retail

I haven't been remembering many dreams lately, although I know the group-living dreams are continuing, since I can recall a snippet of one from the other night (a friend was fixing a computer for me, pulled out a long, nasty string of mold/cobwebs, then carefully replaced it in the bowels of the computer).

Last night, though, or rather this morning just before waking up, I was having a different recurring-theme dream, a theme I like better than the group-living one. I was in an Anthropologie-esque store, looking at the sale section*. Actually, this store was a lot less attractive than a real Anthropologie store, resembling more closely a mall Dillard's or something like that. The merchandise, however, included some very cute clothing. I particularly remember a strapless dress made out of a linen-y fabric with multicolored blowsy roses printed on a deep rose background. It doesn't sound like me, not being either a strapless-dress or a cabbage rose kind of girl, but it was actually very appealing, and I was sorry it wasn't in my size.

The really great thing on offer, though, was a home fix-it book. It had simple, clearly written instructions on all kinds of things, accompanied by photos and drawings. The design was very well done, clean and attractive and just girly enough to be a good fit with the store (but not too girly; not festooned with pink). There were instructions on unclogging a drain** and rewiring a lamp, and I don't remember what else. It was quite disappointing to wake up and realize that I couldn't actually buy the book for $5.99 or however much it was on sale for.




*Not too far off from reality, since I often troll the sale room at Anthropologie, it being my "pass" to park in their parking lot so I can avoid the highly unpleasant Whole Foods parking garage. This particular retail dream differs from the usual, though, in that it's the first I can remember not involving secondhand merchandise.
**Also reality-based, since we've been having some bathtub drainage issues.

physically retarded and mealy-mouthed

I woke up this morning with the phrase "physically retarded and mealy-mouthed" ringing in my head. I don't remember the exact context, but I had been using it to describe the CEO of some large, nasty corporation. I was trying desperately to determine whether or not my terminology would be considered crass and insensitive to the actual disabled population. I decided that it was okay, since it was a figurative use (??). [This struggling over semantics happens a lot in my dreams, and I almost always end up hitting on some word combination that seems brilliant in the dream but which makes no sense on waking; or something that rhymes in the dream but that doesn't actually rhyme at all.]

I had also been dreaming about shopping for dress pants with my husband. Most of the men's selection of dress pants featured semi-flexible tabs sticking out all over, in various shades of gold and yellow. Once I was awake, I realized that they were modeled after the tabs that road crews stick on the center stripe. I have absolutely no idea where this could have come from, other than the seemingly endless road construction projects scattered along my daily route.

Like You Don't Read The Tabloids Too While You're Waiting In Line At The Grocery Store!

I haven't remembered any dreams in a really long time with the exception of several snippets involving a spider on the wall or the ceiling.  Um yeah, not really liking those dreams so much...

This one was from earlier in the week and is the one I remember the most clearly in a long while.  There's a blogger I'm following who recently posted that she's in the hospital.  And this is my dream:

I was standing in line at Walmart, waiting to pay for the items in my cart.  While waiting for the person in front of me to finish, I was perusing the tabloids.  What better way to pass the time, right?  I opened one up and right there, in the tabloid, was a story about my bloggy friend being in the hospital.  I was really shocked!  Not because I didn't know she was in the hospital, because I did.  What shocked me is that I didn't expect the tabloid to write about it.  After finishing the story, I set it aside and picked up another tabloid, which also had a story about my bloggy buddy.  Finally, it was my turn and as I was stacking my items on the belt thingie, I remember thinking, "Wow, who knew Juliana was so famous?"

When I woke up from that dream, my first thought was that she had died.  I'm sure she hasn't.  She may still be in the hospital or if she's not, she's probably still not feeling well.  But each day that passes and she hasn't posted, that thought comes back to me.  I hope she's ok.

