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.

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.

...and again

I don't know what the deal is, but there was another Anthony Bourdain cameo. I'm beginning to worry now.

In the first part of the dream I was in the car with my husband, on a road trip. It was a more or less spontaneous trip, and we were just exploring. We got to a little town in some southern state. As we entered town, we started to see people in the street, like there was some event. People were dancing and eating, there was music, and the streets were really narrow so we had to slow to a crawl and drive through the middle of everything. As we progressed I realized that we were going through very distinct racial sections of town. At first everyone looked Central American, and I commented that I felt like we had been transported to Nicaragua or Honduras*. As we got a little further the crowd changed. There was a transitional group that included a gypsy flamenco dancer (everything was very detailed, people's clothes, faces and hair). Then suddenly everyone was African-American and there was a large man in a stereotypical "pimp suit", dark purple with a bowler hat, all his accessories coordinated. He was very spiffy and was dancing and juggling a little pistol.

We didn't quite know what to make of this, and we were a little freaked out by these progressive distinct racial groups. We arrived at a section of town with only whites, and they were also out in the street, eating stereotypical things like baked beans and coleslaw. They looked pretty redneck, and they weren't very exuberant compared to the other groups [I love how my subconscious reinforces stereotypes...]; they seemed poor and resentful, like they were fomenting revolt.

At this point my husband had gotten really intrigued and wanted to further explore the town and see what the party was about. We stopped the car to try to decide what to do, and in the few seconds we were stopped, a mulleted blond guy went around the back and bent down. I realized that he was trying to let the air out of our tires with a modified Bic pen. [In the dream, those clear ballpoint Bic pens had a screw-in plug at the non-writing end, and this screw corresponded to the screw on the tire, making them the perfect instrument for emptying car tires; I filed away this information as potentially useful.] We realized we weren't welcome here, and the vaguely menacing atmosphere that had been growing since the beginning finally registered. Fortunately our tires were still inflated, so we got out of there.

Later we arrived at a hotel/resort somewhere in Arkansas. I'm not sure what we were doing there, but we were planning on staying at least one night. It so happened that Anthony Bourdain and his crew were there too, to attend some kind of conference. We were all eating at a big table, and he was flirting outrageously with me (including a roguish and extreme version of "footsies"), which I found flattering but disconcerting. I had the impression that it was a compulsion of his to keep his womanizing skills active at all times, and I told myself that I shouldn't be too flattered by the attention since I was just the most acceptable option present for maintaining his skills (his crew members were apparently exempt since they were too constant a presence).

Later, he needed help organizing handouts and a PowerPoint for a presentation he was making, and I was coaching him on the fine points of labeling Appendices. I said that at my workplace we usually marked them "Appendix A: Such-and-Such" and "Appendix B: Such-and-Such", but then pointed out that the "Appendix A" was probably superfluous, like making a one-item list with "1." He seemed to think that was witty, and also seemed to take my coaching seriously, as if he actually needed help, which was rather flattering (not to mention that he didn't seem to look down on the fact that I had a secretarial job). I felt a little guilty, though, because my husband had gone back to our room, disgusted (I inferred) by my indulgence of this blatant cad.

Things were a little more vague after that. There was a subplot involving a very odd mixed-breed puppy, gray with black speckles and very sheep-like. I did a little bit of research and came to the conclusion that she was actually a very rare and potentially valuable hybrid (she had hair like a poodle, so was allergen-free). According to random internet sources, there were either 330 or 990 existing ("Figures of 1,110 are thought to be inaccurately high"). I was wondering about her potential sale value, but she was also really cute, so I wasn't sure that I wanted to sell her. She seemed like a very cooperative and malleable dog, to the point that she wouldn't really even require training.

Then there was a subplot in which I was arriving at a boarding high school. I was only there temporarily, and there was a whole other group who was also only going to be there temporarily. We were going to be housed in dorms with large, open rooms and bunk beds. As long as the temporary groups were there, each room would contain 8 people, of mixed genders. I was happy to realize that I had snagged a top bunk against the wall, instead of one of the beds out in the middle of the room. The only people I remember were a real-life coworker and a random guy from my high-school class that I don't think I ever talked to. In the dream he was a kind of proto-River Phoenix/Keanu Reeves, and we were all aware that he was Going to Be Big, so everyone was friendlier to him in the dream than they were in real life high school. There was a bit of subtle jockeying to get a bed near his, which he didn't acknowledge openly--but I could tell he was happy about it. A more alarming element of the dorm was the presence of huge cockroaches and even several rats, scurrying around people's luggage.

{Not only do I always seem to introduce the most unsavory labels ("pimp"?), but I'm maxing out the tag characters to the point that Blogger won't publish my post unless I get rid of some!}


*Of course I've never been to either place, but it was very clear in my mind that the scene looked exactly like either of those countries.

hobo code

Last night I dreamed that my husband and I were at an apartment building* in a small town in Arkansas. I don't know why we were there, but I had gone in by myself to see the inside. It was a relatively small building, with one entrance, and the apartments opened into a common hallway, like a hotel or a dorm. It was, in fact, very dormlike--a lot of the apartment doors were open, and I could see that the layout was really one large room with four or so bunk beds and lots of young and youngish people hanging out. The vibe was extremely redneck, and everyone seemed to know each other. Several people were talking about going swimming, and a few guys with mullets and very 80s clothing came out whooping and hollering and left to go swimming. All this freaked me out a little, so I left before anyone noticed me.

