more celebrity appearances

Well. I'm tempted to restate my lack of real interest in celebrities, but since they keep showing up, I guess it would sound like a case of "doth protest too much". Here are the latest two cameo appearances.

The other night I dreamed that I was transitioning to a group living arrangement (of course). I suppose I was in school, because it was rather dorm-like, but I don't remember the details. I was supposed to be sharing accommodations with Chloe Sevigny, which startled me a little--didn't she have enough money to live in a place of her own? After my initial surprise, I thought she might be an interesting roommate. She seemed interesting, nice enough, and I figured she would probably have interesting taste and introduce me to interesting people. Being an introvert who has a hard time meeting people, the idea of a built-in source of acquaintances appealed to me.

I was still in the process of beginning to move my possessions in when Chloe presented me with an itemized rundown of all the food that she estimated I'd consumed or would consume within a certain time period. This included groceries and eating out, and I was floored by her attention to detail. It was all listed by item, estimated serving size, and price--including estimated tax. The estimated-tax part rankled me a little, and I started to think that maybe her financial fastidiousness was going to be a pain.

++++++++++++++++++

I'm not completely sure who last night's cameo was. It was either Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler, or a hybrid thereof. My husband and I were in the process of establishing ourselves in yet another group-living arrangement* (sharing a house, I think; we had our own space, at least, but it was within a larger dwelling). We had pretty much settled in, and our dogs--our real-life Doberman and a dream German Shepherd--had too, making themselves comfortable on a top bunk that our Doberman would never be able to jump up on. Despite some climate-control issues (no heat?), it was a fairly comfortable arrangement, and we took a break with a movie.

The movie was some kind of comedy featuring a gone-to-seed boys' band. They were singing a semi-choreographed song in which they wandered around a vacant lot. The lyrics included something about "until my hips get soft", which puzzled me--I wasn't sure if it was meant to be a sexy double-entendre or a wry commentary on their age (they were all 40-/50-something). They were dressed in either jeans/black leather getups or track suit/gold jewelry ensembles, and the Ben Stiller/ Adam Sandler hybrid sported a spectacularly ugly hairdo: slightly bleached (orangey) dark hair on top, curly but brushed out to fluffiness, and a darker, gelled longer layer (mulletlike but equally long all around) consisting of tiny, bouncy little curls. I was transfixed by its ugliness.



*WHAT is UP with this? What unconscious fixation keeps making me dream about group living arrangements? Am I going to have to join a kibbutz to exorcise this?

the mechanics of dream crying

I had the saddest dream last night. So sad, in fact, that I woke myself up crying (or maybe the dog barking woke me up; it was simultaneous). My husband and I were living (with other people, of course--I couldn't possibly have a dream in which I don't live in a group arrangement) in a rooftop apartment. It was really just a small box-shaped one-room building with extremely low ceilings, on top of the flat roof of an older building. I think the building itself contained a mixture of offices and apartments, and it wasn't in great shape.

We had been out and about and were returning home, if you can call such a living arrangement "home". It had been raining, and as we neared the top of the stairs leading to the roof, I noticed water pouring down the stairs from the rooftop. I made a note to let the building manager know (incidentally, the same guy who manages the building at my real-life office). It didn't really occur to me to be worried until we came out onto the roof and saw that it was completely flooded, almost up to the wall around the edges, which was about six feet tall. We could still walk through the water easily, but it was threatening to fill up the apartment to roof level. When we went inside, everyone was confusedly trying to gather up their things to evacuate. I looked around for our dogs with an increasingly sinking feeling. I asked someone about them, and just as they started to answer I brushed up against what was obviously one of their bodies floating around under the surface of the water*.

Of course no one had thought or had time to rescue our dogs, and it was terrible to think about them struggling to keep their heads above water in the middle of the crowded bunkbed setup (the room was filled with bunkbeds like a summer camp). I felt terrible realizing that if we had been there we could easily have gotten them out of there, and terrible in a different way thinking that if the roof had had proper drainage this wouldn't have happened at all.

I've always kind of wondered about the mechanics of crying in dreams, in those cases where you wake yourself up sobbing violently--how long are you actually crying in "real time" (it always seems to me like I cry for hours in the dream), and are real tears coming out? I still have no conclusion, but found it interesting that I woke up with tears in my eyes (but not streaming down my face) after what seemed like ages of crying. I also woke up slowly enough to note that I was gasping, sob-like, but my sleeping partner is a heavy enough sleeper that I've never been able to get an outside observation of whether I'm actually sobbing or just gasping.

Anyway, it was a harrowing dream, and I was very glad to hear the dogs barking when I woke up from it.


