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.

Bugs

For some reason, I was trying to ignite a yellow chair in my living room, which in reality I like quite well. I was using either a candle or a lighter, and there were some charred spots, but I really wasn't making any headway. Then I looked down and saw that some cinders had fallen onto the floor. As I watched, there was movement amongst them, and tiny black bugs, and horrible spiders whose filament-like legs were almost transparent, started moving out from under the chair toward me.

I freaked out and started this full-on, ululating screaming as I attacked them with a broom (which I decided I would also burn when I was done).

Some of the spiders had sprung very thin bubbles on top of/around themselves, like tiny parachutes. When I looked at the havoc I'd wrought with my broom, what I saw were some of those collapsed bubbles (though larger now, and more like plastic cling film), and not insect corpses, but tiny, grotesque doll figurines.

I think this was a fairly direct response to the box elder bug invasion that's been taking place in my apartment over the past few weeks. And, no joke, as I was writing that last paragraph, I discovered one crawling on my toe. Ewwww.

money problems

I had a really sad dream last night. It was sadder in retrospect than while I was dreaming. My husband and I were breaking up--I say "breaking up" because I think in the dream we weren't actually married. Apparently we had been having a lot of issues (in the dream) about money management and autonomy. The plan was to remain friends and pursue some kind of semi-together-but-not-romantic relationship. I was resigned to it, since in the dream I was worn out from our constant conflicts. I wasn't too sad until we encountered a situation where he needed some kind of little thing--maybe a snack? I was going to buy the item from a convenience store with a couple of dollars in quarters, but he stopped me and told me that if we weren't going to be a couple anymore I had to pay with my card so we could strictly divide expenses. I got rather upset and said, "But for something that costs $2? What if I just want to give it to you as a gift?"

Anyway, it was an unpleasant dream to have not long before waking up. I think that right after that, and just before waking up, I distracted myself by moving on to some clothing-related mini subplot.

More old friends

I dreamed that my high school friend S, who lives for real in Seattle, lived in Bellingham, Washington. She decided to take a vacation to Seattle, along with our friend strovska and a friend from high school named J (who as far as I know, neither strovska, S, or I have spoken to in years).

On their trip, they took lots of pictures and decided to print them up in a very glossy (and VERY large--coffee table book sized) picture book. They also write up some interesting, and also quite long, magazine-style articles about the locations and activities in the photos. Things like, "Among the quaint teashops and antique stores, one can find a restful jewel of a cafe, where we enjoyed exquisite tea and sweet snacks on this chilly autumn afternoon." Just as thought it was in a Martha Stewart magazine.

All three of them looked as they do now, but they were wearing clothes that in my dream I remembered from high school. Big, chunky, fuzzy sweaters in early-90s style, for example.

Because S is pregnant in real life, there was a picture of her "resting" in the back seat of a horse-drawn carriage on a cobblestone street (right, this is in Seattle???). There were lots of pictures of them wrapped up in stylish scarves, lounging around tiny sidewalk tables, sipping tea, or strolling up narrow streets while window-shopping.

I remember being very impressed with the size (and heft) and quality of this photo book.

Marathon

Last night's marathon dream was atypical, in that I had apparently started on time and knew the route (there was an out-and-back stretch that I seemed to remember from other marathon dreams, apparently in a skyway of some sort). For some reason, however, I was running all by myself. It was only when I saw another runner on that out-and-back stretch that I knew for certain I was on the right course.

At some point, I ran into David and bummed money off him to buy some Sport Beans, as I'd forgotten to buy any of my own. He had started later and/or was running a shorter race, and said he was "taking a lunch break."

A Rough Transcript

When I woke up this morning, I tried to describe last night's dreams to David. It went something like this:

We were being chased by someone like the Dollhouse people, because I had helped free some of the other people and I had pulled my own Matrix jack-thing out of the back of my head, but had been faking it. They discovered that I didn't have it, and I ran away and they started chasing us. You and I went to the Riverview to hide and watch a movie. (David: "Hiding and watching a movie sounds like a great idea!")

And there were zombies at some point. (David: "Dreams are always better with zombies.")

...And... I was going to get married! (David: "Hmmmmm.") But to a girl. The wedding was going to be in three weeks, and we were experimenting with how my hair was going to look. It was going to look pretty awesome, actually. But I was already thinking, "Okay, I can just go ahead with this, because clearly I've thought out this decision, and it will probably be fine. And divorce is not that big a deal, anyway, if it doesn't work out. Or I could call the whole thing off... I still have three weeks..."

