FUBAR

I'm changing out the lenses on my camera and I look down and realize I've gotten an amazing amount of dirt and dead leaves in the interior of my little kit lens. I blow into it, thinking I can just dispense with the mess, but when I look down again, there's even more debris inside the lens. I tug on some kind of string, thinking it will pull the bad stuff out, and the entire guts of the lens come tumbling out into a pile.

There are people around — presumably people who know how to deal with camera equipment — and as soon as I show the lens (what's left of it) to a white-haired older gentleman, he shakes his head as if to say Too bad, that lens is FUBAR.

I set about trying to reassemble the lens shortly before realizing I have no idea how a lens' interior should even look.

I feel like a total fuckup but I'm not too disappointed because I've been wanting to get a new primary lens for a while. And yes, I did think of that exact lens in the dream.

Red Candy Apples

Prince Harry and Prince William delivered an impassioned speech on land mines at my alma mater, Page High School.

They stood in the parking lot with little oil-caked tykes bobbing around them with their arms outstretched. The children looked like little skeletons dripped in wax. You know, the sort made famous in those damned Sally Struthers infomercials at 2 o' clock in the morning.

Anyhoo, I didn't give two shits from a gnat's behind about Prince William. Of course, I wanted to prod Prince Harry's red candy apples. Always have. But I chomped my lips at the bit, instead.

My Mom drove over to Prince Harry and asked if she could make a donation.

"That's be great," Prince Harry said.

So my Mum swung open the driver side door. In the process, she smacked a little oil-caked tyke in the back of his head.

Prince Harry didn't seem to notice.

One big cart

My parents' church tends to be a recurring scene set in my dreams. This time, I'm in the parking lot with several people I know from that church including a recently married couple.

We're getting ready to make a trip somewhere, and the husband is having a hard time getting his large family to give him enough space to get ready to go. He has been loading a shopping cart with food items we're supposed to take with us.

The large family comes over to bother me for a while. At one point, they gather around me holding hands in a circle and start singing. I freak out and break away from them.

The wife tells us to all jump into the shopping cart, which is now empty of food items. It's the couple, one other girl and me. I don't know the other girl, but she's ridiculously underdressed for as cold as it is. We talk briefly and I ask her how she stays warm in her purple sweater dress. She replies that she's wearing Spanx.

All during this time, the wife is moving back and forth putting the foodstuffs back in the cart. She's doing a remarkably good job in her feng sui as I don't notice a decrease in available space at all. When she's not nearby, her husband is being ridiculously affectionate toward me. He rubs my shoulders, kisses my head, and does all sorts of sappy little touches that seem to be reassuring.

I'm really ignoring this, not because I feel any sort of guilt or embarrassment. It just seems like nothing to me and I don't give it another thought. I don't reciprocate and I just watch where we're going as the cart coasts around the parking lot closer to the SUV we're going to take on our journey.

Floods.

Ocean flood/tsunami dreams for the past two nights. Both with my family nearby, though in one I was mainly hanging out with Jessie and her husband. Last night I was on the beach when the water pulled out and when I saw the big wave coming back in, I hauled ass up a hill, scrambling and tugging at vegetation, to get away from it.

Lindsey doesn't need any sushi

I was at my grandparents' house in Cerro Gordo, apparently living in my sister's room. I was getting ready to go somewhere, and the blue early morning light was streaming in the window. I got dressed and looked down at my heels to see if they matched okay, and then got a text alert. It was a telemarketing text, and I replied, "No." Only, somehow I forwarded it to Lindsey, because she texted back, "No pa hai need sushi, y no pe ha any sauce, either, but thanks." I read it and understood that she was texting in Japanese, even though once I woke up I realized that it was clearly Spanish-inspired gibberish. I was embarrassed that I had forwarded the text to her, and didn't know what to say in return, so I just threw the phone on the bed.

Bad weather and a wedding

My father instructs me to get all gussied up; we're going to a wedding in less than an hour, and would I mind getting ready even earlier because we have to stop by the store for something on the way? The wedding is happening at the Parkers' house. I played softball with the Parker girls throughout my school years and we were always good friends (I've not seen or spoken to any of them in years; I don't think they're on Facebook). Apparently Faye (Jo Ann's mom) has cancer (that's true in real life) and even though Jo Ann just met this guy thirty minutes ago, they're getting married immediately and everyone's got to get dressed up to come to the house and watch it.

So I do my best to put my dress on and look pretty and it's tense because we're running late because of me. We pile into the car and my cousin Keri — a younger version of her — has to sit in my lap and I'm afraid she's getting mud on my skirt because she's just a kid.

The weather has started to get nasty out and we are trucking it over backwoods hills, topping them with no tires on the ground, screaming for my mother, who's driving, to be more careful each time we meet another speeding vehicle at the crest of the hill. We have so many close calls that eventually something happens and we're all exposed to the elements and we're wet and my hair is all effed up.

The sky is the heaviest color of dark grey, like it's ready to just flatten us all.

[][][]

I'm in a high rise, in what I've come to understand is my editor in chief's office. It's super swanky, with its own little breakfast stand and attendant in the lobby. There are jars of candy on the stand, as well as doughnuts. The office is sparsely decorated, but seems incredibly, frighteningly open because it's surrounded completely by giant plate glass windows. And glass for a ceiling. The storm is still raging outside and I wonder who would want to work in a place like this when the weather gets sour. I notice a small, black, high-walled, completely enclosed cubicle. It is there that the editor actually keeps his desk, I discern.

I imagine a tornado sucking the entire thing out the window and carrying it across the fields that surround the building.

Dream love is dream real

This guy I like but don't know very well is proclaiming his love for me and telling me I'm the one. It'd odd hearing this from someone again. Odd, but nice.

Haunt me, you beautiful man

I implore ya'll to hop on over to a dream blog way better than ours (but only slightly). There's a couple of special somethings for the old folks as well.

Bath time

I'm living in a new apartment. I don't know how long I've been living there, but things are mostly unpacked and settled -- even though I don't recognize any of the trinkets or knick-knacks as mine -- so presumably it's been a while.

The apartment is housed inside some kind of huge mansion owned by an older lady who lives there with her family. She seems like a typical middle-class Southern lady: freckled from years of sun damage, and wearing cheesy granny clothes. She's even wearing a sun visor.

The bathroom in my apartment is rather large. It has expansive windows on two adjacent walls -- one side looks into the mansion's giant indoor pool room, and the other side looks onto a grassy courtyard.

There's a jacuzzi tub in the middle of the room, made of slick, dark material. I want to strip down and take a bath in it so bad, but I don't want to be seen, either by the family inside, splashing around in the pool, or any passersby who might happen through the courtyard.

I walk over to the drapes dressing the windows facing the courtyard and close them with a great flourish (they are huge -- the size of stage curtains). They glide shut and I realize I've lost all the natural light and the bathroom is suddenly quite dark. I open the curtains back up and close the sheers instead, but worry that people might still be able to see me inside.

Prison and Spy Missions

Dream 1: I have gone to prison for what seems to be a DUI, but I have befriended a male guard who coddles me and gives me special privileges and generally treats me like his granddaughter. I walk in and out of my cell as I please. Inside my cell is a hospital bed, and I'm in a hospital gown, and I feel fragile as if I've been in a wreck. I know I haven't but that my health is failing for a reason no one can determine (I actually left work early Monday and didn't go at all today for health reasons). I dread telling Al that I've been incarcerated for the DUI (poor health) because I've been sick so many times lately. I wander behind a barn while dreading telling Al about the DUI. I can't even begin to think of how to word it. I go back to my cell and see the male guard leaving out a utility door. I wonder if this will present a problem. I see Jeff's phone sitting on my tray table. I think, "Oh great! I can text while I'm in here. I prolly need to tell him I'm in jail, anyway." Then I realize that if his phone is there how can I get in touch with him? I have a moment of panic. I whirl around, looking for my phone.

