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.

A Steven Spielberg production

Last night, I had an alien dream. It wasn't just aliens running all over the place either. It was like a movie was playing out the way areas came into focus.

I was at a lakeside house along with some blond guy and a bunch of friends. I guess he was romantically linked to me although we didn't act that way. Everyone else called on me with issues related to the guy.

It was some sort of typical college-kid party where people carried red Solo cups and "rebellious" music played in the background.

Something was wrong with the blond guy's dog. He and I were in a room where the dog's leash was attached to the wall. The leash ran down the length of the room on the floor, out some sliding glass doors and down a floor to the sandy beach below. The dog had plenty of lead to run and play on the beach, but it was laying down close to the house when I looked.

As the guy told me how the dog approached some creature he'd never seen before, the leash rose off the floor as though charged with an electric current. Lights began dancing outside like something from Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the camera view shifted from the second floor where we were to pan down behind the dog. The lights out on the lake danced behind some trees as the dog barked furiously.

The dog had enormous ears like no domesticated species and a horribly short, wrinkly face. It raced toward the trees where the light emanated and pulled the leash taut.

The scene shifted back to the second floor where I was with the blond guy. His eyes had become red and alternately flashing like a child's toy. I was sitting on the floor as the blond guy crossed the room, his eyes flashing, saying, "I told the dog not to go over there. Stupid dog. I don't want to lose it, though."

All at once, the dog stopped barking, the lights stopped flashing and the blond kid dropped to the floor. His eyes had returned to normal colors and he could not breathe. He laid clawing the carpet and at his chest trying to take a breath.

I called for help and knelt over him as he grew more frightened. "Breathe!" I bellowed. He took one gasp. "OK, you can do this. Come on!" I encouraged. "One, two, three, BREATHE!" and he took another gasp as other people entered the room curious as to what was happening.

Worst. Doctor visit. Ever.

We are sitting in a psychiatrist's waiting room. Beside me is a quiet middle-aged man. In front of me, in a chair against the wall, is another middle-aged man, reading a magazine. He's got a weird, ruddy texture to his face, like he's been burned or had bad acne as a kid. He looks up from his magazine and sees the man next to me, and a flicker of recognition lights his face.

"Hey, you're [so-and-so]," he mumbles, unsure of himself.

The man next to me grows surly when he realizes he's been spotted. He mutters something rude under his breath, something in the vein of leave me alone.

The man in front of me keeps looking at the man beside me, and his confidence grows. I get the distinct feeling that the man beside me does NOT want this dude to ask for his autograph. Which he promptly does, which causes the man beside me to say something really rude and confrontational.

Both men are standing now, and I'm just sort of watching them from below and the man with the weird face takes a swing at the famous man's face. He connects, and suddenly I'm trying to get out of the way of this brawl in the middle of the waiting room.

Some older man starts clearing everyone out and sending us home. Crystal Wade and Tamara are there in the parking lot, and they offer me a ride. I turn them down because I drove my own car. They leave and I walk to the area of the lot where I remember parking, and see that my car and several others have been placed behind a makeshift barrier of corrugated metal and barbed wire. Like a junkyard fence. I sigh a thousand sighs and go back inside the clinic to get someone to let my car out.

The front foyer has been completely closed off with tall walls of Plexiglass, and the far wall has some kind of scared-looking black dog perched on the top of it. I see that the dog is on a leash, and the leash leads to somewhere behind the wall. I wonder how the dog stays balanced and what happens if it falls. Wouldn't it choke?

Suddenly I'm somewhere else — presumably behind the wall — and I'm being ushered into a dark room, like a bedroom, and made to wait — presumably for my car to be let loose. I wait for a long time, long enough to eventually find myself wearing pajamas, when someone comes in and I ask him if my car is ready yet and he acts like it's been ready for freaking ages and what was I waiting for?

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.