more ugh

[Another "ugh" to go along with the previous post.]

I don't remember what led to this, but I was settling into an educational institution. It must have been a co-ed dorm*, because I was in a restroom with a couple of guys I had known at various points in my real-life educational career. They're both fair-haired, and they were wearing similar but not exactly-matching plaid western shirts, lending them the air of a hipster comedy duo.

I was trying to find a toilet suitable for use, but, as so often happens with public restrooms, they all had issues. I finally settled on the one with masses of waterlogged toilet paper covering the seat. I brushed it off into the bowl and tried to flush the toilet (which was fortunately free of unpleasant matter as far as I could see). When I started to flush, it began to spew water all over**, on the walls and--more importantly--on me. It was a spectacular geyser made up of both larger solid streams and fine spray, and it got all over my face and even in my mouth, which I suppose was opened in astonishment and alarm. Of course my thoughts immediately turned to e. coli.

This awakened the sympathy of my two friends, who, it became obvious, didn't remember me at all. They said, "aw, what a bad start to your freshman year!" I was taken aback, realizing that they had mistaken me for someone a good 15 years or so younger. On one hand, it filled me with glee that I (apparently) looked young; on the other hand, I felt like an impostor due for a fair dose of embarrassment when they would inevitably realize that I was not, indeed, an 18-year-old and that I hadn't corrected them. My feeling of fraud increased when they very kindly offered to show me around (it also didn't help that we would be exchanging the relative obscurity of the restroom for the less forgiving sunlight outside).



*Really, WHY do i so frequently dream that I'm moving into or living in a dorm?
**I'm sure this was prompted by my intense hate of those odious auto-flush toilets that start to flush with excessive force right as you're sitting down, spraying your backside with a fine mist of water containing microorganisms I'd rather not think about.

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).

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

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.

gross and girly

I dreamed the other night that I was staying with my husband at my parents' house (they weren't there). I had apparently disposed of some leftovers (a lot of beans, and some other miscellaneous food) in the upstairs bathroom toilet, but hadn't flushed for some reason that seemed perfectly legitimate at the time.

Three girls in their mid to late 20s were there, for some reason I can't remember. Neither of us knew them, but their presence there had been pre-arranged through some sort of lodging swap program. We had just gotten home from somewhere, and I had decided that it was the perfect time to broach the subject with him of whether or not we were ever going to have kids. I have no idea why I found this the ideal time, especially with the three visitors in the house, but I was convinced it was the perfect opportunity, so I cornered him on the piano bench and started questioning him.

He wasn't as forthcoming as I had expected, and the conversation soon fizzled out. I was walking around the house doing chores, and he was in the living room messing with his phone. I ascertained that he was calling, or trying to call, a girl, and got very disturbed about this--especially since I took it as a reaction to my effort to get him to decide on the procreation question.

I decided to just stay upstairs and occupy myself with things and let him call whoever he wanted. I would then react as warranted to whatever ended up happening. Alarmingly, though, I looked over the second floor balcony and saw the three female visitors lounging in the living room in see-through 1950s lingerie (all three of them had very vintage/rockabilly hair and makeup). Great, my husband is in the living room making a "booty call" while surrounded with three women in various states of undress, looking like Suicide Girls itching for an orgy! I was quite unhappy but determined to maintain my sangfroid. The most annoying thing was my impression that I was expected to waltz down there and join in their orgy with them (even though said orgy had not started and was possibly only a figment of my imagination).

I went into the bathroom fuming and flushed the toilet. Unfortunately, though, the garbage had sat in there long enough to start getting fizzy, and the whole thing blew and splattered all over the place when I tried to flush it. There were little bits of decomposing garbage all over, including on my eyelashes. I went out to inform the charming group below that the toilet had exploded and that I was going to have to clean the whole bathroom and then take a shower (what better way to discourage them from including me in their orgy?).

I never did get my shower, although I did get the bits of slime rinsed off my face. The girls had come upstairs and I gradually caught on that they did not, in fact, intend to involve our couple in an orgy. On realizing that, I started to warm to them and we ended up in my old room talking about vintage clothes, various sewing and crafty things, and selling on etsy. I started rooting around in my old dresser and came up with handfuls of really neat old pajamas--lots of hand-embroidered silk and that kind of thing.

The whole encounter turned out rather pleasant, except that after having rinsed my face I hadn't put on any lotion, so my face was very tight and itchy. Also, I realized that since my parents weren't there--and since the girls weren't there to engage in an orgy--we had three separate bedrooms to lodge them in. The only problem was that the other two bedrooms available hadn't been cleaned in quite some time and were crawling with dust bunnies, which I found very embarrassing. (Garbage-spattered clothing and dried-up face showing messy and dirty lodging space to very cute, put-together visitors. Great.) I don't even want to think about what this dream says about me or my sense of self, but once again I've managed to generate a surreal and unwholesome list of labels.

i'm dating a mac

I had three wildly different dreams last night. I'll get the gross one out of the way first. WARNING: I'm not kidding when I say it's gross, so you might want to skip down to the second one if you're squeamish or eating. Really.