Dream 2: I am looking at a photograph of a former teacher of mine - we'll call her Ylffah Ydnic for the sake of Google and my own very fragile pride - that Lindsey has taken for me on a spy mission. It is a face shot, and although the back part of her hair has gone gray, I notice that the front strands have not, even though Lindsey plainly told me that it was completely gray, and the hair around the face usually goes first. I am mystified and enchanted as the photo comes to life and begins to say something. But before she can get a word out I wake up in my own bedroom and can't figure out where I am for at least an entire minute. Then, when I do, I lament that I freaking missed what she had to say.

UPDATE: I just saw the real photo Lindsey snapped for me on her real spy mission and my dream was right! It's not totally gray around the face. It's salt and pepper. My dreaming brain was right! Also, if I may add, she looks so, so hot. SO hot.

Dream within a dream.

I'm at Lindsey's place, only it's completely different. It's a house rather than an apartment, and there's carpet in most of the rooms. She has a live-in boyfriend (husband?). We're hanging out and chit-chatting while I help her move the furniture so we can shampoo her carpets. For no reason, a girl I used to see on the sly back in high school (we'll call her Jamie) walks in and it ain't no thing. It appears that she and Lindsey are at least aquainted with each other. Lindsey has to go to take her man some lunch and a package of paper, and encourages us to take a break while she's gone. Jamie and I sit down on the couch and start talking, but then she's Tamara, and Tamara is talking about how much she misses Jamie. I'm like, "I thought you didn't even know Jamie!" to which she replies, "Everyone has a Jamie." Then she is Jamie again. Lindsey is back and she says that since all the stuff is out of the way, ____ (her fella) will finish when he gets home. She said his name but (sorry!) I didn't absorb it or I can't remember it. I stand up and bang my head on a low shelf. Suddenly Mom and I are driving through Germantown and something in my car goes wrong. I have to pull over and Mom says that we need a specific tool from a specific store, and points to an upscale-ish department store, which is closed but we see people inside. One of the people opens the door for us and then we're coming off the escalator and into a beauty-counter area. My attention is drawn to the Chanel counter and I trot over to get a spritz of some Allure, Luke's favorite on me. Out of nowhere, there's a singing man in my way. I immediately recognize him from high school; he was a total jock, one of the "hot guys" and he had a big thing for me which of course was pretty much ignored at school, since I was not exactly a cheerleader. I stopped talking to him because what I needed was a friend and he was disturbingly horndoggish. He never got in my pants, and I think that through high school there was some lingering resentment about that even though he was basically nice to me. We'll call him AJF. Anyway, AJF is between me and the Chanel counter, singing and dancing around. His singing voice isn't too bad, kinda like Michael Buble and in that style, but he looks like a damn fool. And he's singing about all the women he's looking at, making up the song as he goes along. It's creepy; he's singing about all the asses and thighs and how he just can't help himself. He's using the "p" word constantly. I'm the only one who notices him. He's danced off to another lady, so I start looking at the pretty perfume bottles and making a mental note to look for a new atomizer. Then he's back, and he's making a big, grand sweeping gesture with his arm that knocks over and breaks all the pretty bottles. Undaunted, he sidles up really close and says, "Hey, funny-face! My funny valentine! Dance, funny girl?" and breaks into a jig and starts singing about the tall redhead (that's me) whose lady-parts he never knew but still wants to. I'm impressed by his clever rhyming but he still looks like an idiot and I still think he's pathetic. Then I'm suddenly back on Lindsey's couch. Jamie and Lindsey are looking down at me and I realize that when I bumped my head and conked out and that I had been dreaming. I say to Lindsey, "Oh, man... I need to write down my dream quick for Nocturnal Admissions! That was crazy!" and she agrees and starts rummaging through things for a particular dream notebook she keeps. She rummages into the other room and Jamie starts rubbing my shoulders. Then she touches my face and leans in to kiss me and I stop her. I'm very confused and I don't want her. I get mad and tell her she doesn't want me in particular, she just generally wants everybody. She starts crying. Lindsey walks in and hands me the notebook. She notices Jamie crying and looks at me like, "What's her deal?" and I roll my eyes and shrug. I flip open the notebook and start flipping to find a blank page. We hear her significant other pull into the driveway and come up the walk. I flip to a page that has a picture pasted to it, a picture of Lindsey and her ex, and there's a poem to go with it. She gasps that she thought she had thrown it away. Jamie storms out. Lindsey's guy, who is too dream-blurry to identify, comes in and sees the picture/poem in my hand, yells "Goddammit!" and walks back outside and sits in a chair on the front porch. Lindsey gives me a hateful look and I feel really low, like I've gotten her in big trouble. She goes outside too and that's when I wake up.

Big Kitty.

Last night I had another bout with a scary sleep paralysis situation, only this time it did not involve the hag I usually see. Instead, I dreamed/hallucinated two small slightly glowing eyes in the crack of the bathroom door, and I either then saw or understood that they belonged to a big cat, like a mountain lion. I credit this completely to having earlier viewed a forwarded e-mail of a mountain lion/cougar on someone's back porch. I couldn't move or scream (duhr, because that's what happens with sleep paralysis) but of course I awakened just before the cat pounced. This is obviously a clear case of a picture just getting lodged in my head and popping back up later. Its significance to me is that this is the ONLY time I can remember the hag not being part of the s.p.

Dreambits

1.

Theogeo started a new career as a call girl.

2.

A coked-out feline chases me up a metallic staircase. It clacks up the stairs, mewling and meowing the entire flight. Finally, it leaps on my face and starts clawing my nose to shreds. In real life, I jolt out of sleep only to find myself punching a nearby pillow.

3.

I'm wearing a pink gazebo balloon animal to my sister's wedding. I'm completely naked except for the pink gazebo balloon animal wrapped around my midsection. "That's so gay," a wedding guest says. I begin stroking the pink gazebo balloon animal. I look up at the guest plainatively and say, "it's a part of me."

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.

Shock value

1.

We are riding on a bus, heading who knows where. It's packed with kids I don't know and kids from my senior class. And Jack White, fresh from either the De Stijl or White Blood Cells album. He's sitting in the seat in front of me, next to the aisle, chatting and laughing it up with the more popular students. His hair is delightfully mussed and he's wearing a red shirt (as if you couldn't have predicted).

I suppose I'm trying to get his attention in any way I can. So I'm babbling loud mnonsense to my seatmates, who are giggling at my lack of shame. Suddenly, I blurt, "GOD IS A PUSSY."

Hahaha, I'm cracking up right now even writing that because who the fuck says that aloud, much less in a dream? I'm a horrible person, clearly.

My exclamation fails to get Jack's attention but everyone around me reels in shock that I'd ever let such blasphemy cross my lips.

2.

