some non-gory but brutal violence, and an excessive amount of detail

I'm completely overwhelmed by all the dreams I've had lately. For one thing, I feel like I've only remembered a tiny percentage of fragments; for another, they've been insanely and excessively detailed (noticeably more than usual, which is saying a lot). I guess I'll just start with some snippets in no particular order and see how far I get.

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This morning before work (in real life) I logged in to Yahoo IM in hopes of talking to a friend in a faraway time zone who's been wanting to chat for a while. Then I realized that I was falling asleep, so I turned the volume way up on the computer in hopes of waking up with the little window-opening noise if he tried to chat with me. That's the real-life background.

In the dream, I was sleeping in my house (except that of course it was slightly different, both in the house's characteristics and the location, which was more wooded). In the dream I also had the computer on while I slept (for the same reason), so I was sleeping a bit fitfully. [I find it weird when dreams parallel real life so closely, especially when I dream that I'm asleep.] I ended up waking up to find that my husband had been there, which surprised me since he had already gone to work and is usually way too busy to come back home. He was trying to sleep in a gigantic king-size bed in a different bedroom (our house had morphed again), and said that he had come home the previous morning too.

That was the boring part. I got into bed intending to sleep some more, and woke up to hear strange sounds outside. We got up and looked out the window, and finally figured out that it was a disgruntled former coworker of my husband, shooting randomly with a shotgun (it must have been a pretty wimpy shotgun, because the sounds weren't very loud). We weren't sure what to do, but before we had decided on a course of action I heard noises in the house. He had somehow gotten inside and was waving his gun around, ranting and raving. I went out into the living room, and he shot wildly and missed the side of my head. Obviously something had to be done, so I picked up a greenish marble cutting board (not something we own) and gave him several solid blows to the head. He slumped over a countertop and I hit him several more times, very much in the way you'd crush a cockroach to be sure it was dead (there was no gore, at least). Then I produced a small pistol out of the blue (we don't have a pistol either) and shot him in the temple to be really sure--no gore there, either. The pistol was just as wimpy as his shotgun--no kick, and not much noise. It occurred to me to wonder why I hadn't found a bigger gun, but this one seemed to have done the job.

Of course after that I was stressed about what to do, not to mention extremely disturbed at having just killed someone (in self-defense, but still, the repeated head-bashing was a little much). Fortunately my alarm went off then.

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Another recent dream involved living in a dorm modeled loosely after my high-school dorm (where, thankfully, I didn't actually have to live). The rooms were very small and the hallways were narrow, and it was set up so that people in the hallway could peek through large cracks in western-saloon type doors and see what was going on in the bathrooms. There wasn't much of a plot, just an overwhelming amount of stuff all over--my stuff, other people's stuff, just all kinds of objects crammed into every available space. At one point I took a bath in some random stranger's bathtub, and the bathroom was chock full of all kinds of toiletries and shampoo. After that I visited my sister in her room and spent some time going through her selection of jewelry, which was a lot of ethnic and vintage stuff. I remember a necklace of jet beads carved into the shape of rosebuds, almost like a rosary, and a curious thing from Czechoslovakia: an egg-shaped container of very thin wood with decorative painting. I opened it up to find that it was full of tiny pins out of the same very thin wood, in lots of different shapes (people, geometric shapes, etc.), meant to be combined in different configurations. I was extremely impressed with her collection.

The dorm then changed a little bit, and I was in an upstairs room helping Curly Sue (who actually had to live in the aforementioned high-school dorm!) move to a different facility. It turned out that she had been incarcerated for some not-too-serious offense and was graduating to a lower-security facility. It can't have been anything too serious, because her mother was there helping with the move, and she didn't seem too disturbed about her daughter's crime/incarceration. Also, in conversation with them I remembered that my dad had recently had a similar stint behind bars.

The funny random detail here is that she was wearing several hats (literally, not figuratively). She had layered two or three knit caps of various textures on her head, and she changed these at least once during the dream. The consistent thing was that the hat on top was always just balanced rakishly on top of the others, not pulled down over her head. I found it curious and didn't completely comprehend the reason she offhandedly gave for her distinctive headgear styling, but I let it drop.