*This seems like a weird detail, that they would be floating around at a 3' depth, but I don't know enough about the physics of water and dog corpses to say whether it's really inaccurate. Another weird physics-related detail was that after we had removed the dog corpses from the flooded rooftop I was carrying them around in a garbage bag, casually slung over my shoulder--all 170 pounds of them, which I would surely not be able to do in real life, especially if racked by sobs.

Which reminds me of another gorily specific detail: I was carrying the dogs around because I hoped to find someone to flay them and preserve their hides for me, and also to remove and clean up their skulls so I could keep them as mementos**. When my husband expressed dismay at this weird and excessive desire, I said, "but think, don't you know any hunters who could do it? It would be easy for a hunter who was used to processing deer!"


**I probably shouldn't confess this, but I have considered in real life (although purely theoretically) the possibility of keeping the skull of a dead pet as a memento (in my defense, the hide idea hadn't occurred to me), although I'm sure I wouldn't due to a lack of butchering/taxidermy skills/cast-iron emotional constitution, and the fact that I don't know any local hunters.

squalid group living

I guess this dream was prompted by our recent housekeeping woes (as in, lack of) and our attempts to find a leather couch that the dogs won't dirty up so much. We (my husband and I) were sharing a house with some other people, a couple of different parties consisting of two or three people. All of them were Asian (I think one party was Indian and the other, with more members, was Korean). All were either students or had "knowledge economy" type jobs*.

Anyway, my husband and I had the living room as our area, and we had never properly moved in so everything was a huge mess (you know what happens when you've run out of steam in the end stages of a move and haven't found a proper place for everything). To make things worse, we had our two dogs with us--I think they were in an indoor-outdoor living situation, and the doberman had been inside.

[At some point in the middle of this dream, the dwelling curiously transitioned into a huge construction-parts warehouse; even while dreaming I was aware that this was my subconscious's way of voicing its displeasure/overwhelm at our real-life messy house.]

Back in the actual house (not warehouse), I was trying to tidy up while my husband, who had a cold, was lying on the couch watching TV. I wasn't really upset by his lack of help because he was sick**, but I was completely overwhelmed and questioning the utility of my endeavor. I had just discovered that the dog had thrown up in several places after chewing on a rawhide (so it was that whitish, milky post-rawhide throw-up that will be familiar to dog owners).

I was trying to find something to clean up the mess (and not finding a rag, of course). In the adjacent kitchen, a couple of the Koreans were eating their breakfast, like perfect little robots: get out the food, dish it into one dish, eat it all quickly in a focused manner, quickly rinse single dish and single glass. This only increased my feelings of inferiority, since I have never been able to eat so neatly and with such little production of dirty dishes.

Breakfast tidily put away, one of the Koreans grabbed his backpack (without fumbling, of course) and started to very quickly navigate the piles of junk on his way out the front door. I panicked and tried to warn him about the dog-vomit piles, but couldn't get it out fast enough. He landed in the biggest one with his clean be-socked foot***. He was too polite to register more than the briefest expression of surprise and discomfit before he whooshed out the door, sweeping up his shoes in one smooth motion.

I never did find a rag to clean up the vomit, I just sunk into self-recrimination and amazement that the tidy Asians hadn't already kicked us out, then woke up.


*Yeah, my subconscious hews closely to racial stereotypes.
**This does at least show a departure from the trope where I start yelling at assorted family members because I'm doing all the housework.
***Because, being clean, he didn't wear shoes in the house.

zombie lambs

I had a really weird and disturbing dream just before waking up this morning. I wasn't clear on all the details, and I think there were some double meanings/significances that I barely caught at the time but now can't remember.

It started out nicely enough. I was in a beautiful open field that sloped up on three sides to more wooded areas (there was a road in the distance at the uppermost point). I was just walking slowly and enjoying the scenery when I noticed a deer. At first I thought it would run away as I approached, but it didn't because it was very intently searching for something. Rather creepily, it almost brushed me as it went past in its quest.

I was a little alarmed and hoped that it didn't have some kind of dangerous rabies-like illness that was causing it to throw caution to the wind, but I soon realized that she (it was a she) was looking for her fawn. Just when I realized this, the fawn hopped into sight, but kept on going after something further up the hill.

It turned out that the fawn was going toward what looked like a group of lambs. All very idyllic, right? Almost syrupy-sweet? BUT. When it got to the group of lambs, I saw that they were writhing around on the ground in various zombie-like states (I guess my fears of a malicious infection were well-grounded, if misplaced). Some were motionless, apparently having died from their malady, others were wriggling around weakly, and still others were aggressively jumping at the fawn and trying to bite it.

As if that weren't disturbing enough, I suddenly found that I was responsible for either a small child or an animal (a dog? a kitten?). I really can't remember what my child/pet was, exactly, but I suddenly had to protect some sort of relatively helpless being from the zombie lambs. The whole thing was extremely creepy. I think some of the animals may have had speaking parts too, but I can't remember what they may have said.