Hilary

I dreamed I was at some sort of fancy boutique, which sort of morphed into/out of a Banana Republic. I was examining two skinny belts, trying to decide which color to buy and having difficulty ascertaining the actual color of each. I think they started out basically red and blue, but then became so dark that I couldn't distinguish between them. I tried to get them into better light so that I could see more clearly, at which point I was assisted by a salesperson--who happened to be Hilary Clinton.*

In retrospect, I think it was 90s-era Hilary, with longer hair and a smoother face, and she struck me as very poised and polished. I was filled with admiration and respect, as well as gratitude for her help. (Later in the dream, I passed another older, very professional-looking woman, whom I understood to be the president of Banana Republic, and overheard someone mention how nice it was to have these two very important women on the floor.)

I didn't see Hilary again, but when I went to check out, my total came to $710. I had anticipated spending too much money, but not that much too much, so I asked the cashier to go down the receipt for me. I had somehow rung up all sorts of odd things, including a $20 DVD that I didn't want, and asked her to remove. I woke up before we made it through all the items.

*As Hilary hasn't even been in the news much, all I can think of that would have triggered this is having heard the news yesterday (via FB--not even an article!) about Al and Tipper divorcing.

prostitution, partying, and megastores

Guess who had another group-trip dream? This one was to Italy (or an Italy-like country). In the first part, I was walking around an old city square. It wasn't as idyllic as it sounds, though. There were various construction things around (those wooden sidewalk-cover tunnels, mostly), and a fair amount of trash. There were also a lot of youngish men loitering and walking around*. They were invariably small, kind of greasy, tackily dressed (tracksuits, gold chains, and curly mullets figured prominently), and they were all, in various languages, propositioning me for favors. The most common was "how much for the night?" I found that I understood perfectly what they were all saying, and a tiny part of me was exulting at my perfect understanding of languages I didn't really speak. I didn't take the propositioning too seriously; it was kind of annoying and unsettling, but I figured that it was a cultural thing and that they weren't targeting me in particular, just any female in a certain age range.

After that I was with my dad in a gigantic semi-outdoor home/garden/decoration megastore. My eye was caught by a display of wrapping paper on sale--there was a really beautiful Art Nouveau-ish design with red poppies, and some colorful Josef-Frank-esque botanical designs. I was trying to decide on a couple to buy, since I don't use that much wrapping paper. The more I looked, the more confused I got. I saw some very cute designs that were very original and would be really good for wrapping kids' gifts--but then I remembered that I don't give that many kids gifts. I finally decided I should just go with the two I had seen at first, since I had been there so long (my dad was being extremely indulgent, pretending to root around and be genuinely interested in the wrapping paper while waiting for me). Once I decided on that course of action, though, I could no longer find any that I wanted, let alone the two I had seen before. All I could see were disappointingly unoriginal designs that looked pretty lackluster up close.

I decided to give up on the wrapping paper and accompany my dad to look for some item he was looking for (which had been the original purpose of the trip). I commented on how gigantic the store was, and recalled that Curly Sue had told me of being on a business trip to Houston (??!) and killing time in a similar store.

After that, I was with a larger group (still in a vaguely Italian place) including my husband and some assorted acquaintances from college. It was in the evening, and activity plans were being negotiated. Several of us were lounging on a huge couch/bed thing, and suddenly a girl I had known in college threw herself down next to me/on me John-and-Yoko style. I was a bit taken aback at this sudden incursion into my personal space, but didn't try to make her move because I was cold. There was a lot of tedious back-and-forth in the group about where we would go and what we would do, and it became clear that the group members were all very !Party!Party! types. I found myself agreeing to go out and "party" with them. Not being much of a partier in real life, I was surprised at myself, and even more surprised to realize that although it was getting late I wasn't tired at all. Of course I woke up tired after that.


*An eerily true-to-life detail, from my limited experience in Italy.

put this one in your pipe, sigmund....

