Before Disassembling...D'oh!!

I have dismembered a body under cover of night, and have wrapped each part in white garbage bags and secured them with twist-ties. I am loading each piece into an open trunk. I apparently have partners in my crime, but it's so dark I can't see who they are. When I'm done I turn around and realize that I am right in front of a Walgreen's, and there's a security camera pointing right at me. I panic, but realize that there's nothing I can do. I am caught, and I am going to jail for the rest of my life.

Wow, brain. Wow.

Last night I dreamed that my brother and sister were murdered and buried in a shallow, shared grave in my parents' backyard.

I remember going through the initial grief, and then trying to maintain my composure, doing well for a while, and then thinking about being an only child for the rest of my life. I remember standing on the grave without realizing it, and watching the dirt — red clay — shift to show a bit of someone's sleeve beneath it. Then I remember having a complete sobbing breakdown on the floor/ground, complete with heaves and honks and drool and snot bubbles and convulsions. I remember my parents trying to comfort me.

There's more, but it's all gotten quite foggy and I'd rather put it behind me anyway.

This may be the most fucked-up dream I've ever had.

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.

Murder and Botox

I am working in a hair salon with Alicia and another woman, who is the only one allowed to "cut" hair. I think to myself, wow, I finally got into a creative career I can get into. And then I think to myself, but it's hairdressing. I walk in and am having fun goofing off with Alicia and fluffing the locks of happy clients. Then I am at the Hippy Shack, and I am alone playing pool, but I feel like Jeff is around somewhere. I am waiting, hoping someone will show up. I raise the cover of my piano and look at the strings. Inside is a compartment. I open it and my Dad has a secret CD stash there. I wonder why they're secrets and open the padded, zippered pouch to inspect them. I look at the first one, which is a purple disk, and I hear people on the porch. I thrust it back in, quickly, and wince when I realize that Dad will notice it's unzipped. It's Mom and Carolyn, although Carolyn looks like someone else. "What are you guys doing here?" I ask. "We's wantin' to see if you and Jeff wanted to play some pool," Mom answered. I said, "I'll ask him - he's just over in the main house." But I meant another segment of the Hippy Shack that wasn't attached to the pool room, not my parents' actual house. I opened the front door to the Hippy Shack and it was pouring down rain. "Oh, wow," I said, and Mom answered, "I know." I jumped off the front porch and made for the carport but it seemed to take longer than it should've. Mom was in the background, screaming, "Faster, Tamara! Faster!" But when I got under it I was in the middle bathroom of my parents' house. Jeff said, "No, I don't want to play pool." He looked like he was in serious mode (like last night at his high school band's concert). "The last thing I have time for right now is playing pool with you and your mother." Then Mom was beside him, nodding at me as if to say, "Duh, Tamara, why would you even ask him?" Then I realized that I was sitting on a toilet, needing to pee. "Could you guys get out? I'm trying to use the bathroom." Then I was locking up the Hippy Shack, and on the way out I noticed a large blue planter with a coat of maroon paint on the inside. I remembered trying to take it with me once, and a policeman wouldn't let me, saying they were using it to look for evidence of a murder. He was laughing, but I wasn't, because I realized that I had killed my late uncle with an electric drill, drilling a hole in his head, and then chopped it off and faked a car accident. He was still all jokes, staring at me in the rain in his soaking wet police uniform, "You shoulda said to 'em, 'Djew find a head inside of it? Alright, then, I reckon I'm taking this planter.'" I faked a brief smile and headed for my car. I knew he was suddenly suspicious of me, but I looked up at the pear tree's leaves swaying in the rain and thought, I guess these are the feelings you deal with when the choices you make in life include drill-killing and beheading your uncle. Then my dad's friend Hop pulled up in his truck and I tried to rush into my car but he jumped out and said, "Tamara, I need your number. I need to talk to you about this." [In my last dream, my mother told me not to talk to Hop, and I remembered this.] "Let me give you my mom's number," I said. "This is really between you two." Then Mom appeared and they were talking out of my range. I started to drive away, but I thought Dad would be mad that I left her. Then I started to just get in my car and wait to escape the rain, but I thought that would be rude. Then I'm sitting outside of my hair salon, and I inject myself with Botox, right on the chin. I didn't want to - my mind was telling me how I didn't need it and it was poison and there was no rational reason for me to do it - but I just uncontrollably stabbed myself with the needle and pressed the plunger. Then I thought, Oh great, I am SO going to have a bad reaction to this. My mind answered, "You? You of all people will have a terrible allergic reaction to this. There's no way your body will tolerate it. You'd better take supplies." I dig in my purse, realizing with embarrassment that Other Lady in the salon is swamped, and staring at my car outside, wondering what the hell I'm doing. I'll be even more embarrassed when I tell her. I open a set of instructions, like it was a haircolor kit, and notice that what I injected was malleable, and I was supposed to manually sculpt it inside my skin. I look into a mirror and think, Great, just what I need - my lip area to be BIGGER. Then I hop out of the car and hurry around to the passenger seat to grab my stuff. It's dark and raining. I think, Well, Alicia isn't here yet, either, but then I see her maroon car parked there. I think, Shit.

upping the Warcraft ante

I'm so excited I finally have a dream to post. It's rare that I have a dream and even more rare if I have one I remember long enough to talk about.

I'm so embarrassed my dream was similar to World of Warcraft. I play the game, but haven't had time to log on in quite a while. So I'm a little surprised it showed up in my subconscious.

Anyway, I dreamed I was a mage (a class I never play) and I was going through soon-to-be-added game content as a beta tester. Only instead of sitting at a computer and playing, I was outfitted with a suit that actually put me in the game.