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

There's not much of a story line to the gross one. I was standing in front of a toilet trying to get it to flush. I had tried a couple of times and it was sort of flushing, so I thought I'd risk it being clogged and try again. It started roiling around and suddenly (ack! I don't even want to type this.) erupted like a geyser. Not just the contents of the toilet, but what seemed like the contents of the entire municipal sewage system were spewing out in a 6-foot-high fountain, as if the toilet were projectile vomiting.

It was by far the grossest dream I've ever had, and I had mercifully forgotten about it until the local NPR station saw fit to mention a local sewage leak this morning and it all came flooding (har!) back.

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

On to a more pleasant one now. I was in a group setting with an assortment of random dream people and a few former classmates (what is with this?). It was some sort of summer-camp-like environment (except it was winter), and I didn't really feel like being there but was obligated. I was a little sick or maybe just tired and depressed, and sitting next to my mother in a row of folding chairs, watching people getting ready to put on a skit. My mother started talking about some kind of show that a former classmate of mine was in, involving profanity. My mother said, "yes, he says, 'mmmmmghsfsajhgmmmmm' [mumbling]". I asked her to repeat herself and she mumbled again, only this time I made out that she was repeating a punch line containing The F-Word, and that she was mumbling it because she was embarassed to say it out loud. She said, "yes, it's vulgar, but it's so funny!" Which was completely out of character for my mother, who upbraided me once as a youngster for calling someone a brown-noser (which, in light of the previous dream, I can't blame her for).

By that time the performers were ready to perform their skit. I don't know who else was there, but it was a whole row of people seated on chairs on the stage, and in the middle was Justin Long (aka "I'm a Mac"). He kept looking at me during the performance, and when it was over he immediately came over and made it clear (how, I don't know; there wasn't much of an exchange of communication) that he was madly in love with me and that we were going to be dating. I was flattered, of course, especially since I thought I was looking pretty mediocre due to being tired and sick, but I wasn't quite sure how to feel about it.

I'm not sure whether I brought it up directly, but I was rather concerned about the fact that I was married and yet I was clearly supposed to be dating this person. He was cute, and quite persuasive, and completely dismissive of the idea that my being married was a problem. The only thing I could really think of to say as he put his arms around me was, "I was wondering how tall you were" (because he had always struck me as being rather short, which he was indeed in the dream, albeit a little taller than me). I was also confused by the fact that, to the extent that they noticed it, everyone seemed to think this little fling was really cute--even my mother seemed approving of it.

By the time I woke up I still hadn't come to any conclusion about how to deal with the fling with the Mac guy, and we had moved on to such racy activities as sliding across the gym floor on our stomachs. Oh, and there was a lot of hand-holding. Basically it was a 5th-grade level relationship, but it was a pretty self-esteem-boosting dream, what with the instant infatuation (I kept reminding myself that he probably had many attractive choices when it came to dating, including, of course, Drew Barrymore).

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

The last dream was boring but extremely vivid and detailed visually. I was on my way to run an errand for work and had to stop and eat somewhere. I was so hungry I had gotten confused, and I couldn't decide whether to actually eat something or to get something at a juice/smoothie place. I parked my scooter (?!), with some difficulty, and went inside. It was a two-story building with the entrance on the second story because it was built on a hill. The side facing the street was full of frosted glass windows, and the rest of the walls that weren't frosted glass were covered with license plates. I thought it was an interesting look, but was frustrated because it would have been more interesting to look at the street activity than to stare at the milky whiteness of the windows. I finally decided to have a cherry/banana/chocolate smoothie, but I was having a terrible time getting any of the people at the counter to come take my order. I surmised that this was because they were all gay and didn't think women were worthy of their attention (?). The whole dream had a really stressful, confused feeling.

ugh

I dreamed last night that I thought it would be a great idea to go to summer camp as a teen camper. [I was somewhat younger in the dream than in real life (not married, I don't think), but definitely not young enough to be a teen camper.] My reasoning was, "I loved working at camp, and I only have a week available, so I'll go as a camper". I came to my senses as I was sitting in the bathroom, though, and started to panic because I didn't see any way of getting out of it. To add to my stress, I looked down and realized that there was urine all over the bathroom floor*, and the tons of misplaced items (clothes, paperwork, magazines) were getting all wet and soiled with it (let's just say it was not clear and watery and odorless, either). I woke up as I was desperately trying to mop it all up with toilet paper. Nice way to start my day.


*Not from me, just to be clear!

Overflow

I was in a full public restroom. I went into one of the stalls that had just been vacated, and the woman had left her red baseball cap on the hook, so I handed it back to her. I was putting toilet paper on the seat when the automatic flush went off. It went off again as I tried to arrange the paper, and this time it filled the toilet to the edge of the seat and the water looked murky. At this point, I had a dilemma: did I leave the stall and say that although I hadn't even used the toilet, it was now perilously close to overflowing? Would I be believed, since I'd been in there a minute or two and had apparently already flushed twice?

