Choose your own adventure

There was a scene in Mad Men last night that I was sure was going to play out like so: Man falls asleep on couch, man opens his eyes and is suddenly dreaming, man stands up and things happen that the audience understands are dream things, etc., man wakes up. Except it didn't pan out that way; man woke up. But it's a common scenario in movies and television — the falling asleep and dreaming that one is in that sleep position, "waking", and then doing dream stuff. I thought to myself, that doesn't really ever happen to me, self. I never really fall asleep in my bed and then start dreaming that I am in my bed as a starting point for a dream.

Which means, of course, that that kind of happened in my dream last night. Kind of.

Last night in real life, I left my friends D and A's apartment and drove home, like, half a block away.

Last night in dream life, I had a few false starts from D and A's apartment, trying to get home.

During the first one, I was in my car and completely, completely drunk. I couldn't find my way out of the parking lot so I turned around and took some convoluted alternate route and ended up driving over a median and puttering out into the street, unsure if traffic was coming or not. I think I made it home.

Scenario No. 2 had me stumbling out into the parking lot with friends Ay and B, and B lagging behind because he had found something electronic blinking in the grass. He realized it was my Blackberry and handed it to me. I'm grateful, of course, because clearly I dropped it and would have left it behind forever and ever. And then I realize that I must have dropped it hours ago, because it's busted as hell — keys missing, panels warped, screen cracked, not functional at all. I instantly start freaking out because I don't have insurance on it and even if I did, would it cover stupid drunken mishaps like dropping it in a parking lot and people running over it with their cars? Doubtful.

Scenario No. 3 has me leaving D and A's place and getting on some kind of shuttle full of bona fide creepy freaks. I'm sitting in the back of a standard van — two people up front, three in the middle row, and then me and someone else in the back. The driver looks in his rearview mirror straight at me and saying, "Hey, baby, where you headed?" and other barely masked innuendos. He goes on and on and I try to stand strong and silent and wait for my stop. The person sitting beside him turns to look at me and I see what I can only describe as a Satanic nose, pierced by a huge, tribal-looking nosering. The van finally stops at McLean and Poplar and I get out and try to walk quickly across the parking lot of the strip mall there, but the driver of the van is walking briskly to catch up with me. Ay and B are walking close behind and B wants to know what's wrong, so I start yelling at the van driver, who is some skanky old dude with long blonde hair, "You can't just look at a girl like that and say 'Hey, baby, where you heded?" It's creepy!" B's all, "What!? Yeah, man, you can't do shit like that!" I'm screaming at the skanky dude and B and Ay try to console me as I break down into tears.

I don't know if I ever got home.

Moving

I am in a new apartment, one that's quite roomier than my current home, but one that's still strewn with moving materials and my usual packrattery. I walk around and look at the place with some confusion; I vaguely remember my ex helping me move into the place, and I feel guilty about having asked him to do so. But mostly I can't remember how I picked this place, or why. It's sufficient enough, and I'm digging the roomier bedroom, but as I walk outside onto the stoop, I see some things lining the stairs that I know are not mine, and that would seem to have belonged to a previous tenant.

There's an owl figurine, and some kind of dusty flowerpot. I get the distinct feeling — the fear — that the woman who lived here before me (I can feel that it's a woman) must have died in the apartment. I wonder how she died. And why I got to move in so quickly.

I am suddenly struck with another fear — how easy is this place to break into? I peer into the bedroom window and see my bed, and wonder who else could have been watching. I don't feel unsafe, necessarily, but I also feel like I might be at risk. Especially since I have no idea where these apartments are located and their reputation for safety. They seem nice enough, but looks can always deceive...

Then I remember my old apartment and can't recall ever giving my building manager any notice that I was going to be moving out. I imagine him and his wife walking into my empty, echoing living room and wondering where I've rudely run off to.

