Last night and this morning were full of dreams. I remembered them all when I got up to empty my bladder at 6 a.m., but now I can only remember snippets.
Beauty queen
I was getting ready to go to work, though the house I was in resembled the house I grew up in. My husband came back into the house to tell me that a beauty queen who spoke only Spanish had showed up and needed my help. Someone, a woman I knew in the dream, had told her she could come to our house and I would take care of whatever problem she was having.
I went downstairs to meet her, and told her in halting Spanish (even in my dreams I'm not as fluent as I used to be) that I didn't know why she was there, but that I had to go to work and couldn't help her. She kept saying that [the woman whose name I forget now] told her to come here, and she had nowhere else to go. My husband told me he had to leave or he would be late, and I shouted, "Just because I work for an understanding company doesn't mean I can just not go to work!"
My next course of action was to try to reason with the beauty queen. I tried to convince her that being a beauty queen was a dumb thing to do with one's life, and that she should want more. "Nunca querías más?" I asked her. She responded, in perfect, pained English, "I have eight years of experience wearing dresses."
We went out into the backyard, and a lot of people were milling around the driveway. They all turned to leave and I got intensely jealous, since I was stuck there with this beauty queen when all I wanted was to go to work. Two of my friends showed up and started setting something up in the backyard. In the dream, I remembered thinking it would be something fun for everyone to play with.
Eventually the woman who had sent the beauty queen to me showed up, and I expressed my anger with her. How could she be so selfish? So rude? The woman stood by the fence separating the driveway from the backyard and laughed it off. She brushed off my anger and the fact that I had to miss work because she sent this lost, confused beauty queen to me, who I didn't know how to help anyway.
Tow-truck boyfriend
My husband, mom, two sisters and I were pulling into the driveway of the house I grew up in. Someone was parked in front of me, a navy blue car about the same size as my Civic. It was getting ready to storm, and I wanted to get my car under the carport but this car was in the way. My youngest sister said she would call her boyfriend, who drove a tow truck, to take care of it. But by the time we got out of the car, the blue car was gone.
I got back in and pulled my car forward, and it took a few tries to get it straightened out so that when someone eventually tried to get into the passenger seat they wouldn't scrape the door against the evergreens on the right, and the driver wouldn't hit the gutter on the left. My brother-in-law was at the door, opening it and telling us all to hurry up and get inside. The storm was coming. Leaves were blowing around, and I could smell the rain.
My youngest sister announced that she was going to call her tow-truck boyfriend to come tow my car someplace, since we were all going to be drinking that night and she didn't want me driving. Despite my assurances that I am capable of not drinking and driving without having to tow my car away, she insisted. Over and over she told me she was texting him to come get my car. I got more and more angry, explaining that he would pull the back bumper off the car. Explaining that when I am at home, my car sits outside all the time and though I drink every day, I don't ever drive drunk.
The rest of my family agreed with me, but didn't seem to understand how important it was that we not allow my 21-year-old sister's boyfriend—that I had never met—to tow my car away someplace nobody knew of.
Wine bar
I was sitting at a wine bar; there were small tables around but I was alone so I sat at the bar, sipping on something red. I chatted here and there with the bartenders, but mostly I eavesdropped on their conversations and chortled with them when patrons would ask dumb questions about wine.
Someone approached the bar with a box of plastic lowercase Bs, contained in a thick plastic bag but open so I could see them.
"Oh! You brought back our ice cubes!" the bartender said, and I realized they were meant to be filled with water and frozen. They had looked like those chunky fridge magnets at first.
Four women came up and ordered wine, and said something that made obvious a rudimentary knowledge of wine. The bartender and I shared a knowing glance as she poured them their red wine. As soon as they took the glasses, they started dancing around violently. They laughed and cheered and yelled "wooo" as they danced. There was something about the song that made me take note of a name. "Michael Brendan Scott," I think. I wrote it four times on a large cocktail napkin. I kept writing it, over and over again.
When I woke up, I was saying the name in my head.
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