Closeted

My friend Jay is sitting in a closet. I come up to him and begin kissing him. I notice that my mouth is dry. He kisses back and we make out pretty passionately for a while, hands going everywhere. He pulls back and looks me in the eye, smiling intensely. He does not leave the closet, though.

Overly friendly

I have apparently gone to visit my friend James* in the UK. He is living in a huge house that is absolutely bustling with people. Diverse people, in and out, through every room, so much so that we find ourselves unable to procure any place in the house where we can be alone to catch up. Everywhere we go, someone is watching. Even when we go into the bathroom, I realize that the damn door has windows in it for some reason.

I see Fritz asleep on the staircase in what looks to be an incredibly uncomfortable position. I ask James if there's no better place where Fritz can go to sleep, like maybe James' bed, and he hesitates and tells me that even his own bed is in a high-traffic area.

James tells me that it's always like this in the house. People he doesn't know sleeping in beds in shifts, rotating out, lying around on couches and floors, crap piled everywhere. It freaks me out. I ask him how he can live like that, thinking to myself how much I cherish the solitude of my little apartment. He mostly shrugs it off, though I can tell he doesn't exactly love it either, but perhaps has no other choice.

He leans in to kiss me, and I kiss back, except he won't remove his tongue from my mouth, even when I make the "I'm pulling back" head motion/lip tightening action. I keep kissing him, thinking he must just be really into it, or maybe this is a new style of kissing in which you can't breathe or move, but his damned tongue is just a slab of concrete in my mouth, and I find myself really confused by his sudden inability to kiss well.

*Name kind of changed to protect the dream innocent

How did I get here?

I find myself at my friend A's place. I'm in my grey ARMY T-shirt and nothing else, and I'm unshowered, and it becomes clear that I'm there alone. Let's just say that I don't know A nearly well enough to be at his place in such a state, and I start to wonder where he is and when he'll be back.

The thought to leave never occurs to me, so I snoop through his things. One of the things I can vividly remember is his porn collection, which I remark is very classy: It's on vinyl (how that works exactly, I don't know) and instead of each cover featuring sex acts barely obscured by cartoon explosions or black boxes, there are simply artistic illustrations of bodily forms, designed with care and aesthetic calibration in mind. I approve, and think to myself this must be some really old porn. I can only hope the porn itself is as thoughtful as the packaging, if that's possible.

I look out the window and see a bus pass by. It's as if my eyes are equipped with zoom lenses because I hone in and see A's face in the back seat, laughing at a joke someone must have just told. Oh shit, I think. He's home. With friends. What am I supposed to do? I am acutely aware of how weird he is going to think it is that I am in his house.

I go to the next room and peek through the door as people file into the house. I catch A's vision and wave sheepishly, and he looks surprised to see me. I feel awful for being there. I sit down on some low-lying chair, trying to obscure my lower half, which is without pants. His friends come into the room, one by one, and occupy open seats. A takes a seat just on my right and introduces me to each person. I do my sheepish wave thing. His friend L sits down on my left as if she knows me too. I recognize her from the internet in real life and am happy she's being nice enough to sit next to me even though I probably smell bad.

A's looking at me, but I'm afraid to look at him or talk to him because I feel gross. I try to explain to him why I'm there and how I got there. "I think I honestly might have sleptwalked over here," I say, "because I cannot remember coming over here. I'm wearing my PJs and I haven't showered either," I say, embarrassed. A is leaning in to my neck, smelling my hair and the curve of my skin. I wonder if he's trying to get a whiff of my pheromones or something. I tell everyone, by way of explanation for why I'm there unannounced and possibly uninvited, that I've been reading this book called Snoop, about how to determine personality types by hidden clues in people's personal spaces (it's a pretty interesting book that I really am reading right now).

A surprises me with a kiss, and he runs his hands quickly but sweetly over my hair and my chest, before I pull away. There is no way I can make out with him when I've not even brushed my teeth.

Your guess is as good as mine

1.

It's New Year's Eve. I don't know this just yet, but it will become apparent in just a bit. There are people everywhere. I'm not sure where I am and I don't really recognize any of the people around me. Some dark-haired dude I've never seen before comes up and starts cutting my hair with very large, very frightening shears. He is cutting in such a way that I am afraid he's going to slice me open. I tell him to be careful, and I close my eyes tight in fear. Suddenly he kisses me square on the lips and I open my eyes and realize it's because it's midnight on New Year's Eve. Everyone starts cheering and celebrating and I realize that he has cut my hair into a ridiculously short bob*. This distresses me a great deal, as I'm quite attached to my long hair and I tend to look weird with short hair. I freak out and leave the place.

Outside, it's dark, and there are people perched next to cars, poised to take photographs of the people who come out of the building. Like paparazzi. I cover my face and lament that I will look so lame in the photographs thanks to my short hair.

2.

Amber is sitting at a table full of girls I don't know. They are all dressed in mid-'80s garb — acid-washed balloon overall shorts sets, for god's sake — and all of them clearly think they're onto a trend. Amber's wearing more jewelry than I have ever seen, and I note to myself that I have got to borrow her awesome dangly fuschia gem drop earrings. She's also wearing a hot pink cat broach, and a yellow dog broach (I did have one of these when I was a kid), as well as layers of necklaces and bangles on her arms. Her hair is cut short again.

Several of the girls at the table look uncomfortable. I don't know if they all know each other or not. I call out one of the girls for wearing all that '80s crap and not even liking it. She stands up to confront me and ends up being 9 feet tall.