Scene from inside a nap

I'm in China, riding in some sort of cart that's being pulled up a steep steel contraption by a pulley system. It's some sort of rigged-up public transportation system. For tourists. It dawns on me how unbelievably unsafe it is, and how there is probably no federal or state or municipal oversight of this ride's safety. And how you always read about freak accidents in China where tons of people -- including clueless tourists -- were killed. I was going to be one of those people, because I thought I saw a runaway cart come slowly creeping over the hill, at which point it was going to careen into our cart, which was slowly climbing the hill.

I don't think I actually saw it, though. I just dreamed that I thought I saw it.

I need to cut back on the voodoo.

I'm attempting to go back to Voodoo Village in Memphis, by myself this time. I have no idea why. It's dark and misty, and I'm really scared. I seem to be coming in from behind or something, because I'm not on the road. There are banging noises coming from the houses, and it looks like flames behind the windows, but no one is coming outside. I get too scared and decide to run away. I turn around and start running, and trip over a tombstone. Looking up, I realize I'm in Lafayette cemetary, the one in New Orleans. Somehow this is still part of Voodoo Village. I don't know how I know that it's specifically Lafayette and not some other random cemetary with above-ground graves, but I do. I'm suddenly thinking , "Shit, shit!" and other gotta-get-out-of-here thoughts concerning witchcraft and crime rates, when I'm approached by a mean-looking yellow lab. He stands in front of me and growls at me, and I start cying and explain that I'm lost and I just want to go home. He stops growling and says (yes, he talks) that it's ok, that it's just his job and he's not going to hurt me. He suggests that I sit down for a minute and collect myself, and he'll give me directions. This seems reasonable to me, so I sit and we begin talking. He tells me that he's not really a dog but that he has been in this dog's body for a long time, so he's just gottten comfortable now. We have a long talk and does give me what seem to be good directions. I stand up to leave and he nuzzles my leg. I look down at him and he has a pen and paper in his mouth. He drops them and asks me for my phone number. I figure it's the least I can do, and give him the number. He says he'll look me up on Myspace. I say that's fine and I start walking away. I can hear him crying behind me, but I don't want to turn around. I mean, he IS a dog and I honestly feel that he's trying to force a connection. I keep walking and end up in a baseball field, where Tamara is sitting on the pitcher's mound and trying to build one of those ship-in-a-glass-bottle things. I ask her how it's going, and she looks up and tearfully thanks me for coming and tells me that she has to get this done before her wedding.


*I blame most of this dream on a combination of actually going to VV and having been reading The Witching Hour right before going to sleep.

Expectant

I'm pregnant again. I've got a bump, sure enough, but it's a small one. I figure I'm four months along. I keep reaching down to hold my belly because it feels fragile. I'm afraid that every movement and every surge of emotion is going to hurt what's in there.

My middle-school best friend Wendy S. and I are making our way through a run-down Goodwill, looking at the wares and talking about the baby. I get the sense that Wendy is wise when it comes to the ways of childbearing (this is probably true, since she has at least one kid in real life), even though she is the spitting image of how she looked in middle school — buoyant dirty blonde hair, flirty blue eyes, cushy lips and big teeth.

Suddenly there is a tumbly fluttery feeling in my gut, over to the right side, down low. I realize the baby has kicked (can babies kick at four months?), and I have a moment where I'm awestruck (it's alive!) and then worried (is everything OK in there?) and then freaked out (something inside me just moved without my permission). It slowly dawns on me that I don't want to have a baby. I'm not ready for the constant round-the-clock mommying or the enormous responsibility. I'm not ready to give birth, period. It's all moving too fast, and I don't remember making the decision to get pregnant anyway.

I'm back in a bedroom — it feels like my childhood bedroom remodeled, with a huge and impractically tall bed — and I get a phone call. It's Tamara. She asks what I'm doing this weekend.

"I'm going home, actually," I tell her with a tinge of remorse, eyeing my belly in the mirror. "I'm expecting again." (And then I realize that I've either had a baby or been pregnant before, or maybe my brain was referring to my last pregnancy dream.)

