Day Eff-ay

I had a very vivid dream the other night that, on a whim, I decided that we should go on a trip to Mexico city with my mom and grandma (undoubtedly influenced by their impending visit). Accordingly, mom, grandma, myself, and BNB headed off to Mexico City (in the dream I was thinking of it as Distrito Federal (D-F, "day eff-ay").

Upon our arrival, we were ferried to our hotel in a taxi. As we stood around admiring the exterior, which was very lush and tropical with an impressive waterfall, my mom's cell phone rang. It was my grandma, who had apparently mistakenly got back into a taxi and had ended up back at the airport.

I insisted on going to fetch her, pointing out that neither BNB nor my mom had the remotest grasp of Spanish, whereas I could at least stumble along enough to be understood. I snagged a taxi and as we drove away, I decided that the way to get the driver to hurry up would be to tell him the long, involved story of our decision to vacation in Mexico D.F., and how my grandma managed to get lost.

In the dream, I was attempting to do all of this in Spanish, but I noticed that my brain was working very slowly and I was having trouble with words and verbs that I know quite well.

With Grandma rescued, we returned to the hotel. I know there was more after this, included a trip to a rural area and a sojourn in the home of a tall, thin, very intense woman. But those details are hazy.

border adventure!

I had the most exhausting and ridiculous dream last night. I dreamed that, with Curly Sue and another real-life friend, I was going to try to sneak across the U.S.-Mexico border by rafting across the river. At no point was it clear whether we were trying to get from Mexico to the U.S. or from the U.S. to Mexico, or even why we were crossing clandestinely (a lot of things in this dream weren't clear).

At the beginning, I was trying to pack my things to go. I had it in my head that I needed to fit everything necessary for 8 months or so into a small backpack, besides my share of the necessary stuff for the trip itself--tent, blow-up raft, life jacket, food, etc. All my possessions were disorganized and all over the floor of a room in my parents' house (different than my parents' house in real life). I was preparing for an academic year in a dorm atmosphere, so I was thinking about what I would need in that situation and including all kinds of not-strictly-necessary things like a tin of colored drawing pencils. I was also concerned about the mess I would be leaving behind, all the disorganized stuff that I wouldn't be taking with me.

After this packing stress went on for a while (forever, seemingly), I finally realized that this was just a trip to Establish a Presence, and that I was going to be able to retrieve more belongings later (what?), not to mention that wherever I was going was bound to have stores to buy things in. So this threw off my whole strategy and I had to start all over. By this time my traveling companions were pretty much ready to go, so knowing that I was holding them up added to the stress.

I ended up finally just throwing a change of clothes and what I thought was my share of the supplies into my bag, and we got ready to go through the security checkpoint (what? again). This was manned by U.S. agents, although, again, I'm not sure where we were leaving and where we were entering, or why (even better question) we were going through security and THEN sneaking over the border. The security procedure was onerous and there were lots of annoying, noisy kids running around underfoot.

We finally made it through, and then I realized that the river looked pretty wide, deep, and fast, and that I hadn't actually packed my life jacket. At this point, I think my companions' patience was running quite thin, especially after the whole security-checkpoint experience, so I decided to get a life jacket at the first opportunity instead of being picky.

The first opportunity turned out to be a ramshackle taco/life jacket/whatever else stand. They wanted $40 to rent a worn-out orange clip-in-the-front life jacket, to be returned the next day. I tried to find out what would happen if I didn't return it, but they were evasive on that point. Then I bought a taco, which turned out to be one somewhat undersized tortilla and one seriously undersized tortilla (silver dollar-sized), with about 6 bits of ground beef and a smear of vile-looking sauce (all this warmed up in a microwave). I was indignant and tried to protest to the seller, but my Spanish came out all wrong in my indignation (even including some French words), and the guy just laughed at me scornfully. (The guy manning this shady operation was a stout middle-aged Mexican guy with a distinct air of doing business with the wrong people, so I didn't rant for too long.)

After that, my companions revealed that they had been looking at the map to plan our route and had decided that the best strategy to avoid detection was to circle around--waaay around. The proposed route would include a trip through Big Bend, and we were going to take our giant SUV, so at least we could sleep inside it.

On that note, I think we decided we needed a real meal before undertaking the next leg of the trip, because the last thing I remember was a plate with some kind of chicken-fried-steak type meat atop a small mound of mashed potatoes. I was disconcerted because it wasn't the type of meal that fit in with the whole Texas/Mexico border theme, but I was also happy for something more substantial than the so-called "taco" from the stand.

sounds even more depressing than it was

Last night I dreamed that I was on vacation in Mexico with my husband (no reference to flu or drug warfare). We had recently arrived and we were at a gas station to gas up our rental car, some kind of big, new, fancy boatlike car. I went inside the convenience store and had a couple of encounters I can't remember with random dream people I can't remember. It took up some time, and I was getting anxious to get my snacks and get out of there when I ran into a lady from my parents' church. She's a very talkative lady in real life, but not someone I ever knew very well. She started talking and talking, and pulled out a couple of hideously ugly brightly-colored handmade action figures. At least one of them was an ape in colorful clothing, and they were made of some sort of rubbery material that she had sculpted herself. I was a little grossed-out because you could see her fingerprints in the material (they couldn't be erased because it had "set"). She started talking about how she would love to sell them and had been thinking about trying etsy. I told her she should go for it, because who was I to crush her dreams, and besides, there could very well be a market for that sort of thing. She wanted to ask me a lot of questions about how selling on etsy worked, but I was getting anxious because my husband was making very impatient gestures from outside [the rental car had morphed into an older, dirtier, still-boatlike car and changed from black to white]. I was looking for something to write down a website address for her on, but didn't succeed because I had too many different objects in my hands.

I finally gave up and ran out of the store, but it was too late--my husband had given up and left without me. I was sad and frustrated and stressed, and somehow I ended up in a different car, driving home on a country road* because somehow in leaving with the rental car he had caused us to be in two different countries, and I was just going to miss the vacation and have to stay home until he got back.


*with hazardously slow drivers, just like my own route home except more extreme. I had to dodge 25-mph-ers like it was a video game.

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?}