High School Flashback

I dreamed last night that I was at work on a normal day. As I was walking through the building, I noticed a girl that I'd gone to high school with (odd enough, since my entire workplace is ID-access only...no strangers CAN wander around). I recognized her at once because she looked exactly the same, but I pretended I didn't see her. Later that day, she cornered me and started quizzing me: "You're so familiar...don't I know you?" I said something non-committal and she recognized me. I had to pretend that I finally recognized her too.

Suddenly, I was in the position of dragging her all around, showing her the place, as she talked non-stop about high school and all the people we used to know. I asked her where she lived and she said, as though I should have known, "Dallas!"

At some point, the dream shifted to a performance in a big concert hall. It was a Christmas concert (undoubtedly influenced by the Christmas carols !!! playing in the car rental place yesterday). The hip-hop artist Jay Z performed Oh Holy Night. Everyone, including myself, was skeptical about his ability to actually sing, but he did quite a nice job. His performance combined this huge orchestra and choir with some really interesting electronically-modified sound effects, which came off quite nicely. I was very impressed. At the point in the song where it goes really high--oh niiiiiight di-VIIIIINNNEEEE--the orchestra and his pre-recorded soundsd created this whip-like effect that seemed to lash all around the room.

I walked up the long, sloping aisle to use the restroom, and came across my mom and grandma sitting on a park bench outside. At first I was going to avoid them, but I had to walk right past them. They were looking at a tree that was shedding thousands of tiny, white blossoms and petals, so that it looked like snow. I decided to joke around, and I started tossing the petals around and striking poses like a supermodel.

Dust demon

In this dream I spent several hours using a toilet that appeared to be made of red, glittery porcelain. This toilet also appeared to be out in the open, in the middle of a museum gift shop, a little ways out from the cashiers who I was facing away from. I don't know why I was there all that time, I think it partially had to do with part of the dream that happened before this that I don't remember very well where a child molester was getting married to a woman with kids and no one would listen to me when I tried to stop it. Anyway I feel like I went to use this toilet to be away from the wedding and to be alone, which was odd, because I was definitely not alone. There were cashiers and people buying stuff and people staring at me disgusted. I was being as discrete as possible under the circumstances. I think I might have been reading something part of the time.

I don't think I dreamt how I got off the toilet I just jumped to a different location.

I was in this giant dome, it was metal and looked like it was a mechanic garage for huge machines. There were workshop areas and metal supports for holding things up to work under and tools and it was dirty and greasy. There were also huge brown tapestries hanging around the domed ceiling. They were old and ragged, hanging from a two hooks, drooping in the middle, the whole place was very Mad Max.

There were also really large, garage door is type doors in the wall of the dome all the way around.

I walked around the inside of the wall and found that there were sections that had been finished with wood paneling and rooms had been built out from the wall. At one point around the wall there was a catholic priest sitting on a folding chair next to an open door into one of the rooms. He was maybe in his late 40's, not a real old guy. He didn't seem like he wanted to talk so I kept moving.

Then I came around a corner where the rooms stopped and the wood paneling went back up against the wall. A section of the paneling had been torn off and there was a creature sticking out of the wall to it's waist, so that it was just the upper half. It wasn't alive, or it was frozen. It looked like a demon, it's fingers came to points, it had fangs and pointed ears. It looked angry, like it was clawing it's way out of the wall. It also was made of dust or fine sand.

I already knew all about this thing, I felt like I'd seen it before or dealt with it before. When I woke up I felt like I'd dreamt about it before. It was a monster and that had been trapped somehow as it tried to reform out of the stuff behind the wood paneling.

I was still mad about everything so I decided to close all the big doors to the dome so I could watch a movie on the huge projector that I knew was in the dome somewhere.

Now there was a kid in the dome with me while I went around to close the doors. he was kinda annoying me, he was probably about 10 or so and he thought it was so cool how the doors closed. The doors were automated and folded closed like the lid of a Chinese food container.

I'd gotten most of the doors closed when I had to pass by the demon thing again. It now looked like it had a think layer of fussy dust growing all over it, and it twitched. I could tell it was coming back to life.

The dome was very dark now with most of the doors closed. I grabbed the kid and we ran behind something and hid. I could see the demon moving. It started dragging itself out of the wall, it's lower body was mostly formed from the fuzzy dust, so it wasn't fully working. It crawled across the floor of the dome really fast, all the way across to where the priest was sitting. It grabbed the priest and dragged him along with it into the open door he'd been sitting next to. The door slammed shut and I could hear the priest screaming.

I pulled the kid with me out one of the last doors that was still open, out of the dome. Over to were the wedding was supposed to be. It had been called off. There was a man there that looked distraught and seemed to be having a breakdown. I guess he'd known about the groom and finally broke down and said something, and the groom had been arrested.