Demon Cat

My psyche totally made up for the last thoroughly uncharacteristic, but lovely and affirming, dream I posted here by waking me up this morning screaming. In the dream, if was a full-throttled anguished wail, but what actually woke me in real life was my own pitiful whimper.

A couple of my best friends were in town for my wedding (what?!)*, and he brought their daughter and cat to my apartment so that I could watch them for a while; I think his wife was sick. Almost immediately, though, this cat (which in real life is lovely) revealed itself to be an absolute demon. It went behind the TV and there was a theatrical flash of light blue light and a powering-down sound that indicated that the cat had chewed through the TV wires. The same thing happened and the computer went down. As I tried to catch and contain the cat, it chomped down hard on my left wrist and latched on. I tried blowing in its face, swatting it, flinging it off, and prying its jaws open, but it held on, and although I knew it was inflicting a pretty serious injury that would hurt a lot, I also didn't want to hurt the cat.

But then, then! It let go, only to dart into a large cage that had appeared on the floor and contained another couple of best friends' kitties. These kitties were somehow much smaller and more fragile, and the demon cat killed them almost instantly.**

This time I picked up the demon cat and sort of flung it to the floor. Even though it was nothing compared to the shaking that completely failed to loosen it when it had its teeth in my wrist, this time it, of course, suddenly died.

It was the realization that I was directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of basically all of my best friends' cats (though thank goodness my subconscious forgot the toddler in my care and thus allowed her to escape unscathed!), and the fear that David wouldn't love me any more after I'd killed all those animals, that woke me up howling. What an awful dream.

*This getting-married-oh-no! themed dream broke with convention, as the potential groom was my current boyfriend, it was a day or two before the wedding, and before my brain could totally freak out over the idea of getting married, it was interrupted by the antics of a demon cat.

**In real life, one of these kitties really is kind of demonic.

harrowing pet and school dreams

I haven't had one of these dreams in a while (I used to have them fairly often), but last night I dreamed that I had some pet birds. The dream followed the usual scenario: I had gotten them and then sort of forgotten I had them*; of course that meant I had forgotten to check their food and water; out of an original number of 5-6, a couple were dead in the bottom of the cage. Another variation I've had on this dream is that the birds are not dying, but escaping from cages with too much space between the bars. I've also had rather harrowing dreams featuring other pets that I've forgotten to feed/water, usually dogs (I don't recall one where the dog actually died, but there have been some close calls).


*Interestingly, I have a vague memory of also recently having a dream in which I had forgotten about being enrolled in a math class for an entire semester. Except at the end of the dream I realized that I had actually dropped the class and there was no reason to be so frantic.

extremely gross (Warning: Excrement Ahead)

Due to some snooze-button-pushing this morning I had a lot of weird dreams, although I can hardly remember most of them now. The part I do remember is exceedingly gross. You've been warned.

I probably don't need to specify it by now, but the context was a group trip. I had arrived at some intermediate destination and was just hanging around and waiting until it was time to move on. The setting was a sort of complex of makeshift buildings that had sprung up around a train station in a rural setting (the next leg of the trip was going to be by train).

I had one of my dogs with me (the well-behaved, sweet pit bull, not the giant unruly doberman). She had just been wandering around the place while I was waiting, and I hadn't been supervising her all that closely. Apparently she had "done her business" and a guy working there was looking at the results. He called me over while he was stirring around in it (with some kind of utensil), and pointed out to me that there was a smallish white worm sticking out the end of one of the *ahem* pieces. He was concerned about possible health issues that this might indicate, and somewhat chiding in his manner that I should have let me dog be infected with parasites. He abandoned his utensil and started to dig through the mess much more energetically, picking the whole thing apart with his fingers and separating out the (numerous) little worms. To make things even more grotesque, his very vigorous separating action was spraying out bits of both excrement and worms in a 10-foot radius.

I was horrified, both at the presence of the worms and the fact that I and all my possessions were now covered with a light speckling of dog excrement. I was much more calm about it than I would have been in real life, though, exhibiting a positively zen detachment. I guess that was in part because concern for my dog's health (she seemed perfectly fine, by the way) override regard for my personal hygiene, and in part because I knew that I didn't have time to clean up before the train was supposed to leave.

Having accomplished the highly unrealistic feat of rising above and ignoring my dog-doo-spattered state, once the train had started moving I went into the bathroom and set about trying to clean myself up a little. A curious detail is that normally in dreams where I'm doing personal hygiene/appearance work I'm stressed out about it because I'm starting from a point of needing to do a lot of remedial work on various skin problems (flakes, blemishes, you name it; my dream skin is almost invariably pretty bad). In this dream, though, I didn't have any problems other than excrement. Even in the dream I realized that this was an unusual and positive twist on the usual pattern.

in which my subconscious's superego punishes my subconscious's id

The other night I dreamed that my husband had branched out at work into managing not just landscaping stuff but computer/software/marketing things. It wasn't clear how he had gotten this particular project, but it seemed like he had maybe taken it over from another manager who wasn't getting things done. He was excited about having such a big project; it was something for a huge, important company, and although I didn't really get what it was, it was something fundamental like managing orders or something. That's the boring part, though. The funny part was that he introduced me to the guy who was going to be his assistant in charge of all the computer aspects: it was Sam Worthington, in a wheelchair, no less. He was grinning affably and seemed about as happy about the job as my husband was.