I had the weirdest [most Freudian?] dream last night, in which, somehow, both I and my mother were married to my husband. Also, in the dream he was prone to picking fights both with random strangers and spouses. The whole thing was very weird, and I could do without having more dreams like it. The only redeeming aspect of the dream was that after my (our?) husband ran off in a snit (because I/we got mad at him for picking fights with random strangers) we consoled ourselves by doing some flea-market shopping.

Finnish products

Part of one of last night's dreams was really great. I don't remember the rest very well, although I think it involved taking a long and somewhat stressful multi-vehicle road trip with various members of my family. The good part was a stop to visit a home-product store. It was apparently a Finnish chain, and this was one of their few stores in the U.S. (oddly, I think this was in some place like South Dakota). Their things were beautiful, really simple but original and well-made. I wanted to buy everything there, but ended up with some white dishes and a rather large quantity of tiny handmade pottery bowls. There were so many of those tiny bowls that I wondered if Finnish cuisine featured a lot of dipping sauce. There was other handmade pottery in a variety of colors and finishes, lots of basic white dishes, and some really beautiful wood things.

Anyway, it was a really nice dream. I fairly often have dreams featuring "stuff", but it's usually clothes, and they're usually in a context of having to put together an outfit before a deadline. It was so nice to just stand around fingering the merchandise that when I woke up briefly in the middle of the night I tried very hard to stay in dream mode so I could do some more browsing.

Around Town

Once again I was hanging out with my parents, and this time with my boyfriend. We were going to some sort of college sporting event--maybe football. It was fairly raucous and involved a lot of undergraduates. There were a few sort of closet-structures around, and I took a chair from one labeled "Communications."

As we were leaving the event (about which I don't remember anything), I realized that I hadn't returned the Communications chair, and I felt terrible. I had the impression that different departments sponsored these chairs as a fundraising opportunity at the games.

We strolled happily through a very nice downtown-type area, which I realized, upon later analysis, was an amalgamation of all my generic dream cities. I think it was mostly supposed to be Minneapolis, though, and I was pointing out various areas of town and businesses.

And then we stopped at a laundromat near a thrift store. For some reason, my parents (or were they my grandparents by then?) needed to use a laundromat. I started poking around the thrift store, having been enticed by shirts in the window that were on sale for $0.50. I picked up a lime green polo, and was going to get it for fifty cents, when I looked at it more closely, realized it was pilled, and decided I didn't want it even for that price.

At some point, I realized the store was actually closed and that I couldn't buy anything. The two women who ran it were rearranging and pricing things, but weren't willing to ring up any purchases. They had apparently just opened the store, and I thought it was pretty cool that they were privately running a thrift store to help the community, and not to have some chichi boutique.

Disturbingly, however, now it was my ex-boyfriend who was hanging around in the store. We seemed to be attempting to mutually avoid each other, but then he was lingering closer and started to talk to me. I turned and walked away. I woke up with one of those lingering gross feelings.

Blood on the Street

I don't know if Strovska's recent dreams influenced mine, or if it was the five (!) squad cards my neighbor and I passed as we drove home from school yesterday, but either way my dreams also appear to be extremely suggestible.

I was on my lunch break from some training session, and I decided to go to the bookstore or library on my time off. As I approached an intersection that I now realize was probably a version of the one where my favorite coffee shop is located, the GPS device I was holding, and which was apparently giving me directions, narrated, in an increasingly wavering and eerily prophetic voice, that there was "blood on the street at [street name] and [street name]." It was rather disturbing, especially as it referenced a location close to me.

As I was waiting on the street corner, about to cross to my destination, an emergency vehicle with a bright white light flashing above its windshield came sailing through the intersection, I think with a siren going. As it passed, I saw there was a decal on its back window that looked like one of those "crossing" signs, except the animal in it was what at the time I think I identified as a marmoset. I now think it may have been a marmot.* Anyway, I figured it was the logo of the emergency rescue operation.