Then we went into another building that was attached to the apartment building. This was also an apartment building, although it had a different feeling. It seemed like a bank or some other soulless corporate building that had been converted into studio apartments. We went into the apartment of a young guy who left just after we got there. We were waiting for something, I'm not sure what, and just hung around looking at all the things in his apartment. I was impressed with the variety of decorations--lots of things from various parts of the world, indicating that he had done a lot of traveling. There were quite a few candid photos of people, and some of them seemed familiar. I was frustrated because I couldn't remember who they were, or even whether I had actually known this guy at some point in the past.

There were people coming in and out of the apartment, and at one point a very small Asian-looking girl came in and started doing something with a black string- or bamboo-like material. She seemed to be knotting it very quickly into something, then she started waving it around quicker and quicker and at the same time slipped it around my husband's neck. After a few seconds of extremely rapid flourishes, she stepped back and we could all see an extremely elaborate knotted lei-type necklace hanging around his neck. Everyone was very impressed, and it was evident that she wanted some reimbursement for this performance art (she removed the necklace, which I thought was too bad, but understandable as it was part of her "act"). She indicated that she wanted $2.47 for the performance, which I thought was less than it merited. People quickly gave her quite a bit more than that, and I was rooting around in my wallet to find $5 or so to contribute. Every time I found a bill that looked right, though, I discovered that it was a foreign bill--there were weird European currencies and a lot of odd-sized bills from Latin American countries. I realized that we had recently been travelling and I berated myself for not getting my wallet organized. In the end I couldn't give her anything, having rejected the idea of giving her some random foreign bills as possibly kind of insulting. She left quickly anyway, with a small family who looked very much like the stereotype of an indigenous Latin American family: a group of very small people with shawls and assorted small children and a humble demeanor.

After that, I think the owner of the apartment showed up briefly with his girlfriend, there was a demonstration of the new Camaro, which turned out to look very much like a spaceship, covered with buttons and gauges inside (you had to enter through a hatch in the roof); and then he and his girfriend left again. At some point a very dirty homeless guy showed up, and we weren't quite sure what to do with him. It was somehow decided that he would spend the night there, although I had some misgivings about it and about what should be done about him. I looked out the window and saw that a "hobo code" had been put on the parking lot outside. It was an x and an arrow scratched into the asphalt and then highlighted with that landscaping spray paint**. Seeing that it had been put there so quickly made me nervous because it meant that other "hobos" were hanging around outside and watching.

After that I looked around and noticed, then pointed out, that the plan was probably not workable. There were only two double beds in the room, and apparently my husband and I had been planning to stay there, which meant that the apartment owner would have to share his bed with the hobo, which he probably wouldn't want to do. I tried to point this out in an inoffensive way.

I don't really remember anything else. The whole dream had a weird feeling of confusion and a slight vague dread.

*The apartment was based on an actual apartment complex where Curly Sue lived for a while and where I visited her. It didn't bear any actual physical resemblance, but it was quite clear in my mind in the dream that it was the place where she had lived. I thought, "ah-ha! Now I can see why she didn't like it here."
**The landscaping spray paint is because I used some the other day to mark some trees we were treating at our house.

another marriage/wedding related nightmare

i was moments away from walking down the aisle (as is always the case in these awful, awful dreams). the man i was about to marry was like 10 years older than me, a trucker, and had a tattoo (of what exactly i can't remember) on his right bicep. the man also had a young daughter, about three years old. side note: i think my dream husband-to-be was a combination of several guys who are married to various friends/acquaintances. he was this typical redneck character who would be my worst nightmare for a husband.

anyway, my mom was absolutely thrilled. she was so, so happy that her daughter was almost married. i, on the other hand, was panicked. another side note: the dream had this very heavy and sinking emotional quality to it. it felt less like waiting for something special to happen and much more like waiting for my life to be violently taken. i cannot express how deeply sad i felt in this dream. i was caught in this moment where i was trying to decide if i should accept my fate or run. in the dream i was overwhelmed with how happy the whole circumstance made my mother. i was also overwhelmed by the thought of pulling the plug on the wedding at the very last minute. i did love the the trucker guy's little girl and i remember she was making it especially difficult for me to stop the wedding from going forward.

right before i woke up, my dream-self remembered something that my mom had said to me in real life many years ago while watching oprah. she said something along the lines of: no matter how close you are to walking down the aisle, if you realize it's not what you want, you should stop everything rather than continue with the wedding just to save face. my dream-self felt like i had found an "out" that my mother couldn't argue with because they were her words of wisdom.

about this time i woke up with a start and in a sweat. i enjoyed a huge wave of relief as i realized it was all

just. a. dream.

(analyze that!)