Perhaps I was feeling guilty about my glee that the spouse had an attractive sidekick, but the next part of the dream was extremely unpleasant. We lived in an old fixer-upper house in the country (although not our real-life house). I was rooting around in a cluttered room trying to find something when I saw a flash of color. It turned out to be a black-white-yellow-and-red reptile. At first I thought it was a coral snake and went through the little ditty in my head ["red and black, friend of Jack; red and yellow, kill a fellow"] and was alarmed to see that the red stripe was right next to the yellow stripe. Then I noticed that it had legs and thus couldn't be a snake. I was still thoroughly freaked out, though, assuming that it was some kind of equally poisonous "coral lizard". I jumped up on a chair like the stereotypical woman-confronted-with-a-mouse and tried to figure out what to do. There were three big dictionaries within reach, so I figured I could try crushing it with those. I hurled the first one at it, but it landed an inch or so away from the offending beast, prompting it to scuttle away.

Knowing that the "coral lizard" was hidden somewhere in all the junk was even more alarming, and I had no idea what to do. I knew I had to find it and kill it so one of our dogs didn't stumble on it and die (not to mention the humans). Then I looked around (still standing on the chair) and noticed that there were all kinds of big, dangerous-looking scorpions* and other insects on the walls. The whole thing was rather creepy, especially with the added layer of guilt at lusting** after my husband's coworker.

*The scorpions on the walls of my house do have some basis in reality.
**Yet another illustration of how embarrassingly G-rated my dreams tend to be: said "lusting" was really just the idea that he was cute and it would be kind of fun to make small talk with him.

very weird miscellany

It seemed like I woke up every 20 minutes or so last night thinking, "that was so weird. I have to remember that." Of course I forgot most of it, but I think the few I do remember are representative of the rest in weirdness.

• My husband was going to do some interplanetary travel. I'm not sure if I was going too, but at any rate I wasn't concerned or worried, just excited for him and the other two people who would be traveling in his little "pod". It was a very rudimentary metal construction divided into three stall-like compartments, almost like a flat-topped horse trailer, minus the wheels. Each stall had a round porthole-like window that the traveler could look out while en route. He and the other two travelers were getting inside the pod to accustom themselves, but not yet leaving. Oddly, I don't think there was even any glass on the windows. Apparently there had been such great advances in space travel that things like pressure and oxygen were no longer a concern.

• I was staying in a largeish cabin with my parents and sister in the woods somewhere, on a family vacation. I'm not sure who else might have been there, but I had the impression of more people there than just my nuclear family. At one point when we were all sitting around in the living room, I began to talk to the cat. It was a large, mottled gray cat with a slightly cartoonish air. I asked it some question of little consequence, and it answered me immediately as if to have a spoken interspecies conversation was completely normal. I looked around at my human companions and said, "See, that's why I like cats so much. They're so much more intelligent than dogs."*

• [Same setting, cabin in the woods, raised up on a very high foundation/stilts; on the front porch this time.] I was just loafing on the front porch when a redneck-ish man with a junior-high-age redneck-ish son sauntered onto the porch. I wasn't at all alarmed, because it felt like they had some business being there. I just kept reading my book, until I started to feel like the son was infringing a bit on my personal space by staring at me (the father was completely absorbed in the view of the woods and not paying any attention at all). The son said, a propos of nothing, "I'm kweeping!" which in this alternate dream universe meant, I knew, that he was *ahem* very excited**. I was pretty offended by his forward declaration and also didn't want to encourage his attentions, so I went back in the house without really saying anything. On one hand I didn't want to hurt his tender young feelings, but really! A few minutes later a [very corny] rejoinder came to me: "You're kweeping me out! I'm mawwied." [Get it? Think "mawwiage" from The Princess Bride.] I don't know where my brain comes up with these things, and I find it even more alarming that in the dream I considered it a brilliant example of l'esprit de l'escalier.

• Then there was a very brief vignette, maybe a movie, in which a bimbo-ish blonde woman was threatening a used-car-salesmanly man*** with a ludicrously tiny gun, cocking it and holding it to his head. It was some kind of revenge thing for his ostensible past mistreatment of her, and I never did see what actually happened. I had the impression that she was all just hot air (and whether such a tiny gun could do any damage was another legitimate question).
  