I decided to stay... but the toilet flushed again and began overflowing. I crammed myself up against the door, as far as possible from the font, which still splashed me a little. It did this a few more times, flooding into the surrounding stalls. I thought I could hear people talking about it. Finally the toilet settled to a normal water level and I decided I could risk using it. Just then, my alarm went off. What a relief!

Before that, I had been in a field in a car with my parents. There was a dog that charged us and that we determined must be "part horse" because it was so big (though friendly). A cow charged us, too, but was thwarted by a patio door, or something like that. And finally, a creepy guy came up to the car to offer us advice, but we only rolled the windows down partway because we couldn't figure out if he was good or evil.

It was once we'd gotten back into civilization that the toilet incident occurred.

Teaching

For some reason, Ellen and I were sleeping by the side of the road in a city. There were beds there, and even a toilet in the middle of nowhere--which I used, right out in the open, with a sense of something being slightly out of place, but hardly even of shyness.

Later, I was in the TA office at school, where I saw one of my friends with huge dark rings under her eyes. Instead of asking her if she was okay, I asked her if there was anything I could do to help her. She brightened up, and said that actually I could help cut out all of these little figures out of colored paper. But as I was about to help her, I got a call from one of my students. In real life, this student's name is Evin, and I think she's a girl, but in the dream it was a boy. Partly due to the connection, and partly due to his circuitousness, I couldn't figure out what he wanted from me. I kept giving him generic tips about being a better student and trying to reassure him, but I wasn't sure it was working.

When I hung up with him, another student wanted to talk to me. She had very curly hair and skin that actually looked like porcelain. I couldn't remember her name, but I glanced at her paper, and said, "Do you go by Lyligia?" She did. I had apparently given her a C+ on this paper, and she couldn't figure out why, because she'd worked so hard and "shared some really meaningful things." So I looked at the paper, and remembered that although she had presented some very personal details, the essay overall was fragmented and non-cohesive. "And how long is it?" I asked. "Seven pages, single spaced," she answered. "The assignment was for three pages, double-spaced," I responded, "so this doesn't fulfill the assignment requirements."

I guess I was dreaming about grading since I've so far managed to do so little in my waking life. Sigh.

Creepy

Wooo, crazy dreams last night.

Many of them revolved around the theme of my family taking a trip in our old Corolla, and me being late (probably because I rode to work with my mom yesterday, and was running late). In the creepiest one, my siblings kept switching between being children, adults, and other people). The little boy (I don't know if he was supposed to be my brother at this point) had a heavy, suspicious-looking plastic grocery bag. I never got to look inside it, but the suspicion was that it contained body parts (is this what I get for reading about Deleuze and Guattari's Body without Organs?). My sister/the girl had one, too. They looked guilty, and seemed to be intending to dispose of a body at our final destination--though whether human on animal, and where it came from, I never found out. Then I remembered (ah, retroactive dream "memory"!) that they had made some reddish mouse that we had eaten, and felt very disturbed about its potential origin; if it had been what I was afraid I was, did that make me no longer a vegan?

I was all packed and ready to go, but I ran downstairs so that I could use the restroom one more time. When I tried to flush, the water pressure was really low and didn't do much. When I tried again, a jet of air shot out of the toilet at me! It finally flushed, and looked like it was going to overflow, but then it didn't. I ran back upstairs, and everyone was in the car waiting for me, except for my brother (now his adult self), who was leaning against the back bumper, looking disgusted at how late I was.

In another of the family-trip dreams--or maybe just another part of the trip?--we were in a big, multi-story parking garage, and my uncle was there. I think his car was a pale, minty-green Honda. I got out of the car for something, and my family drove away! I ran down several flights of stairs and met them at the bottom.

There were more dreams--about touring a beautifully finished attic apartment and cleaning the room of one of the senior girls in my dorm when I deaned (who in real life was beautiful, deaf, and kept her room immaculate), but I don't really remember much.

Moving

Sorry, this is a rough sketch because I have to run to work.

And the dreams about moving have begun.
A family was moving into my apartment with me. Somehow they were on a luggage carousel they came out when the luggage pops out. Pleasantries, nice to meet you, etc. Suddenly I knew it was a subway track, because I saw the headlight from down the tunnel. Trying to save their stuff instead of themselves and take their bags off the track. I was able to get them also off the track, but then the train didn't come for a long time. I excused myself to go to the bathroom, and suddenly I was in my bathroom but instead of my normal toilet there was a stainless steel airplane bathroom toilet that I didn't notice until I sat down and it felt lower to the ground than normal. I couldn't figure out why my roommate would replace the toilet or move it to a different spot, which I realized was also true once I stood up to inspect it.