I was just trying to get him to calm down so that I could tell him about the demon.

I don't remember if anything else happened after that, and then I woke up.

Staying Cool

I had a horrible dream last night involving stabbing someone. This was not the first stabbing dream I've had, but I certainly hope it's the last.

The first part of the dream was pretty inoffensive. I was supposed to be going to something referred to as a "charity gala" (yes, really) for some organization my husband was involved with. Once again, I was trying to figure out what to wear. A coworker's husband called and just kept on talking and talking and I was getting frustrated because I couldn't figure out how to get him off the phone so I could get on with my charity gala preparations.

Then I was at resort/hotel with my husband. I think we were there for a convention of some sort (not a charity gala!). The atmosphere was kind of 1960s, which came in handy later. The hotel was on a hillside with a pool overlooking a valley. At some point we were in a sort of auditorium with very steep steps up to the exit. The auditorium was fairly empty, and I think we were among the last to leave. We suddenly found ourselves facing several young guys dressed rather snazzily, who wouldn't let us pass--not overtly threatening at first, then becoming more so.

I realized that we were in some kind of life-threatening situation and it was a matter of us or them. I'm not sure if I grasped the plot against us, but there clearly was one, and these young men were clearly its executors. One of them pulled out a knife, and I either grabbed it from him or somehow produced one of my one. *****Warning: rather graphic stabbing content***** Before I could really think about it, I plunged mine into his abdomen, and here's the worst part: I remembered that in such a situation one was to twist the knife for maximum effectiveness, so I did. It was horrible! Just the same sensation as in the other stabbing dream.

As expected, the young man crumpled to the floor, and his companions ran off, although I figured they were just going for reinforcements. My husband had also had a knife in his hand, one of those utility knives (dark red with stainless steel), and he let it drop to the floor (I don't think he had done any stabbing; maybe some light slashing, but nothing fatal). I thought it was very unwise of him to just leave the incriminating weapon like that, but didn't say anything about it. Instead I carefully wiped off my knife (a burnt-orange Swiss Army knife) on the dead guy's shirt and stashed it away in my bag.

We high-tailed it out of the auditorium and into the adjacent parking garage. We knew we couldn't take our own car and would have to steal one for our getaway. My husband said, "so which car should we take?", to which I replied, "our yellow one, of course". He nodded sagely with an admiring look at my presence of mind.

About then we realized that an even better course of action would be to fly somewhere from the airport (the airport was attached to the resort complex). Our first impulse was to fly back home. We were already at the parting gate, talking to the girl at the counter [this is where the 1960s-era vibe came in handy; there was no security to speak of--also, everyone had 1960s hair and clothes]. Of course I realized that flying back home was the stupidest course of action possible and managed to calmly intercept my husband just as he was opening his mouth to buy tickets and somehow indicate to him that we needed to go somewhere else without exciting the suspicion of the ticket-counter girl. He immediately saw my point and congratulated me for being so smart (!), and proposed that we go to Detroit instead.

So I think I woke up just as I was thinking that Detroit was a pretty smart choice, being somewhat of a modern-day Wild West. Also I thought that with the depressed economy it might be easier to start from scratch there if we ended up having to stay. And then as I was further waking up but not fully awake I moved on to strategies for changing one's appearance fast and convincingly and Staying Cool [I had resisted, in the dream, telling my husband to Stay Cool because I rejected the phrase as too hackneyed, no matter how appropriate to the situation].

oh boy (literally!)

My brain is definitely responding to my fear of having more adolescent dreams and/or dreams about young boys*. The very night after the washing-machine dream, I dreamed that I was in a church-ish setting. I think they were having church, but there were some other things going on too, garage-sale sort of things outside. There was an old wooden Middle-America church-ish building with a high porch, and the inside where the church service was actually taking place there was also a balcony in the entrance, where you could stay and look over the proceedings without committing yourself to going in and sitting down.

When I was still outside, I saw a very small boy with curly hair who appeared to be lost. I didn't see any corresponding adults around, so I thought I should try to help him find his people. As soon as I approached him he darted away and was replaced by an older boy, maybe 10 or 11, with straight dark hair.

This older boy also claimed to be lost, and although I didn't have quite the same urgent feelings of concern for him, he was still young enough that he should know where his parents were, and vice versa. So I walked around with him a little outside, and we didn't find any parents. We then went inside and stood on the balcony, and I started to get the distinct impression that he was sticking around more because he had a crush on me than anything else**. I wasn't sure what I should do, whether I should continue the [somewhat fruitless-seeming] search for his parents; whether I should just stand there and listen to him talk, thus encouraging him; or whether I should just start completely ignoring him and hope that he would go away. In the meantime I realized that he seemed older than he had outside, and that, indeed, his voice had changed from preadolescent to adolescent. This freaked me out a little.