*This coming from a person who in real life very much likes both cats and dogs.
**What can possibly be with this recurring theme of inappropriately young boys expressing interest in me?
***Although I know that there are many exceptions to this, my stock impression (based on extensive experience being dragged to car dealerships) is a stout man with a greasy, bloated face and moist, meaty hands with one or two large rings jammed on to his fat fingers.

movie #1 in an upcoming apocalyptic franchise

I had one of the most elaborate "movie" dreams I can remember last night. Interestingly, although it didn't last that long, the plot followed the conventional story path to an extent that none of my other remembered movie dreams have.

The beginning was fairly separated from the dreams before it (which I can only barely remember, except that a couple of old friends who recently visited me in real life were there for a visit), but I want to say that part of the previous dream involved planning to go see a movie--I could be wrong about that, though.

At any rate, there was a definite beginning to the "movie" part. It was clearly a movie, although at the same time it was participatory--I was right there in the action, participating. I was seated on some concrete steps going up to a building, in a residential neighborhood with wide streets. There were several early-20s girls there with me on the steps, and nothing much was going on. There was a girl from my elementary school there, and she was petting my doberman, who was collapsed on her lap in immobile ecstasy from all the attention [I have a hard time imagining this person appreciating a very large dog in real life].

Suddenly, one by one, all of us were overtaken by a feeling of intense dread, and just after that a sensation of loss of bodily control, like everything was slowing down and we couldn't move our limbs--but at the same time, our bodies seemed to be contorting themselves of their own accord. It was very scary. At the moment when everyone had realized that something terrible and mysterious was happening, a mist crept toward the building from the other side of the street*.

This situation lasted an indefinable amount of time, and slowly everyone went back to normal, although we were still very freaked out. Then I heard sirens from several approaching police cars (from the direction the mist had come from, coincidentally). I was crossing the street when they approached, and was nervous about getting run over, when I noticed a circa-1960s blue Bronco approaching very fast. The young woman driving it seemed to be having some kind of violent spasm, and she then drove right into a tree, very fast, completely crushing the car. Just then I realized that similar things were happening to people in other cars all over the city (and possibly to pedestrians too): people were suddenly going completely crazy and becoming out-of-control in a savage, destructive way.

The next thing I can remember is being in a room resembling a cross between an old classroom, an "alternative" coffee house, and a warehouse. There were scaffolding-like things hanging from the ceiling, which I think may have been set lighting (this is important later). The room was full of the carefully diverse combination of people one sees in apocalyptic movies [the "people who would never normally associate are thrown together in a disaster" trope as plot device]. My husband was there, and it was obvious that we were both there as observer/participants and not really as "characters". I was a little annoyed with him for some reason, and sitting a few seats away--I thought he was being hyperactive and disruptive.

An older Asian man started to address the group, and it became clear that in this scenario, the U.S. and possibly the whole world had been taken over by China, making up a sort of mega-dictatorship. The man had a professorly air, and was talking about his life's work of designing and implementing a self-sustaining underwater city. He had a really beautiful 3-d model in carved wood showing the structure: like a globe composed of an organic framework, with a lot of little hanging lily-pad-like elements for the various components needed to make up the city. I'm not really sure if the model was physically there or if it was one of those hologram things sci-fi directors are so fond of using in movies.

Anyway, as the man explained his concept I slowly became aware that this was actually the dictator (he was also an engineer, as evidenced by the "P.E." after his name**). I got the impression that he hadn't really harbored ambitions of becoming Dictator of the World, but was one of those extremely cerebral people who was completely absorbed in his mission (the underwater city) and that he had been channeled into dictatorship by other parties who thought he would be the best choice.

The only other thing of note that happened while we were all in the room was that a young Japanese artist hung himself from the ceiling scaffolding. I'm not sure exactly why he did it, but it was an act of protest of some sort.

After that, the end of the movie showed a young couple arriving at their upstairs apartment (sort of an above-garage apartment in an old house in a neighborhood with a slightly gone-to-seed San Francisco vibe). It was understood that they had reached safety, at least for the moment--the perfect ending for the first installment of an apocalyptic franchise! It's hard to explain, but of course the couple was a parallel version of my husband and me.

At the very end of the dream, I saw the title art for the movie. There was a dark red background and a couple of shadowy faces. The name of the movie was incomprehensible. I couldn't figure out if it was some kind of symbol (Greek, maybe?), or if it was a very short, invented two-letter word or name. At any rate, it was in a stylized, slightly fuzzed-at-the-edges gothic calligraphy.



*I'm pretty sure this has to do with my noting this dvd cover at Blockbuster the other day.
**Yes, I work in an engineering office.

***************************
And stay tuned for a dream from a few nights ago featuring a camero appearance by Lars von Trier.

