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.

Classic Group Trip

I had what I might call the Classic Group Trip Dream last night (as opposed to all those dreams where being on a group trip is just one background fact among many). I was on a trip to India with some random dream people and some random real-life past and present acquaintances. We were crowded (very crowded!) into an older van with a dark red interior, going very slowly through some kind of border crossing or checkpoint. I was extremely uncomfortable because we were so crammed in, and I turned to the guy next to me, a rather prim Indian guy who was the de facto group leader and asked him if it would be okay if I put my feet up on the dash to give myself some more room. He was shocked--shocked!--that I would suggest such a thing, and said that he couldn't countenance it because the van belonged to a couple he knew. He then (possibly hoping to soften the blow of refusal?) added that the couple were originally from Mali but were now running a church in the U.S. for Indians. I responded enthusiastically that I was very interested in Mali, grasping at straws to both diffuse my apparent brazen disrespect for their dashboard and to distract myself from boredom and physical discomfort with the odd coincidence of West Africans running an Indian church in the U.S.

There was an unsettling subplot after that in which I was suddenly saddled with the responsibility of looking after several small children, who kept wandering away (I had to sternly warn one of them about the dangers of wandering off down an alley).

so random

Last night's series of dreams wasn't very interesting as far as the storylines go, but there were some funny details.

******************************************

I was somewhere with my parents, sister, and grandmother. We had been on some kind of outing and were getting ready to leave. We were in a weird, railroad-tunnel type structure (wood, with an elevated table-/rail-like structure running down the middle, with a small space to either side of it). We had almost gotten to the exit of it when a large javelina appeared in front of me. Either she (it was a she) knocked me over or I had already been sitting down on the middle structure--either way, she was looming over me. I was quite alarmed, having heard that javelinas could do a lot of damage. My dad indicated to me that it was my family responsibility to restrain the javelina while they got away, and then I would be able to extract myself (he wasn't throwing me under the bus, exactly; it seemed like the most sensible approach since I was last in line). So a tussle with the javelina ensued, with her eventually down in the little space beside the rails and me trying to immobilize her with my feet. The funny part was that she was speaking the whole time, although I can't remember what she was saying. I was struck by her rich vocabulary, though, and her excellent command of language (really, it was impressive, especially for a javelina).

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I was on a _______ (that's right, Alert Reader--group trip!). I was riding in a car and we were caravanning with another car. I don't really remember who else was there; probably a combination of past acquaintances and dream people. We drove up a very steep, winding road in some wooded hills/mountains and stopped at the apartment of a group member for a bathroom break. I went into the bathroom and started out with some freshening-up. I guess I was taking a while, because another group member came in (a girl I knew in the rather distant past) and started messing with the toilet. It was then that I noticed it wasn't an ordinary toilet. To begin with, because of the remote, hilly location it was some kind of special self-contained system, some sort of chemical toilet (she told me it was quite expensive). Also, it was "wheelchair-friendly", which meant that it had a rather complicated fold-out system that produced a ramp up to the toilet itself. She had helpfully decided to start converting the toilet back into the non-wheelchair version to speed things up for me. It was a rather cumbersome process, and--grossness alert--the fold-out portion had been covered with toilet paper lain flat that was soaked with urine [at least no excrement, but still, yuck!].

***************************************************

I was on my way home from work and debating whether or not to go to a party I'd been invited to. I was very tired and had pretty much decided not to go. I stopped at a little health-food-y juice place/cafe on the way home (not a real-life place), and ordered some kind of snack. They had already started to ring me up when I decided to get a coffee too and try to go to the party after all (which I ended up clutching, un-drunk, for a good part of the dream before finally drinking it and rather shamefacedly just leaving the empty cup somewhere).The party was at a house in the country, given by a girl* I had gone to elementary and high school with. I went into a bedroom and found about 4 girls dressed up in bizarre, makeshift costumes (including something vaguely Mongolian, over jeans and tennis shoes). That made me think it was a costume party, but then I found that it was only the host's sister and a few of her friends, and the real party was outside.

On going outside I found a rather overwhelming scene. There were several folding tables with handwritten game rules on large pieces of paper (lots of cross-outs and corrections), and a huge crowd of people participating in some arcane game that I couldn't begin to grasp. It involved forming a large circle (like duck-duck-goose) and moving around it. Some people landed on spots with big, elaborate, ugly porcelain figurines of fantastical animals that were the prizes--they seemed very excited about them and lifted them up in the air. I gave up on figuring out the game and just people-watched. The most interesting thing there was a greyhound in a pastel crocheted jacket--she was very sweet.