I am at the Young Avenue Deli with my old friend Amy F. (whom I haven't seen or talked to in real life in a few years). I've just trekked there through what is definitely not Cooper-Young but more dense and old and cobblestoned (probably some Parisian street I saw and internalized when I watched Paris, Je T'aime the other night). I'm ordering food from a plump young lady with short red hair. She is utterly bored with the task of punching my order into the computer and ringing me up. As I stand there by the bar (in this dream, unlike in real life, the food cash register is near the bar, not in the other room; in fact the layout of the place is all jacked up in the dream so I won't even try to explain), Amy and I are talking about newspapers and she begins going off on designers who insert errors into stories and make reporters look bad. (Amy, for the record, is not a reporter and as far as I know, couldn't give two shits about journalism.)

We get in a tiff in which she basically calls me out for ruining one of stories way back when, and she demeans my very profession in the process. I'm devastated that she would be so hard on me for making a very human mistake, which I explained was the result of several people's errors, not just mine. She continues berating me as I look over to the side room and see the popular kids from high school (what is with all the high school dreams lately? yeesh) getting drunk off of bottles of wine (including a magnum of Hogue White Harvest, yum). I've had my fill of being made to feel like shit, so I tell the cashier lady to forget about my food, even though I've already paid, and I stumble out onto the street like I'm drunk, even though I've not been drinking, and try to make my way back home through the cold, damp streets.

Performance anxiety

My dreams were all about the zombie walk again. Specifically, how I've managed to fuck it up or not do a good job.

This time I'm in a huge movie theater full of people. It's an IMAX theater, it seems, with massive stadium seating, and we've just watched a promo movie hyping the next zombie walk. It's over and people are scattering, but I feel like I need to say something to them, so I rush down to the front of the room and attempt to yell over the din, but my voice doesn't carry at all. Someone hands me a microphone. I can hear my voice coming out in a comically distorted tone once I start speaking.

"Wow, I don't think I really sound like that, do I?" I ask the crowd, most of whom are ignoring me. I keep talking and talking and listening to my voice through the microphone and wondering why it sounds so hilariously obnoxious. Finally, someone changes the settings and my real voice starts coming out.

I make my announcement — I don't even remember what it was — and then go inside an equipment closet with my fellow organizers. Inside the equipment closet is a small spiral staircase. We go up it, and it gets smaller and smaller until it just ends.

Then we come back down.

Yep.

There's also some stuff knocking around in my brain about how we had some video that didn't get done on time, and there's a point at which I'm standing in the middle of a busy highway intersection.

Yep.

from 2003

I was running. I was running from Jim Carrey. I had become entrapped inside a mid-revolutionary battle house during a nuclear holocaust, and Jim Carrey was my torturous captor. Bombs exploded outside, in all worlds, through and through, reality was unraveling, and I was skipping from world to world, lost from my own, in a warp zone tree infested modest two-story home. With my crippled pit bull in tow, I leapt from limb to banister in fevered and breathless panic in hopes of completing my mission and escaping back to my world with my dog. I found a warp hole and shimmied through into a vine-entangled jungle room. A suitcase bomb took out some flooring of the room in the next world, and my viney floor dissolved into a yawning gap between the trunks of two gigantic trees. My dog became laboriously heavy in my leather satchel, but I continued in frenzied haste down the tree house sidewalks towards a glass exit door. It was an exit to the outside. I could see shrubs, and a paved parking lot with modest sedans of grayish blue and maroon – it was my world! I crawled on my belly through the door and paused at the edge of the brick building, relishing in the edificial fire cover it provided against the turrets. I rested my dog’s satchel against the wall and positioned myself to peep around. Explosions, screaming, bullets shredding, my heart pounding; I inched the outermost corner of my left eye around the wall – too see a pair of army boots. I looked up in terror to see Jim Carrey smiling sadistically as he pulled back a long sword, then buried it in my skull.

Darkness surrounded me, and a deafening toll sounded. My heart pounded as I slowly became aware of grey contours about me. I lurched upright and stared at my blaring alarm, whose face dutifully read 5:14. Oh. The dim melancholy of my small upper room reminded me that there was no revolution, and I was curled on my sunken brown couch under a star-covered afghan having a nightmare.

When you suddenly remember a dream you had...

...or at least the feeling you got from the dream itself and you feel as though it was a dream you had a long time ago...and possibly more than once...Are you remembering a dream you really had a long time ago or are you suddenly remembering a dream you only had the night before...or at least more recently than you think...and it only seems as if it's old?

Earlier this evening I was passing through the little swamp just before you get to my parents' log house in Hernando when I saw something that triggered a visual sense memory. It was around 6:15 or so and the sun was still out, but the sky was beginning to fill with semi-vibrant pinks and oranges...which reflected on the surface of the water. The water is also rising down there. It isn't necessarily as high as it's ever been...so says my mom...but it's getting high enough that they were forced to purchase flood insurance. There are several bridges you have to cross before you get to their house and lately, they've been closing them more frequently with our freakish April showers.

Long story short...I see the colors of the sky in the water and I remember a dream that I had at some point in my life...I feel like it was years ago...where I'm forced to travel across a very thin pathway...which is sometimes underwater and sometimes barely above...and sometimes very high above the water...so high that to fall off would most certainly result in me being rendered dead. BUT the one constant is that there is always water. At times my family is with me...maybe other people who I don't know now, but whom I was familiar with in the dream. We're travelling somewhere. Sometimes I feel like we're in a car and sometimes we're going on foot. Our path was once a road, but not much is left of it. Sometimes I feel like I'm swimming. The colors are very vibrant. There are blues as pure as cobalt from a tube...pinks and oranges. They seem like sashes that sort of flow in the breeze or in a current if they're under water. All I know is that I'm on some kind of important journey and despite being scared I have to continue.

So within a few seconds of seeing the colors on the water today...all of this sort of comes rushing back and a question forms in my mind. What if...and it's a big what if...but it's an interesting what if...What if the Big Bang or whatever formed our universe was a sort of controlled event...not by like an intelligent designer...no...not that...but the kind of explosion that is the result of an event...the kind of result that could be predicted. For instance if we mix two chemicals we know what type of reaction will play out. What if everything...man evolving from sea creatures, man developing the wheel, and ultimately becoming what we are today...is all some sort of predictable...controlled reaction? What if dreams are glitches that occassionally act as metaphors to the real journeys we're taking in life? What if that old dream (which I forgot to mention seemed like the road to my parents' house) is some sort of a clue about my life's ultimate path...if it has one? What if? What if we're accidentally catching a glimpse of a pre-destined roadmap for our lives? Maybe?

Deep...I know.

Maybe one day I'll write about the dream I had in the 10th grade where I (in the dream) dated Kelly Kapowski from Saved By The Bell (Tiffany Amber Theissen-sp?) for the better part of a month. When I woke up I felt dissoriented and when I realized it was only a dream I felt like I had been dumped. It really hurt that much. That residual break-up feeling lasted for a good week. I'll never forget the time we had together, Kelly. Never.

Edge of a crater

The same dream with the crazy storm has now progressed to where I'm sitting on the edge of a very large crater alongside my father. The ground is very spongy and I feel like I don't have a good grip. I feel like any second now I'm going to tumble down off the side into the crater and die. I continue sitting with my back to the crater, looking over my shoulder and trying to dig my fingers into the spongy earth.

Someone next to me on the other side points across to somewhere inside the massive indentation and says "that's where it hit." Lucky for me, my sarcastic mind never skips a beat even when pumped full of adrenaline at the fear of falling. I think to myself, "It's a crater. The whole damn thing is where it hit, genius."

Mother nature hurls Crayola colors

I'm at a beach with a lot of people I know including my sister who is out in the surf while I walk on the beach looking around at people and wondering about the menacing clouds approaching.

