My old house.

(*In reality, I have recently moved and there is someone already living in my previous residence.)

I going inside my old duplex to get some of my stuff, apparently before anyone moves in. It's really dark and cold. The light switch in the front foyer doesn't work. I stumble around, my eyes gradually getting used to the dark, and I realize that the duplex has grown new rooms, and that my stuff isn't the only stuff that's there. There are children's toys and books, men's clothing, nasty hairbrushes, etc. Things that absolutely do not belong to me, and that I don't recognize. As I walk through the house, I'm more and more overcome by fear and sadness. The hallway is completely different; it's exposed brick and has dirty stained glass along the top, which of course lets in no light because it's solid wall behind the glass. There's only one bathroom instead of two, and I have a feeling that I need to avoid it. Every time I pass by it, I get scared. My mom shows up to help me gather my stuff, but as we look around, we decide not to take anything because it all seems so nasty and we think my things have been tainted. We look around for anything that hasn't been "tainted" and can't find anything. Along the way, we find a lot of clothes for a young (?) woman who must be a serious barfly. Short skirts, sequined belly-shirts, t-shirts with trashy sexual innuendo, etc. There are used condoms and empty alcohol bottles everywhere, strewn amid the Dr. Suess books and E-Z Bake oven and the tricycle. We keep going past the bathroom, which feels worse every time we pass it. The last time, I stop and look inside. There's an energy-feeling coming from it that's actually audible, like a buzzing. Directly through the doorway is the sink, the toilet is on the left, and the shower is on the right. I don't know this bathroom. I've never been in this bathroom, that I can recall. I start to step inside and my mom slaps my arm and tells me there's an absence of pressure and she doesn't like it. Apparently, this terrifies us and we run through the living room and out the front door. As I'm closing the door and pulling out my keys to lock it, a dark grey cat darts out and disappears into the bushes. That's all.

*This is the second time I've heard that buzzing-energy sound in a dream. Wonder what a recurring buzzing means.

Surely somehow this can be blamed on the media

I don't think I hung on to this dream in its entirety, so I'll have to pick up where my memory allows:

I am in the passenger seat of a car. We are sitting in a street and there are lots of people and cars around. It's either a parade or a mass gathering of some sort. It seems vaguely celebratory, but in a politically tense way. I don't know who had been driving the car — or whose car it was (I want to say I kept thinking that I was just trying to get to my grandmother's) — but the driver's side door was ajar and suddenly there's commotion outside and Vladimir Putin hops into the car, throws it into gear, and we take off to the back roads of rural Russia, presumably.

There is the constant cacophony of machine-gun fire behind our speeding car. I am hunched down and overtaken by both excitement — something is happening! — and fear — something horrible is happening!

I try to appeal to Putin — I am not a part of whatever is happening here, sir! — but he has morphed into a young Tom Cruise, very handsome and manic with an ever-spreading grin that glints with mischief. We are going so, so fact, and he's trying to talk to me and see what my story is. I'm only able to speak in broken sentences — the roads are winding and it's dark out and the machine guns, which way are they pointing, anyway? It's to my great relief that he tells me that they are on our side, keeping other cars and people away from us. It seems like we drive and have a stilted, stressful conversation for longer than I can bear. I am star-struck and quite confused. I ask him if I can take his picture, and then I realize all I have with me is my busted-ass point-and-shoot, so I don't even bother. A blurry pic of Tom Cruise is as useful as a half-obscured pic of Bigfoot. No one's gonna buy it. He finally decides to quickly pull over and let me out to stand with a police officer up on a hill, and the chase continues — car after car after car after car — without me.

I'm relieved, and kind of stupidly sad to see the action go on past.

Funny that my anxiety in that dream — about political intrigue, Tom Cruise, and machine guns — was so much lower than my anxiety in most of my other dreams, which tend to be mundane and much less violent. Hell, the tick dream stressed me out more.

Bugged

The other night, I dreamed that I was scratching the inside of my right ear and I felt a bump. I tried to pick at it and quickly realized it was not a bump that was native to my body. I yanked it out and saw that it was a tick. I dabbed my finger back on the place where it had been attached and saw that I was bleeding.