I entered the bookstore/library and started browsing the shelves. I noticed that most of the books had very worn spines. Then someone pointed out that someone (one of the professors/trainers from where I had just been) had set aside a book for me--there was a label with my name on it taped to the spine. Apparently it was a gift certificate, specifically so that I could get this book. It was on Vuillard, an artist I don't really know at all but in the dream seemed to like well enough. I took it up to the counter, and they rang it up for me. I had $1.60 left on the gift certificate.

Just before, I had remembered or been reminded (sirens?) of the violence ("blood on the street"), and had looked out the side window. In the alley, I could see a car and a person sort of bent over on the street, with his back sort of torn open and bloody. I told myself that I didn't really want that image in my head, so I looked away quickly.

As I looked out the huge picture windows at the front of the store, I could see that there had been a massive car accident. Five or six cars were strewn along the street, variously crumpled. There were big oily-looking patches of some fluid, from cars or bodies. Emergency personnel appeared to be draping sheets over bodies on the street. I could see that the building just down the block from the one I was in had been damaged, with its front window shattered.

Overall, one of the more disturbing dreams I've had in a while.

*The weird thing is that when I googled marmoset just now to find out what one is, a picture showed up that someone printed out and stuck on our office wall (the one with the two babies clinging to the fingers). I didn't know those were marmosets. I have seen marmots in person.

why so much plaid? and why are my dreams always so long and detailed?

I had a between-snooze-function dream this morning that had several threads.

The first thread involved trying to juggle the care of two dogs (to anyone who's talked to me lately, that won't come as a surprise since it's a real-life issue). We were living in a very spartan mid-century concrete house with a fenced yard that seemed divided into several parts, most of which I hadn't been in. We were discussing how to sufficiently exercise the dogs when I remembered that my husband had bought a really nice black vintage-style bike that was parked in the communal parking area, and I suggested that we ride bikes with the dogs so they could run and get more exercise. There was a back-and-forth on whether he had actually bought a bike and then forgotten about it, and whether, if so, the black bike in the parking lot was the one he had bought and not someone else's.

Then, inside the house, my sister and husband were doing an experiment on the effectiveness of Google. They chose as their subject a guy we know who has gone by several different names in his life, and they were comparing the results coming up for each name. One of the results was a video montage of his life, of the sort that people show at graduations and funerals. I only really remember two snippets of it. In the first he was about 12, at a Bar Mitzvah type occasion, wearing a red-and-green plaid jacket and matching plaid bowtie and looking very young and happy. In the other snippet he was adult, very hirsute (bushy hair and beard), and holding forth on some controversial subject in front of a group of people. In this one he was also wearing a loud plaid jacket and an unmatching also-loud plaid scarf. I had the impression that this bit of video was not something that should be readily available and that he might get himself into some sort of Homeland-Security-related trouble over it, not least because the bushy beard made him look like a candidate for profiling.

As we were looking at this video the surroundings changed and we were suddenly in a Target-like clothing store (still at a desk looking at the computer). The store also housed the office where I work, with people's desks mixed in here and there with the merchandise. My coworkers were walking back and forth purposefully, getting engineering-related things done, and my boss had a little office off to the side, the sort that you would imagine the manager of a small store having.

In the dream (and above all in real life), it was time for me to get ready to go to work, but I was reluctant to do the preparatory rituals and I wanted to watch the video of the plaid-clad friend with earphones so I could actually hear what he was going on about. So I went into my boss's office and told him I'd like to take a couple of hours of sick time and come to work later, if that was okay. He readily agreed, and I puttered around the store for a while, most notably running laps back and forth between the racks with the feeling that I was getting some really good exercise [on later reflection I realized that people were giving me really annoyed looks].