The clouds are not the average dark grey thunderheads. They're rather brown and resemble something more like a sandstorm than rainclouds.

About as soon as they're over the beach, softball-size drops of mostly yellow paint come falling out of the clouds and making big "sploosh!" sounds in the water. People start screaming and running. I'm looking around and realize these paint bombs aren't bursting and dissipating very much. They're actually rather gelatinous and they're ensnaring people in the water and on the beach.

It's strange, too, the color of these things. They're mostly bright yellow, but there are swirls of red, green, blue and purple in them that occasionally appear. The water has since turned from blue to an Easter-like pale yellow with rivulets of other colors.

My sister is screaming and crying as she tries to climb out of the surf and onto land to flee. I see a few people move to try to help her and I turn away to keep running. I've been hit by two or three of these Crayola blobs that I've shaken off as I climb over a breaker and stumbled down into some long soft grass.

I start clambering up an embankment full of flowers, grabbing and tugging at them to help myself up to the path. I yell at people to head east. "You have to head east before you go north!" I shout.

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.

Dreambitapalooza

It was a veritable carnival of anxiety dreams in my skull last night. Bollocks, I can't remember many specifics of any of them.

1. It's zombie walk day and not very many people have shown up. Worse yet is that the ones that have shown up don't seem too terribly excited, and are underdressed and underwhelming and guess who feels like a total failure? No, come on. You can guess. That's right. THIS CHUMP.

2. I am riding in a car with a blonde-haired European dude who looks like some kind of weird Elijah Wood knockoff. He is being a pretentious asshole about something ... though I don't remember what ... and I'm trying to console him by telling him it's not really as bad as he thinks. And as soon as I reach out to touch him, he acts repulsed and freaks out and wrecks the car. We are careening off the road when I force myself to wake up.

3. I'm in an odd and foreboding version of my great-grandmother's house. It seems like there's some sort of permanent darkness outside. I'm hiding out from someone. Someone who feels drunk and violent. I try to lock myself in the bathroom but spend several harrowing seconds trying to get the door to latch and then lock. It doesn't matter anyway; the door feels thin like it's made out of balsa wood and could be smashed by a single pissed-off fist. Whoever's looking for me gets in the house ... and I remember having to leave the house and get into a car ... feels like there may have been rain. I don't know where we ended up going.

Brain update

For the very first time in months, my brain dislodged the high school test mememe.

In last night's dream, I was finally on time for once.

It could be that my subconscious realizes that I will disparge it publicly on the Internet if it doesn't get its shit together for once.

Late Registeration

I've been having this recurring and deeply cliched high school examination dream.

Says Dream Moods,

"To dream that you are taking an exam, indicates that you are being put to the test or being scrutinized in some way. Such dreams highlight your feelings of being anxious and agitated...You may also experience the fear of not being accepted, not being prepared, or not being good enough. You feel nervous, insecure and tend to believe the worst about yourself.These dreams also suggest that you may feel unprepared for a challenge."

Christ. It's like they're living in my brain.

In my test dream, I'm always stoned or late for this exam. Last night, I dreamt that after smoking a spliff, I waded through a gang shooting and tornado en route to high school.

Oh...it's cool that my cat is my car too.

Actually...the line from my dream was "Oh...it's cool that Heinrich is my car too." But see...I knew none of you guys...ok...like only two of you guys...the two I know...would know who Heinrich was.
SO...I'm on my way to a friend's house for something important. I pull up into the drive...which is somehow inside a house...and realize that despite my little red hatchback being tiny...it still has its ass hanging out in the road...which might be a hallway since we're actually in doors...but I can't tell. The driveway is maybe...MAYBE 2 feet long. Right in front of my car is a bookshelf of about 4 feet in height and on the other side of that is a long slab that runs 12 to 15-ish feet on into what now seems like a dining room/garage. My logic dictates that if I continue driving forward my wheels will drive up the bookshelf so that my car is diagonal and no longer in the road. Somehow it works, but when I go to step out of my car it changes the dynamic and the car begins to roll backwards. My friend/student Cody is there now with his handlebar mustache and he's helping me try to figure out what to do. My car's wheels are now really close together...like the wheels of an ab roller (shut up) and I'm able to pick it up and set it onto the slab/table thing. Only...now, my car is green and plastic and the wheels are white. I see my cat Heinrich running by and am concerned that he can't fit in the garage as long as my car is there...but then my car turns into Heinrich and runs away...to which I respond "Oh...it's cool that Heinrich is my car too."

I'm just not this frisky.

Without going into a lot of small detail and TMI, I've recently had a crop of vivid sex dreams, mainly starring people I am not attracted to/don't even know. Most notably, Bret Michaels. The night that I encountered the Rock of Love itself was also a night fraught with sleep paralysis and nightmares, though I have to admit that, surprisingly, Bret wasn't too shabby of a dream-partner. Other people who have shown up lately include but are not limited to: ex-coworkers, members of bands I like, and even a politician. I have no idea what any of this means. I've never had so many of this type of dream, so close together. (It should also be noted that there is little-to-no pleasure with these dreams, during or after. They're just fuckin' weird.)

The Asslicking Bandits

Criminal Activity

Unknown suspects have been breaking into houses in Williamson County. The suspects have been trussing victims up like a Christmas turkey and performing acts of anal penetration on said victims. The time of occurrence for the majority of these crimes has taken place between lunch and dinner hours. One of the suspects has been described by the victim "TvontheFritz" as an Asian-American woman in her mid-40s who bears an uncanny resemblance to Margaret Cho.

Cobwebs

I'm in the house in which I grew up and I notice there are a fair number of cobwebs in the corners and around the place.

Then, this one woman I don't recognize is telling me that there are in fact spiders everywhere, but I haven't been looking at them.

So, I start looking around and I realize ... she's right. There are spiders building webs all over the place. In fact, I'm surrounded by them. It's a labyrinth of webs and I'm stuck in them. To get out of the house means I'm covered in webs and spiders.

I look down and realize two light brown monsters have already made their way onto my clothing. I pull off a shoe and fling them off me, then beat them to pulps once they land. Then, I start swinging my shoe through the air, clearing the cobwebs and killing spiders in the way.

I have a nice bubble around myself cleared only to realize ... I haven't been seeing the smaller filaments. Now I realize there are still more around me as I furiously swing my shoe in an effort to clear them.

Then, in the ultimate brain-telling-itself-that-this-is-psycho moment, several people walk up oblivious to the webs and spiders and ask me what I'm doing. "I'm clearing the spider webs. Don't you guys see them? They're everywhere! And spiders, too!"

"No," they say ...

Straightjackets on sale only $29.95. I swear ...

Something borrowed, something ... doesn't add up

I dreamed that my mother was planning some sort of all-day extravagant wedding celebration for herself and her new husband. They were going to get married in the morning, kick back and relax in the afternoon, then have a huge celebratory reception at night.

This night thing was supposed to be black tie. In my mind, I had already picked out what dress my mother should wear. It was daring but it's elegant. It was also very expensive.

My mother, on the other hand, was worried about costs and seeming snobbish spending all this money. So she picked out this kimono looking shapeless dress with pants underneath. It was white with black designs on it and it looked like pajamas. I mean it was like polyester made up to look like silky fabric with folds and creases still in it. And the pants underneath are just a smidge too short from where they should be.

Then she's wearing these abominations she called "shoes" that looked like she was trying to cover up bandaged feet and still wear wedge heels.

All this leads me to the conclusion that my mother is crazy and doesn't want to go through with the ceremony.