Totalitarian States and gender-stereotyped bathrooms

I had a rather alarming dream last week. I was carrying around a couple of grocery bags of stuff, at least some of which needed to be gotten rid of. I'm not sure whether I was planning on just dropping it off somewhere or whether I was going to give it to someone. I needed to stop in at the post office, which is where things got complicated.

In this dream, post offices were highly guarded, secure locations--I think they had started offering additional services, along the line of the passport services they already offer but necessitating tighter security (also, this dream was rather Totalitarian State, as you'll see later on). I was at a back service entrance, trying to figure out what to do with my bags of rejects. I couldn't bring them inside with me because of security issues, but I didn't even see a trash bin to dump them in. There was a pile of discarded stuff (a mix of outdated office equipment and just plain trash), but no official trash bin, so I guessed that it would be okay to leave them there while I went inside (and maybe forever, I thought, although I felt guilty about dumping them there sans trash bin).

There was a security guard involved in getting into the service entrance, too, and at first he seemed willing to let me in. Then things got bad really quickly. I don't know if he had actually seen me leave my bags with the pile of trash or if he just suspected, but he got very stern and started wielding the Long Arm of the Law and became very officious in his close inspection of my ID. The really alarming thing was that I realized that it wasn't my ID--it had been switched, planted, I suspected, by him or by an associate.

I don't remember the details, but there was some sort of knocking-about of a relatively mild nature but still very scary. I tried to protest that a false ID had been planted on me, but of course that only excited more suspicion and anger. Finally another security guard who had come from another area and who apparently had more authority intervened and let me go. The whole thing was very alarming, and I left as quickly as I could, still anxious about the items I had left by the door.

Then I was with my husband, somewhere in Europe. The location was ostensibly Geneva [I was talking about how pretty it was and how I missed it], although it didn't really look like the actual city, but more like how I imagine Stockholm or Copenhagen. There were a lot of 18th- and 19th-century buildings, some of them pink or yellow, and open stone plazas, mostly empty of people. It was really beautiful, and the fall atmosphere and cloudy day added to the appeal.

As we were standing in a plaza deciding what to do next, I realized that I should take advantage of the lull in activity to find a bathroom. We were next to some sort of museum, and I thought that would be a good option. I started looking around, but only found the men's restroom, and I decided to use it for the sake of speed (I was worried about my husband getting annoyed because I was taking too long, because he had already protested my preemptive and possibly unnecessary trip). It was extremely dirty, though, and there were two or three menacing looking young hoods in hoodies (!), which made me a little nervous. I decided to take my dog inside as a deterrent, hoping that she wouldn't betray her non-mean nature by being friendly to them [this is my real-life dog, who, being a pit bull with cropped ears, looks very mean at first]. Then I tried to find a suitable toilet, but they were all either clogged with paper or the seats were all dirty and wet. I wasted quite a bit of time trying to decide the best candidate for cleaning up a little, but finally gave up in despair, they were all so awful. I decided that it might be more time-efficient to just look a little harder for the women's restroom.

I found the women's restroom just around the corner, and it was completely different. It was the cleanest bathroom I'd ever seen, everything spotless and deodorized. It was all decorated with purple walls and gold trim, everything matching everything else, and the walls were covered with black-and-white pictures of Hollywood starlets from the 30s and 40s. I thought that was a weird touch. Apparently it was maintained by some kind of women's association, because there were signs (with a corny jingle that I regrettably can't remember) reminding members to clean up, and visitors of the members' hard work on their behalf.

I had happily done my business and come out of the stall when I saw that a small Italian woman had come in (how I knew she was Italian, I don't know). I was nervous that she would be alarmed by my dog and make a big scene about me having her with me, but instead she said, "Oh! A pit bull! I love pit bulls!" and started going on about the merits of pit bulls.

miscellaneous husband dreams

I dreamed I was on some kind of group outing, and the female part of the group was supposed to all be getting haircuts. I was waiting around for mine when my phone rang. It was my husband, and he sounded extremely stressed and not like himself. After some digging to find out what was wrong, he said that he had gotten into an altercation with someone at work and ended up punching the guy. I was somewhat relieved, because he sounded so upset I was afraid it would be something much worse.

He was freaking out about losing his job and maybe even going to jail over this [apparently somewhat-merited] punch, but I was pretty calm about it. I tried to remind him that he had a very good record at work, that there had been witnesses to the situation, and that probably they would just discipline him somehow instead of firing him. I figured that we were going to have to hire a lawyer, though, and that we were probably in for a couple of years of expense and complications before the whole thing got ironed out.

Also on the subject of husband-related dreams, I dreamed the other night that he offered our larger, unrulier dog to my sister (who is not in the market for such a high-maintenance beast). She was interested, but then he started to have second thoughts and specified that he only wanted her to take the dog for a couple of years--until he [the dog] calmed down and got older and easier to deal with, basically. I told him that he couldn't just try to pawn his dog off on someone for his unruly years and want him back when he was better-behaved.

canophagy?!

