, and desperate to communicate the urgency of the situation. I said, "They're going to kill us!"***

He was pretty unimpressed. I tried to go very quickly through the whole scenario so he would see that the only logical outcome was that we were going to die if we didn't leave right now. I knew we didn't have much time, but saw that he was determined to keep dancing in the bathroom and then take a shower. I finally said I was going to try to get away, adding "I'm so scared I want to take a gun". I hoped that would finally alert him to the danger, since he knows I hate guns and wouldn't want to carry one unless it was really necessary. He seemed excited that I was taking an interest in weaponry and said, "Oh, in that case take the pistol. That's the best option for you." [Apparently we had a stash of guns in our freezer.]

I woke up around then, completely freaked out and also feeling guilty that I was going to bail out and leave him there to face an almost certain rubbing-out at the hands of the mafia guys.

*How can it have been that much if it fit in that small envelope? I'm disappointed in your reasoning process, subconscious!
**Interesting detail: all of the mafia women had the same shade of washed-out blond hair.
***Actually, I remember it was a mixture of French and English: "Ils vont nous SHOOT!" I think I was thinking they wouldn't understand French--so why did I say "shoot", the most tipping-off word of the sentence, in English?

[Once again, here I am using all the unsavory labels.]

even my snippets are crime-related

Sometime during the night I dreamed that my daffodil bulbs in a pot had started to bloom, and they turned out to actually be hyacinths. They were several different colors and types, and they smelled so good.

Then just before waking up I dreamed that I was driving a car and planning to navigate by memory in southern California. I was pretty confident I could do it, but I wondered if I should buy a map just in case. There was a guy making a left turn onto the street where I was, and I knew he was a Russian mobster.

Helena Heavyhole! Snakehead here!

{This has nothing to do with dreams, but I tried to post here yesterday and found to my dismay that Blogger was turning everything I typed into my choice of south Asian languages--I could choose from Tamil, Urdu, Malayalam, and several others that I can't remember now, but it wouldn't leave it in English. It sounds like a dream, but I swear I was awake.}

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Now for the dreams. I've had very few "movie dreams" (in which the dream is a movie), but I've had two in a row recently. The first one was extremely jumbled and irrational (an experimental movie?). There was a child version of Gael Garcia Bernal, and the movie was dealing with his relationship with his mother. At various points in the movie his mother was:

1) a young handicapped girl who somehow healed herself by The Power of [Love/ Magical Thinking/ Ambition/ Creativity/ whatever] to become a dancer (this featured a stop-motion transformation scene in which she moved forward and morphed from a tiny crippled dwarf into a beautiful, normal girl dancing ballet).

2) a somewhat homely young woman obsessed with the idea of being a celebrity. This featured a dream/imagination scene in which she entered a room and imagined herself being accosted by smarmy reporters; this was indicated by her saying in a forced deep voice [in the role of Smarmy Reporter No. 1] "Helena Heavyhole! Snakehead here!" [she being Helena Heavyhole and Snakehead being SR No. 1].

3) an elegant, attractive older woman headed to her job as curator of an archaeological museum in Mexico City. The museum was really beautiful, sort of an Art Deco reprisal of something Aztec, in white plaster with gold-leaved carved decorations. She was climbing up a set of shallow steps when it became clear that she was about to fall down stricken by a stroke. I think the other two portrayals of her came into play as she was falling down, in a sort of slow-motion montage.

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This morning's dream movie was a little more straightforward. Robert DeNiro was an aging Mafia godfather struggling to retain his hold on his gang. He lived in what appeared to be one of those historical museum recreations of a village (at one point he passed a blacksmith who greeted him--this was an obvious way of showing that over the years he had gained respect as the de facto head of the village).

Things are coming to a head, and Mr. DeNiro leaves his house somewhat incognito in a sweatshirt and baseball cap (it's obvious that he's showing he still has an ample supply of courage and daring by going out unaccompanied when mutiny is afoot). He passes the blacksmith and goes down the hill to a sort of family pavilion on the lake. As he approaches it, the light changes (golden glow and all that) and there's a flashback to Happier Times, a birthday party for his mother in the pavilion. When he gets there the flashback ends and reveals that there are some of his fellow mafiosi there waiting for him, along with a couple of hired Young Toughs (not mafiosi and the viewer immediately recognizes them as ignoble mercenaries willing to Do Anything for a Buck, No Honor, etc.). He has a brief, somewhat tense exchange with the mafiosi when the viewer becomes aware that there are two large barrels there that obviously contain explosives. One of the Young Toughs drops a cigarette on the water, and a layer of oil on it ignites. DeNiro starts to run away, knowing that the whole place is about to explode.

He makes it up the hill and hides behind a building while the lakeside pavilion and dock goes up in a huge explosion, then ducks into the nearest house. He follows some kind of circuitous route through plumbing/utility areas of the building, ending up in the home of a young mafioso (who isn't there but soon shows up). He conceals himself in various parts of the house before becoming aware that his daughter (played by Saffron Burrows) is arriving for a tryst with the young mafioso. To avoid detection he ends up having to take refuge in a tiny old Airstream type camper that's been converted into a bathroom. This young mafioso is obviously into interior decoration and has used lots of frilly valance type curtains in the camper/bathroom. He's apparently not as into privacy, though, because said curtains don't cover the windows at all, and DeNiro (now so convincing that the viewer thinks she herself is the one in the trailer/bathroom) has to scrabble around making makeshift window coverings of various seventies print pillowcases, which show a tendency to slide off the rods even when clothes-pinned on.

At this point my alarm clock went off.

{At some point I'm going to resign myself to being the one who adds all the actor/celebrity tags. For now I'm consoling myself that they were appearing *as actors in movies* and as such don't really count as Celebrity Dreams. Right?}

al pacino et al

I had a really surreal dream this morning between punches on the snooze button. I dreamed that my husband and I were walking down a downtown street in some large city. We saw a group of people and realized that it was a mafia funeral procession (which I immediately knew meant more impending bloodshed). Before we could get out of there, we were recognized and coat-tailed by Al Pacino (who was surprisingly short). He started walking arm in arm with us toward our house, talking about how from now on we would be doing each other lots of favors.

At another point in the dream, there was a song-and-dance number performed by a variety of racist neighborhood residents who were protesting the "invasion" of their neighborhood by Asian immigrants. The ones who really stand out in my mind were a particularly vehement grandmother who swore she wouldn't step outside her house until the immigrants were gone, and a couple of annoying teenage male twins with hipster haircuts who made lots of half-hippy-half-gangster hand gestures.

There was another episode involving a fish who had been given to us by a neighbor who turned out to be a "world-renowned seafood chef" (thanks to Top Chef for influencing my dreams!). He had been fishing and given us a tagged fish, which apparently was somehow still alive and started flopping around scarily on our balcony after escaping its bucket.

Oh, and Humbert Humbert later made an appearance, reading "Lolita" (in German?) to a bearded female teenager who was sitting on his lap.