Bo-day-ga

I'm on a couch in the middle of what looks like a Washington Square-sized coffee shop. My favorite professor, Dr. H-K, is leading a class behind me. I've got a story to tell him, but one of his students needs my seat. I move to another couch and sit next to Danny Glover. He'll have to do for now. I tell him the story instead:

I was walking in the mountains when someone stole my pickup truck and began to chase me. Before the bad guy could run me over, a woman in a Chinese bodega-TCBY combo shot a poison dart up through her ceiling, hitting the thief in the ass and saving my life.

Gifted

I am hanging out with my gifted class -- as well as a few other people from high school who were not part of the gifted class -- and we are riding in a moving restaurant. It's like a reunion of sorts, as everyone seems to be the adult version of him/herself. I haven't seen most of these people in eight years or so.

The moving restaurant is moving fast. It's almost like we're in train cars, but we're bustling through city streets. I see tall highrises around us. It's night and the city is twinkling. Things are getting jostled around from the speed at which we're moving. I can see into the kitchen and the line cook is swaying with the dining car as we make a right.

Everyone sits down at a long table -- we seem to have stopped moving or perhaps moved to a stationary outdoor table. We're talking (about what, I don't know) but Brandy T. shows me a painting I apparently gave her back in the day. It's a rudimentary and very bad version of a painting I did for Amber (the one whose background is based on a pattern that can be found on a pair of underwear I have) in real life.

At some point, everyone's mellow is seriously harshed because we realize that Jacob H. is not with us. Because he's dead. Electrocuted, to be exact. He is apparently the first of our group to have passed away.

***This is an example of dream content for which my brain plucks situations directly from real life and turns them into barely filtered craziness. The gifted class bit comes from my conversation with Palm Tree last Friday night, when we drunkenly mused about the good old days and how we'd love to reunite with Mrs. Gilchrist's class again just to see everyone. And the electrocution bit had to come from my conversation with Lighthouse Pilot yesterday about being electrocuted: by fences, by wires, by Coke machines. And the bit about the dining car no doubt was taken from my excitement yesterday over learning that you can go from Memphis to New Orleans for $50 each way on an Amtrak.***

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.

My name is Lindsey, and I have an inferiority complex

I am at Amber's place, only it's unlike any actual place she's ever lived in. It's more like a dorm or compound of sorts, where lots of people live crammed into a small space. There's sleeping bags and living accoutrement everywhere. I make my way to a small space behind a curtain — a dressing area perhaps — and hey, there's Chan Marshall (Cat Power), wearing all black. She sees me take a pair of green striped workout pants from my bag, and she gestures to them as if she recognizes them. I tell her they're my ex's.

A flicker of recognition passes over her face. "You're Lindsey," she says, as I realize she somehow knows Phil. She has some kind of muddled nearly British accent, which is weird, because she really doesn't.

"Who do you love now?" she asks me. A hundred thoughts flash through my head, but I tell her that I can't possibly get into that. It's too complicated.

The group — Chan, Amber, and a couple of unidentifiable people my brain sorta made up — heads out for a night on the town. I shove some piece of important paper into my back pocket, throw my purse over my shoulder, and hurry out the door. I feel rushed and unsure. We walk a few blocks (it feels like we are in the city, presumably New York, but what part, I have no idea; later it feels like we're back on Long Island) and get to this outdoor concert space where, apparently, Led Zeppelin is playing. We can't actually see the band, but we can hear them and we can see the lights reflecting off the partial walls around us. Wow, they sound just like they do on the albums I have. Hmm.

The concert venue is oddly shaped — there are big rectangular slabs of slate interrupting the flow of the place. I feel like I need to draw exactly what it looked like to accurately describe it. It doesn't really seem like a music venue at all, but more like a public park art sculpture. Occasionally, and to our subdued amusement, we will see the guitar player — Jimmy Page, presumably — walk on the slate walls for an extended length of time, and the round a corner out of our sight. Ordinarily, people walking on walls would creep me out, but it was a rock show, so it was awesome.

I realize that I don't think I locked my car. I just imagine random passersby trying the handle and being delighted when it opens. I fumble around in my enormous and noisy purse for my keys, and manage to accidentally dislodge the important paper in my back pocket. I quickly hit the lock button on my remote, in the hopes that I'm still within remote range. And then I see the piece of paper skitter along the ground toward a giant fountain. I run away from the group, which has more or less been ignoring me anyway (we don't know each other very well) and chase the piece of paper. Every time I grab at it, it lunges toward the fountain a little quicker. I just know the damn thing is going to end up in the fountain and I'm going to lose whatever essential info was on it. I can feel people watching me and silently judging my stupid ass. I make one final leap and nearly go careening into the fountain, but I catch myself and the note, and for one triumphant second, I don't care what people think.

But then I come back to reality and realize that I am a mess. I feel frazzled and disorganized and uncool and frumpy and unattractive and unworthy of hanging out with these new people (this is a feeling I often have in real life, yay). So I take off walking around this harbor/marina-type thing, gazing off into the misty distance, at the boats and the gulls and the ropes. It's beautiful, and I just sort of take it all in. I feel someone behind me, and turn to see it's Amber, who's come to check on me. She's following close behind me, mimicking my steps, trying to make me laugh.

The dream parade made a stop in my skull last night and the grand marshall was a demon who tried to possess me

You ever think that maybe certain locations are more fruitful when it comes to dreams? Like your brain feeds on the residue there -- if it can pick it up -- and just runs with the craziness?

I ask because any time I spend the night in my childhood bedroom, I seem to have lots of dreams, and some of them fill me with anxiety. Like, not run-of-the-mill anxiety, but life-and-death-of-my-soul anxiety.

So last night I'm having a sweet fix of a dream about a boy (whose reality I knew was hopeless to be had), when suddenly a metaphorical night falls on me and I feel hunted by evil forces. I wake up -- or do I? -- and realize that my mouth is slightly open and A) I am being observed by something malevolent and B) some evil force is possessing me by pushing itself into my open mouth. I can't move my body (damned night paralysis!) so I exhale to expel the evil -- and I make the craziest moan/growl noise in the process. But I feel the evil leaving me. My heart is racing and I lie there and wonder why I always have these horrible demon-related dreams at my parents' house. Because really, I can't think of a time when I've had a demon-related dream anywhere BUT my parents' house.

I finally fall back asleep (if I was truly awake at all) and go into another dream or two ... which I swear I remembered until I started typing this; maybe they will come to me and I can come back and fill this in (stay tuned).

...

And then I am sitting at a table with The Harmony Brothers -- the full quartet -- and I am apparently drunk. We're at some sort of celebration. I don't know that I've ever been drunk in a dream before, but I am totally drunk and unable to control the volume of voice. When I can focus long enough, I realize that Jeff and Jeremy are giving me the most humiliating looks I can possibly imagine -- it's pure disdain mixed with just a hint of embarrassment at how pathetic I am.

I realize that I shouldn't be around them so I scoop up Felix and run inside my parents' house -- much to Phil's protests about how of course I should be there -- and lock myself in the bedroom where there's a window overlooking the party and where Felix can roam around freely.

Squishing

There is some kind of bug on my floor — a centipede or something — and I can't seem to catch up to it quickly enough to smash it. It's running all over and I'm searching for things to use to thwack it. I finally settle on something — something sturdy like a can — and squash it. When I pull back, the damned thing keeps running. I try to kill it again and again. I don't remember if I ever succeed.