*************************************

The last tidbit featured Picasso as a washed-up artist looking to re-launch his career. Apparently he hadn't actually died, just stopped producing. He was showing a few recent "works" which seemed to fall far short of his previous output (including some typed pages--?). I wasn't quite sure what to tell him, but he seemed very excited about re-branding himself in a new, more corporate environment.

**************************************


*An interesting detail here was that the girl and her sister were (surely still are) very pretty in real life, and my parents were excessively fond (to my mind) of pointing out how pretty they were. In this dream, they both had rather bad skin. This makes me a bit ashamed of my subconscious for being schadenfreude-y, especially since I liked them in real life and we were friends, despite my parents' harping on their looks.

in which my subconscious wins the Gross and Creepy prize

If you're ready for another excrement-themed dream, read on! (You can guess the corollary to that, I'm sure.)

The dream started with a work trip with a nameless, faceless coworker and a real-life coworker who, although nice, has bossy tendencies. We were in a small car, trying to go somewhere to do some sort of site-based work (I have no idea why I was along). It started raining harder and harder, and at some point we had to ford a rushing creek with the small car, which I now noticed was either completely topless or just open on all sides like a Jeep. The bossier coworker was issuing directives about how to go about crossing the stream ("gun it" being the main idea). She said something about bracing myself, but I wasn't entirely braced, and I certainly wasn't ready for the head-to-toe spattering with muddy water.

We made it across okay, except for being completely wet and muddy, and stopped at a ramshackle house where we were going to stay. There were some other assorted people there, although I'm not sure who they were or what they were doing. The overall atmosphere was sort of scientific field outing (or rather, what I would imagine that atmosphere to be like)*.

The place was pretty makeshift, with a toilet out in the middle of the room. No one seemed to find this odd or unsettling, and consequently I didn't either. I sat down and did my business**, and that's when everything started to go off the rails.

For some reason when I stood up, the *ahem* excrement ended up in two [rather large!] piles on the seat (?? it was definitely in the toilet before). That disturbed me quite a lot, but I was even more disturbed to see a little worm-like creature wriggling about in it***. And then, as if that weren't disturbing enough, the real freak-out began: on closer inspection, the "worm" turned out to be a snake! Wriggling around in the excrement, mind you. The body was about the size of one of those small green snakes, but it was oddly segmented. The head was disproportionately large****, at least 2 inches across, with large, very creepy roundish yellow eyes. It was bobbing its head about like a cobra (no hood, at least), looking at me in the most alarming way. I can hardly emphasize enough how very alarming and disturbing it was.

I had started making alarmed noises on seeing the mounds of excrement on the seat, and they had escalated by now to full-blown, terrorized screams (although I couldn't properly get out half of them, so they were half raspy whispered screams). A kid that I had "dated" in 6th grade (?!?) was sitting near the toilet and hadn't reacted at all until this point. He suddenly had had enough, though, and told me to pull myself together and stop the screaming and freaking out. I pointed out to him that he might be freaked out too if confronted with the fact that such a vile creature had just passed through "one of the most sensitive holes in [his] body" (?! sigh.).

That's all I can remember, but it's still disturbing me.



*An interesting detail was that the makeup of the group was eerily multicultural, although disproportionately male.
**Odd variation on the theme of having to go to the bathroom in public--ordinarily in those dreams that's a major source of distress (although, oddly, I don't really have those dreams).
***The real-life inspiration for this undoubtedly being a real-life colony of fruit flies in the compost I just emptied yesterday.
****Which, with my limited herpetological knowledge, I took to mean it was a viper.

russian porn?

After some other things I can't remember, I dreamed I was accompanying my sister while she underwent some sort of test. I can't remember whether this was an educational, professional, or medical test, but it was taking place at an unlikely location, an isolated building in the middle of some woods. The building was sort of a modern, somewhat institutional thing reminiscent of a National Park Service visitor's center, with a stairway leading up to the main entrance on the second floor.

I think this testing was being incorporated into a longer road trip or maybe a long-distance move, because the car I was waiting in contained a lot of random possessions. I was just sitting there, trying to work up my energy for some personal grooming, including changing out of my pajamas (?), when I saw a familiar-looking guy walk down the stairs and approach the car.

The guy turned out to be someone I had gone to school with briefly in college and been fairly good friends with for a short time. He got into the passenger's seat to talk, and proceeded to ask what I had been doing all this time. He made a ridiculous gesture meant to simulate jiggling boobies*, to which I said, "If by that you mean have I been making Russian porn**, no, I haven't." He seemed disappointed but took it in stride, and then tried to convince me to go on a trip with him, saying, "it'll be fun!" By the way, he was also pajama-clad. I really don't know why we were both in our pajamas; it had no bearing on the story. Perhaps it was an artistic flight of fancy on the part of my subconscious, a little Hugh Hefner-esque touch (although both pajamas were regular cotton, no silk dressing gowns).