I can't take credit for this dream, but I found it dramatic and horrible enough to want to document. My husband dreamed that my parents were visiting and we were going to eat one of our dogs (the sweet, well-behaved one)! He had to kill her so she could be eaten, which he did by shooting the back of her head. I asked him if we actually ended up eating her, and he said he didn't know, because after that he had to go off and cry [he said he also wondered afterward, still in the dream, why we hadn't decided to eat the misbehaving dog instead]. What a terrible dream, especially for someone who hardly ever remembers his dreams!

doggy diarrhea and edward gorey

** Warning: this dream contains graphic excrement and may not be appropriate for all readers. **

This was a variation on a theme I've dreamed before. I was living with my parents, sister, and grandmother (I don't remember any spouses for my sister and me, but it's possible they were there too). Somehow I had gotten myself into a position where I was doing 99% of the housework without realizing it--cooking, meal cleanup, laundry, cleaning, everything. All of the family members were sitting around the living room reading* and I was wandering around trying figure out what to do next and wishing I had time to do some project for myself, or my own reading. The dog was laying on the couch, and I realized that something wasn't quite right with her backside. On closer inspection, I saw that she was smeared with the remains of diarrhea. At first I thought none of it had gotten on the couch, and I was panicking about how to try to get her off the couch without dirtying it. I started freaking out and yelling incoherently about dog doo and having to move her, and that they needed to help me, but everyone just glanced up vaguely and went right back to their reading. Then I saw that there was a big plop of excrement that had landed in between the two couch sections, and that really set me off. I started yelling and hyperventilating, which got the dog all riled up so that she spread little bits of yellowish pea-soup-resembling doo all over everything.

Of course that got me even more agitated, and I yelled and yelled and yelled about how I was doing ALL the work for everyone, even washing their dirty laundry, and did they really think that was fair, and how had this happened, and why wouldn't anyone help me with anything, and how could they live with themselves, and why didn't they notice that dog excrement, and why did they think it was okay that *I* was going to have to be the one to clean up all the little bits smeared all around.

They just looked at me with mild surprise and concern, made a few lame excuses for not helping, and a couple of them just left the room to get away from my yelling, implying that the problem was that I was unhinged.

Then my alarm went off, and in my hazy, feeble attempts to stop hyperventilating and wake up, my brain abruptly started making up Edward Gorey-esque doggerel: "J is for Jacob, who exhibited pluck; I is for Ivan, who ran out of luck."



*My family's default setting in real life.

Bad Owner

I came home to an apartment I shared with a roommate (my ex). I was rushing to get ready to go back out again. My roommate needed the place to himself. I was trying to get ready, then suddenly remembered I had a dog. My dog was a black Labrador retriever. She came out looking a little emaciated and dehydrated. I had forgotten to leave out food and water for her all day and did not walk her before I left that morning. I was apologizing to the dog, thinking she would be mad and not come to me, but she was still very sweet and just happy for me to be home. I filled her food bowl with extra kibble from the bag and filled up two bowls of water. I still did not have enough time to go for a long walk, so I asked my roommate if he could let her out for five minutes, so she wouldn't go in the apartment. I felt guilty for rushing out again.

slices of arm

Background: we have a young but very large dog who usually stays outside. It was unusually cold last night, so we let him sleep inside, but due to his boisterousness and inability to leave our other dog alone, we had to leave him in a crate, which he protested very mightily by making loud anguished noises off and on throughout the night. I think this contributed to my having one of my All-Time Most Gruesome Dreams.

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This dream was influenced by those Japanese movies in which a series of people die after learning that they're "next in line" [generally this is due to a vengeful ghost, but there was no ghost in my dream; the cause of the deaths wasn't explored at all]. I was in an indoor public swimming pool (?). I think everyone was fully clothed in the pool, to one extent or another. I was stressed about something that had happened earlier in the dream and already on edge. I noticed that a rockabilly-type girl near me had started to act strangely. She acted agitated and I somehow understood that she was perceiving music that only she could perceive, and that this was her information that she was to be the next victim. I think that she was also supposed to pick the subsequent victim on learning of her victimhood, although this was a little hazy.

Anyway, the rockabilly girl focused her attention on me, probably because I was the closest person. She started pointing at me and becoming more and more agitated. Then she took out a knife and started shaving slices off her left upper arm, like you would slice one of those Spanish hams. She then put them on top of my head, which i found horrible and reacted to somewhat hysterically. Weirdly, there was no spurting blood--the slices came off very neatly, like a food product.

Yes! With three-inch heels!