I enter the dungeon and immediately start screaming, whirling, floating and hurling bolts at enemies in the dungeon. I kill off a few until one runs and triggers animation on another. In the game, this is called getting adds. So suddenly, across the way, mobs (as the enemies are called) start throwing maces outfitted with very sharp blades. One whizzes past me and I realize this form of beta testing could kill me.

I lay down on my back flat on the walkway using the castle-like border as my shield. Maces are flying over and embedding themselves in the wall. Then, I'm suddenly talking as though there is another entity listening to me while I'm in-game. Now that I think about it, I think I was talking to myself ... outside the dungeon. This makes me feel very very crazy.

I say I'm going to have to blink out of here since I can't make a portal. (These are two in-game abilities. Blink moves the mage several yards in whatever direction he or she is facing. Portal allows the mage to travel to a set destination using a spell reagent. Yes. nerdy.)

I start moving along the floor several yards at a time, tilting my head to see where I'm going. After a little while, I'm out of the way of flying maces and I discover this other person I have been talking to is inside the dungeon as well. She's trapped and I'm supposed to get her out. I tell her "I'm going to have to use that spell." Somehow it's understood I'm going to use an ability that will turn me into an entity entirely made of energy. I would become an indiscriminate killing machine. The Other nods and walks over into another area.

I float up and shift into this thing that looks like a purple ball of lightning and start rushing at one mob in the room all while screaming like a banshee. I make the mob explode from the inside out. I move on to another and another, causing the entire room to erupt in screams of terror. Any remaining mobs run out. My ability has not faded, so I move to another room.

Bad move.

In here is a boss with his minion. I think about how fantastic my run in this dungeon has been going so far since in the game no class, let alone mage, would be able to solo an upper-level dungeon. I alight close by the two and suddenly, my pure-energy ability fades.

Now in real game play, I would have been dead. Lucky for me in dreamland, my brain just shifted to a different kind of playing field. Now all the area around me is cubicles with their 3/4 walls and desks. The room I'm in is empty of people save the boss and his minion-now-secretary who are hot on my heels.

I run over and suddenly I'm in Corporateland in some generic office with generic people and generic office plants amid a flurry of activity. I'm still talking to the Other telling her "don't worry. I'm going to get you out."

The dream progresses into something rather sinister and bizarre, so I'll end here. The corporate world is a scary place.

Horror Movie

A group of people and myself were at a party when Michael Myers attacked. The power was disconnected and people panicked and scattered. For a long time I found myself alone and sought out nooks and crannies in the old house in which to kneel, duck, and slip. I quivered with my inadequate weapon every time I heard someone coming. It kept turning out to be other party guests who found my hiding place to their liking. After a large gathering of them had populated my crevice we realized Michael was coming. Like a frightened herd we circled the room and somehow managed to lose him. We decided to move like a pack to decrease our chances of dying. I eventually came up with a meat cleaver and was instantaneously voted group leader. Trembling, I led the harried group through the creaky halls until someone pointed out that by crawling into the kitchen cabinets and shoving the napkins out of the way you could access a trap door that spit you into a shelf in the basement. They all awkwardly squeezed in while my heartbeat quickened and I suddenly felt very hot. I turned in quick circles as my group slowly disappeared and I waited to be the last one. I decided, instead, to run to the basement to meet them because I was afraid Michael would hear my heart beating in the trapdoor. Once I got down there they had disappeared and I was all alone. I'd say about ten minutes' worth of terrified sneaking ensued, and then, inevitably, I met up with Mikey. My meat cleaver had somehow turned into several pairs of pliers. I started stabbing him with them everywhere I could - stomach, heart, neck, temple - then I mashed two pairs into his eyes and pressed harder as white ooze and little blobs of eyeballs came running out. I backed away quickly but froze because he came out of that chair I pinned him down on like a bullet. I held my breath and silently freaked while he groped all around me, arms on both sides of me, trying to find me in his blindness. Somehow that skipped directly to his still body collapsed over the bathtub, his mask submerged. I walked, drained, back to the basement to ask the ominous-looking man who had somehow saved the day to stay til I got my friends to safety. He had been about to tote a big log upstairs to burn Michael, but he turned slowly to me - a black man with gray hair and gray eyes - and laughed in a foreboding way. The realization washed over me just before he spoke. "You will never be safe," he said, and a woman screamed from upstairs. I darted up a few steps to see a splatter of blood on the shower curtain. I ran back to the basement and screamed, "GUYS!" They all opened their cubby doors in unison like they were little elves in little elf tree-coffins. "We have to get out of here RIGHT NOW!!" Somehow that idea got interpreted as, "Let's get out of here right now - in two waves! You guys go second." So I found myself, holding an ax and the bathroom door shut, with a gang of terrified partygoers in my charge. We were waiting til the first group of people successfully escaped. Suddenly I looked down at my feet and thought, for a second, that I was Alicia, and had only 80's-style flats or ill-fitting slippers as footwear. Then it was time to move and I was me again. I came out of the bathroom swinging the ax, determined it was safe, and pointed toward the hall that led to the front door. "Let's go!" I screamed. Suddenly a party of two, the guys came out of the bathroom and looked at the hallway in terror. "What if that way's a trap?!" one guy plead, pointing to the balcony door that was less than five feet away from us. "OK, go, go, go!" I screamed, and the three of us bolted out the doors and up the grass embankment to a parking lot that was filled with cars. I spotted my Eclipse and, luckily, had my keys right in my palm. I frantically surveyed the area around the car as I got closer, silently praying that a butcher knife wouldn't sweep out from under the car next to me and slice my tendon. Then I awakened, terrified, in my darkened room.