* Yet another dream for which I pulled content from that day's events. My friend Ashley just got her hair cut really short and told me about it over e-mail yesterday at work.

Crime scene

I have found myself and two of my friends — X and Y — in the hospital, though I don't think any of us are sick or hurt. X is wearing hospital garb, though, and reclining in one of the room's twin beds. She seems in good enough spirits, and I find myself wondering where her boyfriend is, as they're usually together. I also notice that Y has a sister there with us, although in real life he doesn't have a sister at all. I also realize that Y's dream sister is the real-life sister of my first boyfriend Jeremy (I'll call her C.A.).

We're hanging out in the hospital room, being generally goofy and making each other laugh, which is what we normally do in real life. Y does or says something — I don't remember which — that is so perfectly amusing that I can barely contain myself and lean over to give him a quick smooch. He quickly turns and presents his cheek to me, and then reconsiders and kisses me on the mouth. We don't think another thing about it, but X gets really upset and starts berating us. She storms out of the room. The three of us are left wondering exactly what we did to incite such a lecture.

Somehow we discern that there's a commotion going on outside. We leave the hospital room and follow the labyrinthine corridors to the hospital's back exit. There are tons of people doing exactly what we're doing — going toward where the action supposedly is. We reach the outside and continue walking along the sidewalks of a residential neighborhood. I see my mother walk right past me, and I stop her "Mom! momomomommom! Hey!" — and hug her and walk with her, even though she's acting incredibly distant and very much unlike how my mother would act if she randomly saw me out somewhere.

As I'm walking with her, I notice I'm leaving Y and C.A. behind, but I figure I'll catch up to them later; it's my mom! We finally arrive at where the supposed action is and I realize there's been a horrible murder and everyone is standing around gawking at a crime scene. I briefly glance in the direction of a house surrounded by police tape, and see a body under a white sheet on a stretcher. There's blood flecked on the sheet and pooling on the stretcher below. I look away and don't notice anything else about the crime scene.

I infer from the conversations around me that there had been a horrible knife fight in the house, and many people had been carved up. No one seemed to know the victims. Or the killer. I notice that Y and C.A. are gone, so I tell my mom bye and head back to the hospital to tell them what I found out. Once inside the hospital, I can't for the life of me find the outpatient corridor. It's a swank hospital. Think something done in the design style of CSI: Miami, except classy. I rush past the nurses' station and head down a hallway toward surgery. I double back. I head down another hallway, and find a fucking aquarium. Double back. Two more false starts down unfamiliar halls and I finally find the outpatient hall beneath the stairwell. I don't remember which room we had, but I find one that has a post-it with "Lindsey Turner's blog" written on it. Um, okay.

I go inside, and Y and C.A. are there, but X is still nowhere to be found. C.A. has blood all over her face, except it's theatrical blood — bright red and goopy — so I don't think much of it. I tell them all about what I know about the crime scene, and C.A. asks me if I saw the other bodies. No, I said. But she did! She said one of them had "xoxo" carved into the chest.

Somehow I missed that.

Dream residue

So, I can't remember much of what I dreamt about last night, but I can remember that I had a lot of fitful dreams that made me wake up repeatedly. I remember waking up at one point because I flailed my arms around and knocked my glasses off my passenger-side pillow and onto the floor and the clattering woke me up.

I'm almost positive I had a lucid flying dream, though, and another dream where I was trying to focus my eyes but couldn't see anything. I'm not sure I've ever dreamed about my horrible vision before.

Oh, and I kissed the same dude again.

Baby, my snake is a shark tonight

I had a long and meandering dream last night. I've mostly forgotten all the details, except this bit:

I'm hanging out with this guy I like, and we're just sort of sitting there, kind of facing each other casually. There's not a lot of distance between us. I'm petting my cat Jack, and Jack goes in for some headbutt nuzzle action, and I oblige for a minute. And then I just sort of lean over and kiss the guy straight on the mouth. He seems surprised, but not weirded out at all. In fact, I begin to hesitate and apologize for being so forward, but he tells me, no, it's totally cool. Really. And he kisses me back.

It's a good kiss, too.

No nookie for old men

I don't usually dream about things the night that they enter my consciousness. Usually it takes time for ideas and places and people to marinate in my skull before they begin popping up in my dreams.

Not so with Javier Bardem, the actor who plays the psycho in No Country for Old Men. He showed up in my dreams last night, uh, in a big way.

We're in some kind of confined space — a big room, maybe, though I don't know where. There's furniture in it, though I don't know what kind. We are wearing pajamas, I think, almost like we're having to sleep somewhere unexpectedly. I don't know how I know him, or even that I do know him, but any time someone leaves the room and we are alone, he approaches me in his best seductive swagger — which is not even a swagger at all, but a full-court press — and transfers some of his heat to me as his mouth — large and firm and prickly — presses against mine.

He follows me around, literally hounding me, telling me things like, "But I neeeed you" in that molten accent of his. I am flattered, of course — every woman likes the chance to play hard to get just a little bit — but I am wary of him. I know his reputation as a prolific lover and ladies' man. I suspect he is a womanizer, playing me for a fool. I rummage through his luggage (his BAGGAGE!!!), and pull out two pairs of women's underwear.

"Either you have some interesting hobbies or we have a problem," I tell him as he laughs sheepishly, caught.

[this next bit edited out because you should have to pay good money for my cheesy erotica!]