Another recurring dream theme I have is a scenario in which I discover that I've grossly neglected a pet (or pets). This hasn't happened for a while, but I had one last night. I was staying in a dorm that alarmingly resembled my high school dorm (which I fortunately didn't have to live in at the time). I had just realized that I had a pile of overdue books and dvds for the library (a recurring real-life theme), and I was agitated about going to return them. I think I was making pointless and confused trips up the stairs to my room and down to my car.

On one of these trips, as I was walking past the movie-set Western Town setup (?what?), I heard clomping footsteps and looked over to see a guy who looked like a 17-year-old Hayden Christensen, walking by in cowboy boots. He was doing that thing where you watch someone to gauge their reaction to you while trying to not appear to be watching. I didn't think that much about it, but he followed my trajectory for a while, gradually starting to walk beside me.

Around the time I realized he was really trying to accompany me I remembered that I had had my childhood cat (still alive, apparently) with me in the dorm, but that I hadn't fed her or even seen her for quite a while. I went back to the dorm and tried to talk to the dean about it. She tried to be reassuring, saying that cats were self-sufficient and she might have just wandered off to find a new home (or, she added, maybe she had just died and that was why I hadn't seen her).

All this time Hayden, Jr. seemed like he really wanted to talk to me. I was a little annoyed because I was already stressed about the library and the cat, and I couldn't figure out why he was so interested in me. Was he really desperate for a friend, or did he have a Thing for Older Women, or what? (Despite the living-in-the-dorm thing, I was my actual age in this dream.) He finally engaged me in conversation and asked if I had noticed him as he walked past the Western Town. I said, "yes, you were wearing cowboy boots", to which he answered triumphantly, "Yes! With three-inch heels!" Bizarre.

doggie nightmare

I had a terrible, terrible dream the other night (morning?) just before waking up. I dreamed that my husband and I were on a trip and were going to stay one night in an avant-garde hotel. We were shown our room, and walked in to look at it. It turned out to consist of an empty carpeted expanse that slanted toward a one- or two-story dropoff into a lobby below. No railing or anything. Above this expanse was a white loft for sleeping (no furniture anywhere, although that didn't strike me as strange at the time). We had our dog with us, and while we humans were up on the sleeping balcony the dog lost her coordination, started slipping toward the edge, and fell over it.

It was awful! Of course she was dead, and I was crying hysterically (suddenly my mother was there for some reason, and also crying hysterically). To add insult to injury the snooty young staff members started talking about how "no one would be stupid enough to have a dog with them here".

I sometimes have dreams like this where I'm sobbing hysterically and I'm always curious as to whether I'm actually sobbing/hiccuping. I half woke up as I was crying in the dream and noticed that I was just breathing normally, although it was strange to be awake while still doing deep "sleep breathing".

No Pets Please!

So I had this dream that I was living in an apartment somewhere with one of my coworkers. (In real life, she and I are acquaintances, but know each other from work). In the dream she loved pets. I agreed, since I have never lived with pets or owned a pet (this is true in real life as well), but I was willing to try it. I ordered the pets from this telephone service, and suddenly, I had a ferret, a snake, and 1 mouse. As the dream progressed, I was doing my weekly activities, which I was rushing to and realized I was late to because I was trying to find the pets. Suddenly, the ferret grew up and became large, the snake became 3 snakes, and the mice became 8. It was also weird because 3 of the mice were still attached to each other. To make it even more interesting, they had found themselves out of their cages, and I could feel them running by me around my feet, but when I attempted to catch them, they would disappear. After a day of trying to chase them around, I finally called the hot-line and asked them to take the pets back after finding them in my apartment. I was left with a feeling of knowing that my roommate would be disappointed and or angry that we got rid of the pets. I didn't wake up from the dream feeling scared of any pet as I would have thought of normally, which was a connundrum in itself for me. I guess I have the rest of the day to ponder this thought.

how to have interesting dreams

Use your cell phone as an alarm clock, because that way you can press "snooze" an unlimited number of times and wake up just enough to think "this is a really great dream I'm having" and then go back to sleep and continue it.

The downside is that afterward you can't remember everything. I do remember that we were buying a really great old house in Italy. I was also, for some reason, babysitting some spoiled little kids. At another point, my husband and I were taking our dog for a run. He was driving his work truck, I was driving a car behind, and the dog was running between the two vehicles. It seemed like the perfect setup, and it didn't occur to me to wonder how the dog was managing to run so fast for so long. She seemed to enjoy it, but worked up a huge thirst and afterward jumped up on the kitchen counter of the Italian house to drink directly from the faucet.

Then, after it had been established that we were buying the house, we had to pack to get back to the airport, because we were going back to the U.S. for an unspecified period of time (the house was apparently a vacation home). One of my former roommates was there, a couple of random friends, and lots of objects from my past life were scattered all over the house, which made it difficult to hurriedly figure out what to put in the suitcase.