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That's just a couple; maybe I'll give it another try later. Stay tuned for not just one but TWO dust-ups in thrift stores; an anthropological exploration of either Afghanistan or Macedonia, depending on which part of the dream you believe; and an outpouring of emotion for an adoptive father (??).

Snippets

I haven't remembered many of my dreams lately, just a little snippet here and there.  But I haven't posted in awhile and was kind of feeling like I've been neglecting this blog.  So here ya go...

Last night I dreamed that I was back to working in a salon.  (I used to work in one eons ago and quit there because it wasn't a stable income.)  I had the feeling that I was pretty poor and was excited when I man came into the salon for a haircut.  His first question was if I could shampoo his hair without getting water all down his back.  He also wanted to know if I could blow-dry his hair once I was done.  Of course I told him yes!  We went back to my little area of the salon where I draped him with a haircutting cape.  I then took him over to the shampoo bowl.  His head didn't seem to fit into it and I couldn't figure out why at first.  Then I noticed that there were perm rods in the bowl.  A co-worker (one who I really did work in the salon with but haven't seen in years) came over and had the guy lift his head up onto the counter for a moment while she rinsed the rods and took them out of the sink.  The counter was up much higher than the sink and the way the guy was positioned, I don't know how he could've gotten it up there?!  So she gets all done and I proceed to shampoo his hair.  In the mean time, some random dream guy showed up and was asking me all kinds of questions.  I don't know what he was asking me but it seemed to take a lot of concentration to think of the answers and I wasn't paying much attention to the guy whose hair I was shampooing.  I got all finished and sat up the guy there for a haircut and put a towel on his head.  As he rubbed his hair dry with the towel, I noticed his back was all wet.  He got up and left, cape and all.  As he was walking out, I said goodbye but continued to talk to the second man.  Shortly after, I realized that I hadn't given the first man any of what he'd asked for.  I was concerned my supervisor would be angry that he didn't even pay for the shampooing and wondered what I'd tell her.
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This was a very disturbing dream to me.  I don't have a job in real life and can't seem to get one.  I'm barely managing to keep my head above water each month so I pray this isn't a forewarning of what's to come.

I was walking around my house and there were lots of packed boxes everywhere, some of them sealed shut already and others only partially packed so they were still open.  In real life, I have a room which I call my girly room.  It's sponge painted pink and blue.  In the dream, I went into that room for some unknown reason and noticed the walls had been repainted, they were now all white.  I couldn't figure out why it had been repainted.  In my confusion, I stumbled into one of the open boxes and turned to look at the items in it.  There was a look of horror on my face as I realized that not only were the items not mine, but the house was no longer mine either.
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I was on a campus of some school and was trying to figure out how to sign up to attend.  I have no idea what kind of school it was (college, technical school, etc.) beyond the fact that it was some kind of higher education after high school.  I also have no idea what kind of class(es) I was trying to sign up for.  After walking around for a bit, I figured out where I needed to be.  I needed help filling out the registration papers so I was taken to a classroom with a gentleman who helped me complete them.  We sat in a classroom at a long table.  As we filled out the paperwork, a class was going on around us.  The weird thing is, it wasn't just one class being taught.  There were mulitple classes all being taught at the same time by the same teacher.  One of the classes was a Spanish class and the students spoke mostly Spanish.  After awhile, she's switch to another subject.  Each subject she taught had totally different students so everyone was crammed in together.  I don't remember what other subjects she taught but they were things that were totally unrelated to each other.  Like one subject was for sure Spanish but another might have been Greek History and another could've been algebra.  I knew that I was registering for this teacher's class and wondered how I'd ever manage to not get confused or distracted with all the other things going on around me.  When the class was over, the various students stood up to leave and that's when I got a better look at them.  The majority of them were considerably older than me and several of them seemed to be senior citizens.  The man who was helping me was trying to get my attention so that we could finish up the registration paperwork but I kept wanting to look around at everything going on around me.  I noticed a gentleman I hadn't seen in many years who in real life has actually passed on.  He was talking to a woman about his same age and they were discussing the difficulty of the class.  He didn't seem to notice me and didn't acknowledge me at all.
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I was sitting on the edge of my bathtub in preparation of shaving my legs.  There was a band-aid on my leg and I was trying to figure out how to shave around it without getting it wet or having to remove it.