This is marriage to Paul Rudd

We're in the woods and I'm married to Paul Rudd. There are people around. This is the nice kind of woods, where it's dusk and there's warm lighting, an absence of cold or hot, and no motherfucking mosquitos. People are wearing flannel. The dream feels like flannel.

My husband Paul Rudd has a restaurant in these woods. He's the head chef. There are many people around, and my husband Paul Rudd is smiling, charming, and utterly beloved by all, including our two beautiful tow-headed sons, who are around but behaving themselves.

Best of all, my husband Paul Rudd is way into me. When he sees me, he lights up. Big smile, big embrace. Big energy. In fact, Paul Rudd gets fresh with me there in the woods, away from the restaurant crowd. Real fresh. Clearly, a well-run outdoor restaurant is an aphrodisiac for my husband Paul Rudd.

Getting time with my new internet boyfriend

I'm in the orbit of Phil Jamesson, the guy from the internet who is very funny and who looks like an actual Tolkien elf (which I'm way into IRL). I can tell that we are some kind of new couple or that we are close to being a couple, but we are having trouble getting alone time. There are people everywhere. His family and friends, I presume. We're on some kind of campus or in a huge park with several buildings. There's a cookout of sorts, a gathering. He keeps having to leave and come back. I feel an almost maternal longing to separate him from whatever it is so we can be alone. I don't remember his specific interactions with me but I remember feeling that we were very sweet to each other.

Baby belt

I am standing out in wintry field with a group of people who are watching this long conveyor belt that runs alongside a fence. It's carrying big clumps of snow in a continuous motion, and dumping the snow into a rusted metal bin where it gets ground up by rusted metal teeth.

In a break in the snow, along comes a group of small babies. Human ones, just sitting there on the belt, bundled up in their pastel-colored winter garb. I watch the babies inch toward the big metal mouth and it doesn't occur to me that what is going to happen is bad. One of the babies falls into the crush of metal teeth but he's sort of bounced about on top of the gears, bruised up and thwacked about, but not obliterated like you'd think.

I instantly start yelling in my head, the scolding of a guilty mind: "Why didn't I DO something?!"

The baby who took the fall is taken out of the metal bin and placed on the ground, or maybe inside on some carpet, and he's disoriented and can't move around or stand up without falling in ways that contort his tiny frame. It's horrifying to watch.

I wake up to the sound of my own son over my bed, demanding water for the third time that night.

A-hole

I'm walking through a truly enormous house. I think it is meant to be my friend Lesley's new(ish) house, which I have been meaning to visit and tour in real life for months.

There's a lot of work to do in the house, and old, patterned wallpaper covers almost every surface. Still, it's an architecturally impressive space, with giant angled ceilings and beams that I imagine must get caked with cobwebs and dust. I wonder how Lesley and her husband plan to clean the highest of the crevices, or if they will just let them be.

As I'm walking and gazing upward, I realize I'm dreaming. I've been hoping to have more lucid dreams lately, and have begun reading a book on lucid dreaming to try to get my brain primed. So once I realized I was dreaming, I got excited. It hasn't happened in a long time.

Then I hear a phone ring. It's my mobile. I answer, and the voice on the other end sounds just like mine. It's talking to me in a quiet, mumbly tone and I can't make out much. I ask the voice to please speak up, that I'm having trouble hearing. As the voice is talking to me, dream me is thinking about what awake me read in that lucid dreaming book: That if you encounter yourself in a dream, it's OK to ask that self questions about your Self. (At least, I think I read that. I just flipped back through the book and can't find the passage I'm remembering.)

After a few hard-to-understand exchanges with the voice, I ask it, "Are you me?"

The voice — my voice — says to me, clear as day, "Asshole."

The Santa hat

I had this dream a month ago but forgot to post it. I told my boss about this dream in real life and his reaction was, "Was she hot???"

I am visiting my childhood best friend, Christy, at her house, which is this depressing hovel of a place where she has several large put bulls running around. (This is the total opposite of how she lived when we were children.) She looks the same as always — incredibly thick, long blonde hair and a sweet round face. I can't believe she lives in such filth. The house is basically a shack with a dirt floor.

She tells me about how she's secretly sleeping with my boss, which is super juicy gossip. Then she shows me a video on her phone of a party they attended recently. My boss is sitting in a chair, completely wasted and wearing a Santa hat, and he's giving an impassioned soliloquy that's barely intelligible. Once he's done, he bolts out of the chair and out of the door and into the yard, where he runs smack into the mailbox and falls down.

Extremely questionable PDA

An authority figure in my life (not going to say which one because yikes) and I are spooning on a couch in a very large room that feels sort of like a warehouse or a hangar. Somewhere brightly lit with those suspended fluorescent lights that hang from chains suspended from corrugated metal ceilings. There are plenty of people around, including people we know and one of his close friends, but he is all over me, hands and mouth moving swiftly and surely. Voraciously. I'm surprised at his aggression.

I'm incredulous that it's happening but I am loving it; it feels like it's been a long time coming and the tension has been broken. But I'm worried about being seen because what we are doing is a Very Bad Idea. He doesn't seem to care, though, whatsoever. So I hold up a small red blanket in front of us as if that is going to keep us hidden just enough to keep going. I think to myself that I need to text Amber and tell her this is happening, and almost do so, but then remember that it's rude to use your phone during intimate encounters.

Buggin' out

I've gone to the foot doctor to complain about my big toe. It hurts, right on top. Right where the hair is. Yes, I have hair on my big toe. IN REAL LIFE TOO, NOT JUST DREAMS!

The doctor is treating me and I don't realize until he starts talking some crazy shit that he has used a fairly unconventional method of relieving me of my ailment: He has sliced open the top of my toe and inserted some sort of large insect, who has orders to go in and retrieve whatever it is that is bothering me.

The large insect goes in and fetches another large insect and then a tiny, tiny, tiny fish, both of which had somehow lodged themselves beneath the skin on the top of my toe.

I get stitched up and that's that.

Nip (pink) slip

I'm doing work for some colleagues in Staunton, Va., that includes me taking some arty photos and sending to them for their input so they can choose which ones they want to use in their publication. I don't realize until much later, after I'd sent the batch of pictures, that one of the pictures includes the entirety of my right breast, thanks to the fact that I was wearing a nursing top in it and didn't realize I was peeking out.

Then the email chain comes back to me, and they are scandalized. I am humiliated, and can't believe I didn't notice this before I sent it to everyone on their staff.

I figure I will lose my job because everyone is going to assume I did this on purpose.

Always a bridesmaid ... again

Amber is getting married and in celebration is riding around town on a school bus full of her bridesmaids, all of whom are dressed up in white with fancy headpieces on. Amber's dad is driving the bus and I'm trying to catch it in town but I keep getting to the wrong spot or missing it. Finally I am just standing near a curb next to a parking lot and the bus comes to a stop beside me. I can't figure out how to get in and won't go around to the other side, so Amber's dad does a huge U-turn in the middle of the street so that I can get into the bus without having to step into the street.

Once I'm on, the atmosphere is a little uncomfortable but celebratory. Amber seems excited at what's happening, but I can't recall who she's marrying or who any of these dozens of bridesmaids on the bus are.