I wore my smoking patches again last night

The abridged version:

After the bucktoothed, spittoon-toting pastor delivers a fire-and-brimstone sermon at an asbestos-ridden Presbyterian church in rural Tennessee, my mother feels moved by the spirit.

She retreats to a backroom to get saved, but ends up with the pastor groping her chest. Furious that the pastor is a lecherous old perv, my family decides to go all I Piss on Your Grave on his ass.

I begin conversing with a ham sandwich shellacked in careful detail as a shrine to the Nativity scene with the little sprigs of lettuce denoting a goodwill Olive branch.

"The Nun Bun doesn't have nothing on my ass," the shellacked Nativity scene sandwich tells me.

For some reason, I become convinced that this sandwich is Jesus.

At the last minute, right before my family exacts revenge, a cavalcade of cops barrels through a side door. They arrest the pastor on embezzlement charges.

As the end credits roll (end credits?), I grapple with the death of Sandwich Jesus. It seems that one of the cops has chomped him to bits.

"Oh, my Lord," I wail as I comb through pieces of lettuce and Swiss cheese. "Father, I have forsaken you."

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.

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.

The Bottom of the Well

My teeth are falling out again. According to the FreakyDreams.com, this translates into a "loss of honor, fear of failure and feeling out of control." Spot-on. They're like the frickin' SparkNotes of Subtext Becoming Rapidly Text.

I'm standing in my family's foyer. It's Christmasy all around. Sweet Baby Jesus is lying in the manger. My cousin is a six-figure MD, sitting out on the porch with his recently Botoxed missus. My other cousin is a Baptist preacher.

And I'm standing in my family's foyer with my pants bunched around my ankles, smoking a pathetic looking spliff through cud chewers.

But at least, I seem happy.

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?

Broken

We are in some kind of run-down hotel room. My grandmother is in the bathroom showering, and my brother and I are in the living/sleeping area surveying the place. I'm going from window to window, closing the blinds and then the sheers and then the drapes. I get everything closed and then realize that the door in and out of the room is a huge sliding-glass door. There are no blinds or anything on it. It looks out onto a courtyard — a busy area spotted with dark, damp soil and clumps of grass.

I go over to the door and attempt to open it, when I look down and realize that the thing has shattered and I've sliced my finger open. I can't really say that it hurts too much. I decide that my brother — in the dream, he's young, maybe 12 — and I need to go to the office to report the breakage so maybe they'll move us to a different room. We peek outside the room, down the courtyard, and see a skanky-looking hand-painted sign pointing us to the office. Suddenly it feels like we're in the poor, rural part of another country, possibly Mexico.

We traipse down to the office and attempt to explain what happened to the door. The clerks — who are old with deeply grooved, tanned faces — don't seem terribly swayed. In fact, they want to turn it around like we should have to pay for the damage, which I'm not even sure we caused.

I try to convince them that they are the ones at fault. I even brag that I was cut, implying that I could sue their asses. They are utterly nonplussed.

Grandma wants to watch horror movies.

My Grandma Charlie is visiting from California, and she announces that today is special grandma-granddaughter bonding time. This usually means a fun day full of shopping and heart-to-hearts over her chardonnays and my lattes, so I'm stoked. Then she tells me that she wants to watch some scary movies. I'm immediately even more stoked, but then I think Wait, she probably has a way different idea of scary than I do. And she's in her 70's. Let's take this easy. She just doesn't do horror, at all, so this is a big deal. My dad has to run an errand at Lowe's and, for some reason, we go with him. There's a big bin of previously viewed movies there and she starts going through them. I'm thinking she's going to go with something like The Uninvited (1945 version), which is cool with me because it's an awesome movie and I dig cheesy 40's one-liners. No. She comes to me with her arms full, with titles like Hellraiser, Return of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead (2004), The Omen (1976), Sleepaway Camp (!), Poltergeist, and... Labyrinth. She really wants to watch Dawn of the Dead. I quickly mentally scan through it. 1.5 sex scenes, some swearing, gratuitous zombie violence-goodness. Ok. But I really, really want to watch Labyrinth, and I think it's cute that she mistook it for horror. Understandable. We never get to decide on one because that's when I woke up.

Third Wheel

I dreamt I was asleep in my bed in my apartment. Then Jordan Cox, from Scrubs, came walking in like she lived there and said, "Perry was masturbating in the shower! Let's pretend we're having sex." So then the bed was on the opposite side of the room and she was on top of me and we were making out. We got tired of waiting for him to stumble upon us, and then the bed was back in its place. Just as she was getting up and saying, "Maybe he'll," Dr. Cox came sauntering in in sweats with a towel around his neck and said to his wife, "Your friend needs to get the hell out of here. She's not paying rent and this is ridiculous." I realize suddenly that this isn't my apartment after all, and I haven't been paying rent, and I wonder what the hell I'm going to do. I accurately recall the balance of my bank account and realize that it won't cover a security deposit on a new apartment and still cover my bills, but I still start to get up out of bed and collect my things.

Waking life ... asleep

All night last night, Wiley Wiggins kept trying to make out with me. Which was fine, it was just weird because I didn't know him in the dream and suddenly he wanted to be my boyfriend? Weird.

And I saw some kind of giant tower of dead and mutilated deer, positions in the middle of the downtown area of a city. I just kept wondering how the people whose windows gazed out on the thing felt.

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.

I blame the lunar eclipse

I'm selling my shoes at an indoor neighborhood swap. It's time to leave and I forget my purse. (Put that aside for a moment; we'll get back to it.) My grandparents, mother, and I get into a very modern, mass-produced-looking spaceship and fly to another planet. I look out through the sunroof and see that we're approaching a lovely, perfectly round ball of orange light. We arrive at what seems to be my grandparents' condo, a cozy space obviously created with the future in mind, despite the lack of obvious futuristic technology like the Jetsons had. The condo's designer was clear about where he or she was building, but there are no signs of robots or automatic whatsits. There are nooks with rows of bookshelves and a tiny opening to a rather large bedroom with minimal furniture. Everything is white, but I can see a few glimpses of my grandmother's feminine style on the countertops and in the fabrics.

Once we've settled, I find out that someone has taken my abandoned purse and stolen my identity. I can get on the computer and watch a young woman spend my money. She spends thousands of dollars on flowers. I can't stop crying and spend my entire vacation on another planet trying to get the fraud department to shut down my credit cards. I can feel that my family is annoyed with me; they think I'm being dramatic. This hurts.

Bits and pieces

Lots of little dream bits last night.

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I've trekked into unfamiliar territory, by car or by foot or by combination of both, to a building where a kind of informal committee resides, to try to apply for the zombie walk permit (this is something I'm in the middle of doing now in real life). I'm having to appeal to a group of elders to get approval. I tell them all about our plans, and the date (last Friday in April). They get a little iffy about it and point me to the CA's M section, where there's a story about Native Americans coming from all over to gather and pay their ancestors' respects downtown that day. I feel gross about hundreds of people lurching around as a zombies while people are spending the day mourning their ancestors, so it occurs to me that we might ought to move the date to the end of May. I find Sharon and Leah, two of my fellow organizers, and tell them what's up. They're really disappointed (Sharon rolls her eyes in a moment of Oh yeah, I think I knew about that!!!), and while I'm explaining what's going on, it occurs to me that it might not be a problem after all. I check the CA article and see that the bulk of the Native American ceremonies will take place around noon. Our march will be after six.

We breathe a sigh of relief.