I blame this dream on the fact that just before bed I had watched Brokedown Palace, and Darlene gets an ear infection when a roach crawls into her ear.

Horror Movie

A group of people and myself were at a party when Michael Myers attacked. The power was disconnected and people panicked and scattered. For a long time I found myself alone and sought out nooks and crannies in the old house in which to kneel, duck, and slip. I quivered with my inadequate weapon every time I heard someone coming. It kept turning out to be other party guests who found my hiding place to their liking. After a large gathering of them had populated my crevice we realized Michael was coming. Like a frightened herd we circled the room and somehow managed to lose him. We decided to move like a pack to decrease our chances of dying. I eventually came up with a meat cleaver and was instantaneously voted group leader. Trembling, I led the harried group through the creaky halls until someone pointed out that by crawling into the kitchen cabinets and shoving the napkins out of the way you could access a trap door that spit you into a shelf in the basement. They all awkwardly squeezed in while my heartbeat quickened and I suddenly felt very hot. I turned in quick circles as my group slowly disappeared and I waited to be the last one. I decided, instead, to run to the basement to meet them because I was afraid Michael would hear my heart beating in the trapdoor. Once I got down there they had disappeared and I was all alone. I'd say about ten minutes' worth of terrified sneaking ensued, and then, inevitably, I met up with Mikey. My meat cleaver had somehow turned into several pairs of pliers. I started stabbing him with them everywhere I could - stomach, heart, neck, temple - then I mashed two pairs into his eyes and pressed harder as white ooze and little blobs of eyeballs came running out. I backed away quickly but froze because he came out of that chair I pinned him down on like a bullet. I held my breath and silently freaked while he groped all around me, arms on both sides of me, trying to find me in his blindness. Somehow that skipped directly to his still body collapsed over the bathtub, his mask submerged. I walked, drained, back to the basement to ask the ominous-looking man who had somehow saved the day to stay til I got my friends to safety. He had been about to tote a big log upstairs to burn Michael, but he turned slowly to me - a black man with gray hair and gray eyes - and laughed in a foreboding way. The realization washed over me just before he spoke. "You will never be safe," he said, and a woman screamed from upstairs. I darted up a few steps to see a splatter of blood on the shower curtain. I ran back to the basement and screamed, "GUYS!" They all opened their cubby doors in unison like they were little elves in little elf tree-coffins. "We have to get out of here RIGHT NOW!!" Somehow that idea got interpreted as, "Let's get out of here right now - in two waves! You guys go second." So I found myself, holding an ax and the bathroom door shut, with a gang of terrified partygoers in my charge. We were waiting til the first group of people successfully escaped. Suddenly I looked down at my feet and thought, for a second, that I was Alicia, and had only 80's-style flats or ill-fitting slippers as footwear. Then it was time to move and I was me again. I came out of the bathroom swinging the ax, determined it was safe, and pointed toward the hall that led to the front door. "Let's go!" I screamed. Suddenly a party of two, the guys came out of the bathroom and looked at the hallway in terror. "What if that way's a trap?!" one guy plead, pointing to the balcony door that was less than five feet away from us. "OK, go, go, go!" I screamed, and the three of us bolted out the doors and up the grass embankment to a parking lot that was filled with cars. I spotted my Eclipse and, luckily, had my keys right in my palm. I frantically surveyed the area around the car as I got closer, silently praying that a butcher knife wouldn't sweep out from under the car next to me and slice my tendon. Then I awakened, terrified, in my darkened room.

No butts about it

A surefire sign that my television options should expand beyond the confines of The View and Oprah: I dreamt that Greg completed a monologue show and as the audience milled around outside, I spotted Whoopi Goldberg taking concentrated puffs off a cig.

"Aren't you filming the segment 'Kickin Butts with Whoopi' currently? I thought you were trying to quit smoking," I told Ms. Goldberg.

As a fellow smoker, I somehow felt cheated by Ms. Goldberg's refusal to nip the habit in the bud.