An unrelated but interesting detail was that there were food vendors in the back of the church. Someone had converted an old chicken coop to a portable stand for selling what they called “oeufs caillés”***. They were eggs cooked somewhere between soft- and hard-boiled, in the unbroken shells, but when one got to the yolk it had been transformed into soft little spheres the size of the big tapioca pearls in bubble tea. There were two versions, just plain lightly sweetened, and chocolate (although the white in the chocolate version was still white). The operators of the stand had set it up so that it was self-service, thus cleverly avoiding offending anyone with compunctions about buying and selling in the church building. I thought the whole thing was very clever, although I wasn't sure how much I liked the eggs in question.


*Not that kind of dream. Really.
**Wait! This is the second dream I can recall dealing with underage boys having inappropriate crushes on me IN CHURCH. What is going on?
***I don't think such a thing exists. Literally it would be "curdled/clotted/coagulated eggs", and a search doesn't show up anything. However, there are "oeufs de caille", or quail eggs; but the eggs in the dream were definitely chicken, not quail****.
****Wait! Eggs. Is this whole thing really about my biological clock? Is my brain really that twisted that it's presenting me with these weird parallel themes of pursuit and procreation? Does my brain fancy itself a controversial Italian movie director from the 60s or something?

regressing

I hesitated all day about posting this because I think it's an embarrassing thing to dream, but it's so random that I'm going to go ahead and do it.

I don't know what the occasion was, exactly, but I was at some kind of big event being held in a school gym. Whatever the event began as, it was transitioning into a dress-up social occasion of the sort held by religious schools that can't hold a dance. I was somewhat younger in the dream than I actually am, and not married; and there were a lot of people from my old high school, although most of them were just faceless extras (all older than high-school-aged, like me).

When I found out that the event was going to turn dressy I turned my attention to what I should wear for it. Although I don't remember the creative act, I found myself in a dress that I had whipped up on the spot*, out of peach-colored silk, floor-length, and late-80s style (fitted bodice with a "v" at the waist, puffy sleeves--it should be noted that I was skinnier than my actual self in the dream and such a dress actually fit me properly). I was surprised at how good it had turned out, but once I tried it on for fit I kind of ran out of steam on hemming the sleeves and skirt, and was just wearing it unfinished and over a pair of pants.

That's not the really embarrassing part, though. Around that time I started talking to a guy from my high school class who I apparently had a crush on**. He was being very cute/funny/charming, and he put his arm around me as he made silly comments about a washer and dryer we were looking at. What he was saying wasn't even registering because I was so excited that he had his arm around me. Then he made a comment about how we could have that washer in our house if we got married, or something joking-but-not-joking in that vein. Then he mentioned Oklahoma and I realized with a start that he was a big family person and that if we were to get married I would have to spend a lot of time there, possibly even live in Oklahoma, which really gave me pause.

Anyway. The embarrassing thing is, who has such adolescent dreams? The whole thing reads like a 7th-grader's diary! ("And then we were looking at washers and dryers and he put his arm around me! I think he likes me!") And I thought admitting to the Johnny Depp dream was embarrassing. I'm not going to be surprised if in tonight's dream some boy gives me a note saying, "Do you like me? Check yes or no."


*The event was in a cross between a gym and a Best Buy store, complete with merchandise in random places, including sewing machines and other home appliances.
**Thinking about it this morning, I realized that there may have been an actual mutual crush at the time, but I was too clueless to pick up on either side of it.

Dogs and Blood

I had another nasty dream last night. Lately I haven't been remembering my dreams, but this one was vivid.

I dreamed that my boyfriend and I were sitting on the ground, watching two dogs playing. As we watched, it became clear that it wasn't really playing anymore, but was turning into a fight. One dog looked much smaller or weaker than the other, and seemed to be losing the fight, but suddenly he just launched himself forward and grabbed the other dog's paw in his jaws.

He set his legs, and shook his head a bit, but didn't let go. Suddenly he growled loudly, and I knew that he was going to rip the paw off. BNB and I were really freaking out and we both turned away just before he made one massive effort and tore the paw off.

Somehow I knew what had happened without seeing it in the dream. The smaller dog was standing there in a pool of blood, holding the paw in his mouth and panting. The other dog was shivering on the ground, lying in his own blood.

I was shaking in the dream and a bit shaken when I woke up.