She's a bit incredulous, and asks me how that happened.

I start to think about it, and realize that I have no idea. Not only do I not know who the father is, but, once again (just like the last dream), I can't even remember the last time I had sex. "I just got off my period, too," I tell her in a final flourish of TMI. It occurs to me that I'm either psychosomatically pregnant or I'm carrying the lord's child. Which is worse, I don't know.

But I felt it kick.

Driving while Grandmaw

[This one's from last week.]

My grandmother and I are in a bigger version of her modest, newish silver SUV. We are driving -- er, trying to park, more accurately -- atop some kind of platform structure where the ground is actually a series of sunken trays that hold moving water. Please don't expect me to explain it any better than that. It makes no sense. Why moving water instead of asphalt? Hell if I know. It almost sounds like some stupid Fear Factor stunt.

Anyway, we're moving slowly, backing up, going this way and that, and I'm nervous that we're going to fall off the platform. She maneuvers us onto a piece of platform that looks as though it's for authorized personnel only. I tell her we should go somewhere else, and as she's backing up, we careen off the platform -- the fall feels like it takes forever, and I am aware of my own screaming -- and we hit the concrete below with a thud and a pop of the tires blowing out. Luckily, we land on all four tires and are not hurt. And no one -- since there are people everywhere around us -- seems to have been crushed by our vehicle.

I am freaking out, of course. I make sure Grandmaw is okay before getting out of the car and just walking around for a bit to collect myself.

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.

One of the weirdest.

Last night, my husband was working and I spent the night at my parents' house.
In reality, I am an only child of two historians/park rangers, and they live in an antebellum house that was fomerly a B&B, in the heart of the historic district in our city. I say this because:

In this dream, I have a younger sister and am still living at home with my parents, who are not my reality parents at all, and we live in a one story brick house in a suburb. In what I'm guessing is the early 70's.

Now please bear with me, because this is gonna get cheesy. But while I was actually having the dream, it seemed very real and I was absolutely terrified.

Anyhoo, (in my dream), I'm asleep and having a bad dream about ghosts. I wake up and there are black shadowy things moving around in the corners of my room. There's a nightlight beside my bed and one of the shadows passes it and completely blocks out the light for a moment. I hear whispers and a low humming that's kind of electrical. I start to scream, and am thrown out of bed and am knocked unconscious. When I awake (still in the dream), the lights are on, I'm lying on my back in bed, and my family is sitting on the bed. They tell me that when they heard me scream they ran in and I was on the floor. They lift my shirt and show me that I have human-looking bite marks all over my torso. At that moment, things start flying all over my room by themselves. The nightlight comes out of the wall and is "thrown" to the floor, where it shatters. I run to my closet and close the door and sit down. Now, I don't know who the hell this dream self is, but I/She has to quit with the dolls. In this closet, there are shelves up to the ceiling lined with dolls and stuffed animals. I'm sitting there, crying and hearing all the noise on the other side of the door, and one of the dolls falls off the shelf. One by one, they start falling. I start screaming again and try to open the door, and it won't open. All of the dolls fall on me at once. So I'm, like, siwimming in all these dolls and stuffed animals, and the whispering and humming is really loud but I can't make out any words. The door opens. My sister is levitating. I run to my parents' room (why did they leave us??) and jump into bed between them. I'm crying, lying face down and wondering why they won't comfort me. I feel a tapping on my lower right shoulder blade. Instinctively, I know it's not my mom or dad, that it's whatever this evil thing is. I burrow my face more into the pillow and try to think about happy, ordinary things and the tapping gets more insistent. The "finger" starts pressing really hard into my muscles, and it really hurts. I'm crying and writhing and trying to think about some birthday party that's coming up.
In reality, the phone rang and I woke up at that point.

This was almost four a.m. when I woke up the first time. I was shaken enough to turn on the lamp and glance around the room. Then I turned out the light and went back to sleep and had another dream.