Around this time (still in the store) I met a girl with a really interesting sweater she had knitted. It was big and cozy, with a fair-isle pattern over most of it. The sleeves were kind of big and gathered on the shoulders and partway down the front, and she had very cleverly incorporated pockets into the side seams so she could stow away her hands. I really liked the idea and wanted to make a similar one for myself. I also suddenly had a vision of a completely different type of sweater, very much like this one. On thinking about it, the stitch pattern that was in this sweater wouldn't even be possible, but it was very pretty.

shoe dream

I had a shoe dream last night. The non-shoe-related part of the dream is pretty jumbled, but it involved my husband; me staying in my old room at my parents' house; some guy annoyingly coming on to me (I couldn't even tell if he was serious about it or just grabby, which made it even more annoying); getting a whole string of communications from a friend of mine in the form of a giant LED display on the wall of my erstwhile room (really, really neat-looking) and, later, lots of wadded-up pieces of paper with random thoughts written on them. It seemed like he was trying to communicate something important and needed serious advice or something, but what with Mr. Grabby and also trying to interact with my husband, I couldn't piece together the message. I didn't even have time to unwad all the pieces and put them in order, which was very frustrating.

Anyway, at some point I was in a large flea market/ antique mall of the type that's common where my parents live. I was trying to avoid Mr. Grabby, who was more or less sticking with my husband. There were some beautiful silk pajamas and silk tops made out of vintage fabric, and I would have liked to look at them closer and maybe try one on, but Mr. Grabby kept popping up and making annoying comments about how they would look on me. Throughout all this I kept getting pieces of paper from the friend (I'm not sure how they were delivered, I think at least some of the time random people would just slip them to me--he wasn't actually there at any point in the dream). The only really bright spot in the dream was a pair of shoes I saw and thought about buying. They were brown leather t-straps with big chunky high heels (shaped very much like these, except higher). There was a patch of brown suede on the toe, like these shoes {aside: isn't he cute?}, and the trim and t-strap were made of little interlocked pieces of metal. I thought that looked potentially uncomfortable and prone to breaking, although the shoes were clearly quite old and hadn't broken yet. In the end, I just wasn't sure I liked the suede patch, and I wanted to get away from Mr. Grabby, so I didn't buy them.

Pregnancy and a Crush: Happiness all around

So..I have had two dreams over the last two nights that I can actually remember! I haven't been remembering my dreams for awhile now, so remembering these dreams is great news to me :)

The first dream I had was about a friend that I work with. She was pregnant in the dream, almost 8 months, and glowing. Once I saw her, I remembered that I have never felt a baby kicking inside the womb. So I asked her if I could touch her belly to feel the baby kick, and she said yes. Once I touched her stomach, the baby stopped kicking. I kept waiting for it to kick again, but it didn't. I was still excited anyway with the opportunity to try to feel a baby kicking in it's mother's stomach. It was a happy dream.

**********

The second dream I had was a little more exciting. I was walking in a store and knelt down to look a product (which I don't know, because I only remember seeing the white florescent lights and being in the greeting card section). All of a sudden, a man with dark brown hair climbs over me and starts to kiss me. (It was like the kiss between Toby McGuire and Kirsten Dunst in one of the Spiderman movies, where he is upside down and she is right side up, and removes his mask and kisses him.) It was a awesome kiss and apparently, I recognized the man in the dream as a current crush, however, I never saw his face in the dream. When I woke up I knew he wasn't a mysterious or random stranger, but I didn't recognize who it was in the dream either. Suffice i to say, this was a dream that was hard to wake up from.

Bits and Pieces

mostly i have only been remembering bits and pieces of my dreams. like my cat standing on his hind legs and peeing on the room across the wall. i thought to myself that it was "target practice."

a few nights later was another dream where i saw a guy who had his shirt off and covering his entire chest was a tattoo of a big ol' target, like the Target logo. the weird thing is - it was so large, it went beyond his chest and part of the tattoo was on his arms.

today i took a nap and dreamed i was cleaning out the fridge. there was a LOT of food to be thrown out, including a large ham that had never been opened, part of a turkey still in it's original wrapper and cheese. instead of cleaning up the messy mess left behind, i chose to go shopping for more food.