[][][]

I find myself trying to get back to somewhere and being confronted with an ocean and a beach. I'm standing on a concrete landing, under a pavilion. I can either go back to wherever I'd come from, or go forward and inch along the side of a cinder-block building, against the angry waves of the ocean aggressively lapping at the side of the building. I imagine a swell of salty water and drowning there, trapped. So I go back the way I came.

[][][]

It's like I'm watching Flavor Flav's show. He's welcoming the camera into his crib in New Orleans (did I gank any of this from real life?). There's a butler at the door of a shotgun-style mansion (it is the definition of "ghetto fabulous") whose facade is an icky green color, with peeling paint and a cagey wrought-iron door. I get the feeling that Flav's house has been recovered after being mostly destroyed by Katrina. Inside, everything is damp and the walls are plaster and buckled and peeling. The long hallway runs parallel to some other hallway where a pulley system has been set up with all of Flav's clothes hanging on it. The clothes move along and he can choose what outfit he wants at the door at the end of the hall. I (or the camera?) make my way down the hall a bit longer before suddenly we're in Flav's dirt-floored basement and it feels like we're making a music video. Featuring zombies. Fucking zombies! That you can only see with night-vision goggles. It's exceedingly creepy. Luckily my brain does not supply any Flavor Flav musical stylings.

[][][]

I'm at a guy friend's house (I'll not mention him by name in case he reads this, so I'll call him Tom). It's actually probably his parents' house. It has a parents' house feel to it, even though no parents are to be found. We're having some sort of small gathering of friends. We're lounging around, watching TV (I'm on the floor), when Tom sort of scoots over to me and says something — god, I wish I could remember what it was — and then kind of nuzzles my neck and kisses me below my right ear, in that crook where you can, if you get close enough, tell easily enough if you have chemistry with a person. You know the crook I'm talking about. I get a little short of breath and feel slightly self-conscious in case others are watching, which they don't seem to be. He puts his cheek just near enough to my face that I can flutter my eyelashes against his lips. He smiles.

It's a sweet moment. He smells good.

[][][]

I'm on some kind of truckbed tour of something ... either a city or an event ... I can't quite explain, but it ends with us driving around this church where all the members are around, cloaked in red robes and holding burning crosses. There are also burning crosses used as torches on the side of the brick church. The people are singing and it's obvious that they see nothing wrong with what they're doing. I get prickly at this; why would they need to burn crosses? Don't they understand the racist implications of burning crosses, even if it's their stupid church tradition? I bitch loudly when the truck stops and I can get out and walk away. There are a lot of people in red robes (with hoods!), holding burning crosses. I can feel the heat from the group of them.

High school candle caper

I'm having a shit ton of dreams lately. This could be because I'm sleeping in shifts now that I'm going to the gym late at night. First round of sleep comes between 3 a.m. and 8. Second round comes after I've gotten up, fed my whiny-ass cats, checked my e-mail, farted around, and then gone back to sleep from 9:30 to 12:30.

Today's naptime dream featured me and everyone I ever went to high school with plus everyone I work with now (roughly), at work — only it's a hugely expanded version of work. I've got two candles lit: a little Glade Scented Oil candle that I fancy in real life, and a little cinnamon tea light. I blow them both out before realizing that doing so is going to set off the sprinklers.

So I grab just the tea light and try to cup my hand over it and rush it to the bathroom, where I figure I can extinguish some of the smoke under the tap. It works, sort of, but the damage has already been done. Plus I left that other candle smoking on my desk. D'oh.

I return to the newsroom to see that the sprinklers have, in fact, been triggered, although the alarm's not going off. People are trudging away from their desks and evacuating the room. I notice that most people are in their Sunday best. This makes me feel really bad. I'm no doubt ruining a lot of nice clothes.

I feel embarrassed that I made such an obvious blunder — the candles were contraband for this reason — and can't decide if I should just shuffle out with everyone else and pretend to not know what's going on, or if I should make sure everyone knows I did it and I'm sorry. I go with the latter, figuring it's more honest.

We evacuate to some sort of large auditorium where some kind of elaborate kindergarten pageant is going on. The kids and adults on stage are wearing ridiculously fancy sequined getups with huge headdresses. Their show fades into the background as people I went to high school with fill up the auditorium steps around me (no seats, just curved steps).

Cary Duncan (whom I've not seen or spoken to in years) comes up to me with a baseball cap turned backward on his head and a stupid nerdy fratboy swagger in his step, his posse surrounding him, chuckling. I am clearly the butt of a joke. He asks me to sign this big swatch of cardboard that says something about labor (as in work, not baby labor). I can see that others have signed this thing a la a yearbook. I circle one of the big words in the phrase and draw an arrow out to the place where I'll make my signature. I write something snarky and sign my name. Except I misspell my last name and have to scribble it out and try again. I'm slightly humiliated, and I want to kick Cary in his teeth.

(I blame Cary's appearance in this dream and, hell, the entire high school scenario on the fact that the last song I listened to before I fell asleep was a Weezer song off of Pinkerton.)

I see police officers working their way through the crowd now. I suspect they're looking for the perps of the great office sprinkler caper. I decide to 'fess up. I find an officer and see that she is confiscating everyone's candles — big, fancy expensive ones among them — and I feel horrible. Candles aren't cheap. "Are you going to give them back?" I ask. She says no. Instantly I know some people are probably very pissed at me.

I follow another officer — another girl I went to high school with, except she looks nothing like I remember, and her hair is pink and silver like Jem's, but short and in a bob — into a long, spiraling staircase that you might see in a castle ... if it had a dungeon. Luckily, the officer tells me to sit on the stairs. She's holding a baby, and tells me she's keeping it for someone, and asks if I can hang on to her for a while. I oblige, and sit there holding this big baby on these steep stairs, thinking how unsafe that is.

(I think I dreamed of a baby because just before falling back asleep, I looked at some pictures of me and LP with Luke.)

I look at the baby's face and see drool pooling on his/her chin. In it I can see the spiderweb pattern of my black Nightmare Before Christmas pillowcase. And then I'm awake.

Space cadet

Amber and I are in a space shuttle. It's weird, because it's just a giant, open, cylindrical space lined with padding and wires and other spacey things. We're not strapped in. We're just kind of hanging out. And whoever is driving the space shuttle — later I'll see that it's one of our photo editors — is having trouble getting the thing into space.

We'll feel a rumble and then see from the tiny windows that we've got liftoff, and we'll see the earth beneath us begin to rotate (I doubt this is how actual shuttles lift off) only to, a few seconds later, find ourselves on the ground, outside the shuttle, waiting on the technicians to fix whatever problem we're having.

At one point, we're sitting near train tracks and I start telling Amber all about how Regina Spektor read a short story written by one of my other friends, and how she loved it, and halfway through, I realize I'm telling Amber her own story and I feel so embarrassed and ashamed.

I look over and see the aforementioned photo editor tossing big crates around outside the cockpit in order to solve whatever takeoff problems we're having.

Then we're back on the shuttle. I have some vague memory of us storing food in a tiny fridge even though none of the other passengers thought to bring anything. I feel slightly gluttonous because of it.

We have liftoff again. It occurs to me that we are probably going to die on this shuttle, and I suddenly want very much to be off the shuttle or to wake up (I realize I'm dreaming, but it doesn't go lucid on me because I can't control anything). Once again, the ground outside starts spinning around us as we rise toward the sky. I imagine with horror of what it must be like to be in a shuttle explosion. One minute things are fine, and the next ... what? Does everything just get white hot and you stop existing? Death makes no sense to me, even in my dreams.