*Totally in character for this guy, who I liked in spite of his crassness.
**I think my subconscious, knowing I'm not a fan of the stuff (Russian or otherwise), throws in a cameo appearance every so often just to bug me.

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.

extreme changes of mood

I woke up in a great mood yesterday after dreaming several pleasant things (I don't think any of them involved Johnny Depp). The only thing I can really remember was that I had made a lot of headway on a freelance translation career and had been engaged to translate a real book, and a work of fiction at that! I was hopeful that this was going to be a launching pad for a specialization in translating fiction and that I would end up being one of those translators the merits of whose versions get debated in scholarly papers.

Last night's dream was awful. My husband and I had decided to take a little jaunt to Paris. I don't know where we were, but Paris was within driving distance. The only problem was that I wasn't dressed appropriately and couldn't figure out what to wear. I was very flustered and nothing was coming together, although I was pretty sure that my rose-colored turtleneck* needed to figure in somewhere. He got really annoyed really quickly and stormed out to drive away in the car because I was taking too long, ignoring my tearful entreaties to wait.

It turned out that he had only gone for a short drive because he was feeling antsy and didn't want to sit there while I had a closet meltdown, but it was still pretty harrowing. He came back after about 15 minutes, not mad at all, but I think I woke up before we could get to Paris.

*Notable because this is one of the very rare occasions when an item I actually own shows up in a getting-dressed dream.

...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.

breaking and entering

Speaking of dreams in which people are out of character, I had one last night in which my parents were completely out of character (they're normally extremely law-abiding and very concerned with propriety).

We (parents, me, sister, and possibly grandmother; I don't remember either of the sons-in-law being there) were on a road trip somewhere in rural southern or central Arkansas. Apparently no one had planned for lodging, and it was getting late. Since it was so rural, there were no hotels around, so my parents stopped at a little cluster of houses in the middle of the woods. Somehow it was decided that one of the houses was where we would spend the night. I'm not sure how this was decided, but I was so taken aback that I didn't even question the decision at first, thinking surely they would come to their senses.

They started unloading the car and carrying things into the house, which was fully furnished and clearly lived in. They were commenting on the furnishings and dishes in a matter-of-fact way, and my mother started puttering in the kitchen, although she seemed a little disapproving of the cookware. My dad removed a screen from one of the windows, saying that it was double-screened for winter, and since it was no longer winter the screen should be removed. I thought at first that he was getting ready to do some repair work, which I had mixed feelings about. On one hand, this wasn't his house; on the other hand, maybe he was looking at it as payment for staying there.

When I realized that they were serious about staying there, I started freaking out and saying that we had to leave right now because someone lived in the house and we could be charged with breaking and entering. When they weren't fazed by that, I brought up the possibility of the owner coming home late, finding his house full of strangers, and opening fire with his shotgun and killing us in our sleep. That didn't make much of an impression either, and I was more and more stressed about how to extricate myself from the situation. I was also disturbed at not getting any backup from my sister, who in real life is sensible and very cautious about anything that could provoke a violent reaction from a random stranger. She had shut down and wasn't saying anything, just wandering around almost invisibly in the sidelines (maybe looking to make her exit unnoticed?).

After we had been there for a while, with all the lights blazing and the windows opened, a police car drove by. It circled around, left, drove by again, and parked facing the house. The policeman just sat there staring at the house, with a civilian woman in the passenger's seat who looked like Grace Jones. I thought that surely that would move my parents to change their plans, but they remained calm in their bedtime preparations.

I don't remember how all that ended. I think it just phased into another story line. I was at work, looking at pictures (or footage?) with my boss. The pictures showed the bend in a creek that was supposedly part of a cave/creek system here in town. The bed was eroded stone with very steep edges, like a very miniature western river canyon, and the water was gushing through. He wanted me to go out and explore the creek system and take more pictures, but I was a little worried about the safety of getting into such rushing water. He said it was only about waist deep, but I thought he was being a little cavalier because he's a very tall and large person and would be a lot more stable in such a rapid current than a medium-sized person. I also wasn't excited about spending my free time on a work-related project, even one involving such beautiful scenery, and hoped he would forget about asking me.

In the other snippet, I was shopping with my mother, and it's only significant in a dream-analysis sense. She was rushing me along and didn't want me to look at some things I wanted to look at, which is one reason I don't shop with my significant other (the other reason being that I don't generally like shopping with anyone but myself). It's one of a few examples of dreams in which I transfer annoying husbandly traits to my mother, which I find odd.