Part two: I'm myself, with my real family, and at my parents' real house. In the guest room I stay in, there are these big, old windows that go from ceiling to about two feet from the floor (the house has 15 ft ceilings). It's Christmastime and I'm lounging about. It's getting dark and snowing heavily outside. I walk over to the window and am enjoying watching the snow falling in the beam from the lamp-post. Suddenly there's a huge, shaggy, brown bear on the other side of the window, and he means business. He raises back on his hind legs and does the standard bear growl-roar thing, but to me it sounds like the T-Rex roar from Jurassic Park. He starts pawing and clawing at the window. He can't get in, so he walks over to a nearby tree and swings at it and it falls over. I don't know if he 's just displaying his prowess or what, but I'm really scared. I duck down, thinking maybe if he can't see me, he'll go away. I hear a snuflling on the other side of the window, sit up, and peep through. And down. He's digging his way under the house, really fast. A big paw bursts up through the floor beside me, and I wake up. My dad's dog has jumped up on my bed and is pawing at me to take her outside.


So there it is. The first sounds like a "scary" Lifetime movie and the second ended up kinda funny.

*The phone call was a wrong number.

Baby bump

[from Friday night]

I look down, and there's this thing on me -- this distended, somewhat lumpy belly -- that feels not entirely of me and yet mine all the same. I have no idea where it came from, but I observe it for long enough to hazard a guess that, if I am indeed pregnant, I must be seven months along.

Instantly, panic sets in. I didn't plan for a pregnancy. What am I going to do about my job? (For some reason, I start feeling guilty because I am yet another woman on the design desk who has recently gotten knocked up, which means they'll have to find a temporary replacement for me.) What am I going to do about my life? The fear grows as I realize that I probably would not be okay with getting an abortion this late in the term. I tell myself that it will be fine; lots of women have unplanned pregnancies and it ends up being a great thing for them.

Then I try to figure out how exactly I got pregnant. I try to recall the last time I got laid and quickly do the math. No ... it doesn't add up. I have no idea how long my tummy has been growing, and I don't know when any of this could have happened. So I wonder if I'm even pregnant at all.

I'm in some kind of big, bustling room. There are lots of people around. I'm searching for a doctor of sorts. I finally find one. Seems like I recall him being a middle-aged man with wiry reddish hair and a copper-colored beard and mustache. He seems frazzled enough without having to diagnose whether or not I'm pregnant or carrying around a giant tumor in my stomach.

As he takes notes, I can tell that, yes, even if I can't remember how it happened, the reality is I'm going to be having a kid in two months. And the fear, it grows.

Breaking bottles

For some reason, I'm alone and walking through the parking lot of that gourmet pasta shop and eye doctor on the corner of McLean and Madison. It's just me and my purse, and I think I'm in pajamas. I stake out an unoccupied area of the lot (for what purpose, I have no idea), and notice that there are several people standing around, throwing beer bottles and delighting as they shatter on the asphalt.

One woman engaging in this apparently sanctioned activity sees me, and I laugh with her about how I don't want her to start chucking those things at me. She has no problem with that. Which is why it surprises me when some other dude at the far end of the lot starts chucking bottles just over my head, lobbed high at first, so they'll miss me, but later thrown just past my fucking face.

And then another dude starts throwing bottles toward me. A few near-misses later, and I'm abandoning my purse and taking off across the street, admonishing these assholes for having their fun a little closer to my skull than I'd normally prefer. I realize with a sinking feeling that my purse has all my earthly belongings in it, and I'm leaving it there in the lot. The asshole dudes are descending upon it, and one other dude is coming straight for me. So this is what it must feel like to know things are going to end badly, I think. I reach my purse and wonder why I didn't just sit in my car — which is apparently there — to avoid the bottles. One dude puts his hands on my and another grabs at my purse. I try to yank it away.

I notice, before I come to, that a soundtrack of gangster rap had been swelling in the background as the conflict got more and more heated. I think to myself, Do my dreams always have music?

I honestly can't say.