I wince as we meet the horizon and rise up through the atmosphere. Out the window there is blackness and stars. And then everything kind of happens in a montage — as I'm standing there, looking out the window and thinking about the relative pointlessness of space travel, I see what human space traveling has wrought on the galaxy (I see giant oil rig things on distant planets; it's unclear if it's Earthlings who struck out to look for oil, or if it's just the technology we shared with other cultures in the galaxy). And while it's really freaking cool seeing all that crap, I feel that at any minute the whole thing's going to explode and I'm going to die.

I said no, no, no

I'm in what looks and feels like prison, but I'm surrounded by young people. I quickly realize that I've been sent to rehab. I have no idea why, as I'm not going through any type of withdrawal. All I know is that the place is dingy and muddy and disgusting, and I'm standing in line to have the contents of my bag rifled through by a very cross black lady with short hair, glasses, and big teeth. She pulls out two pairs of underwear — both of them, I understand, are brand new, and one of them seems to be a custom job and is, if I may say, really adorable: It's chocolate brown with light blue and pink and yellow stitching curving around the hip — and tells me that I can't take them inside. I'm incredulous; I can't have underwear in rehab? No, she tells me, it's not like that. It's just that I can't have that particular pair. (Perhaps it was so cute that it would have caused a disturbance among the menfolk? I don't know.)

No suddenly I'm in a train car, and not one meant necessarily for human passengers. It's dark and the walls are made of rickety wood, with a generous amount of space between each plank so that I can see the world whizzing by outside. There are other people in the car with me. Everyone seems just as downtrodden and miserable. A fellow passenger gets up and walks to the far end of the car, where there seems to be some sort of makeshift kitchen set up. He crosses a particular spot and I see what must have been an invisible barrier light up red and set off an alarm. The guy doesn't seem to care that he's about to get in trouble. Trouble never comes for him.

It occurs to me that I need to wash my hands. Badly. But the only way to do so is to cross that alarm-rigged invisible barrier. I decide I've got to do it. And when I do, sure enough, the alarm screeches but I wash my hands as planned. Although I can't quite remember the details, I'm pretty sure that I get in trouble even though the other guy did not. I've lost a lot of details here.

The last thing I really remember is being issued a car (they give us cars, but my underwear was unacceptable?). I get in mine, and drive myself and several passengers up an incline and around a curve to a grimy parking lot sitting atop a concrete hill that overlooks the dirt-packed courtyard of the rehab facility. I notice that the lot is, with the exception of my car and a Saturn, full of brand-new Fits. I point out how odd this is, but no one seems to care.

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.

Rob Lowe makes a charming dream guest

It always cracks me up when celebrities cameo in my dreams. Usually they're doing insane things related to the characters they play. But last night Rob Lowe stopped by for a bit to talk about acting and show biz. He was an all-around nice guy.

I don't remember much of what he said, except, "I've been in this business for fifty years." (!!!) Which was interesting, because I just stood there mesmerized by how handsome he was, trying but failing to do the math in my head.

Wreckage

My mother and I are in my old Alero, driving along the back roads of Lexington, Tenn., which is not terribly far from my family's house in Saltillo (think somewhere between a dozen and twenty miles). She's at the wheel, and we're chatting it up, when she gives the car a bit of gas to go over a hill, and we go flying, Dukes of Hazzard-style, through the air over a rain-filled gully at the foot of the hill, and crunch down on the asphalt several feet later. We're kinda laughing about my mom being a speed demon (in real life, she's anything but), and she continues to push the pedal as we vroom over still more Lexington hills. Except this time, something's off and we slide off the road and into the woods and the car loses its balance and we begin flipping, side over side, end over end, flip after flip after flip, our faces coming within inches of the damp forest floor, our car crunching on top of rotting logs and musty piles of leaves. The roof of the car has either been obliterated or my Alero acquired a sunroof (or would it be moonroof? and wtf is the difference?) in the dream, because I can look up and see the earth as our heads go rushing toward it on each flip.

I look over at my mother to make sure she's okay — she seems to be — and wince upon each new impact because at any minute a rogue branch or something could come crashing through the windshield or roof and plunge right into our faces.

We finally, after what seems like dozens of harrowing flips — land bottom-side-up and somehow we're both able to climb out the side — either through the window, which has been busted out, or through where a door was ripped off. How we're both able to walk, I'll never know. "I'm never riding in a car again," I wearily tell my mother, with thoughts of my real-life previous wreck in my head.

Apparently in order to get to safety and to get to where we can call 911, we have to swim through this murky black lake. We're already wet, I imagine from sweat and the dampness of the forest, so we just wade in and head for the far shore, which, I notice, is my great-grandmother's yard and house (which means we flipped in that damn car for at least 13 miles). My mother swims ahead of me. It's almost like in the dream my mother is me, or a different version of me, because every time I look at her, I see her, but it feels like I'm looking at me. She certainly acts more like me than she does my actual mother.

Anyway, we're swimming through this gross stagnant lake in the middle of the night (what's more terrifying than swimming through some random lake? Doing it at night) and I start thinking about all the gross things that could be in this lake, and my pace slows as I get bogged down with the psychological weight of everything that has just happened. Plus my foot has gotten tangled in some branches from a tree under the water, and I can't get the cluster of branches to fall away so I can swim freely. My mother yells back some encouraging words (like "Hurry up" or "You're gonna make it! Just keep swimming!") and sure enough, we finally make it to shore and I pull the slimy cluster of branches off my foot just in time to hear mom say something about leeches.

Which, I think I should point out, may just be the first time I've ever dreamed about leeches, but I'm fairly sure that it won't be the last.

I'm like, "Um, did you just say you saw leeches on you?" And before I could hear her reply of, "No, I had thought so but I don't see anything," I had already pulled up my shirt and unbuttoned my jeans to have a good look to make sure none had shimmied their way into areas that would have been most painful and embarrassing to address later.

All clear.

We're at my great-grandmother's house (which is not fronted by a lake in real life), soaking wet and exhausted. My mother takes out her phone but I fear that she won't get any reception or that her phone will be waterlogged, so I go inside Granny's house — with the full knowledge that she's dead and no one lives there anymore, or maybe someone lives there but that it's someone I don't know — and am pleasantly surprised to see a portable telephone sitting on the coffee table. I take it outside and realize I don't remember the address of my grandmother's house. Actually, I do remember it — the real-life address — but when I run down to peek at her mailbox, I realize the address is different now.

I dial 911. The operator is a mild-mannered woman who doesn't answer like any 911 operator I have ever heard before. There's some noise in the background — something about the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and his church — but I tune it out and tell the woman that we need to report a wreck. I give her the address I saw on the mailbox.

She is quiet for a bit and then begins treating me as if I am a senile old lady. "Ms. [I can't remember what she called me, but it felt like she was referring to Granny], have you had anything to drink tonight?"

"No, my grandmother has been dead for a year (not true; it's been three years); this is her granddaughter! My mother and I have just been in a bad wreck!" I say emphatically, not believing the 911 woman can't wrap her mind around what's going on.

"This is her granddaughter? Ma'am, has Ms. [Granny] had anything to drink tonight?"

I become delirious with frustration that she is deliberately misunderstanding me.

I'm sobbing, even though we don't seem to have been hurt in the wreck (aside from a gnarly cut on the palm of my hand that seems to be packed with grime and dirt) and don't really need medical attention, but I still feel like we're supposed to get some rescue people there immediately.

"We have been in a really bad wreck and we need some people to come help us," I weep at the stupid 911 lady. "Why won't you send anyone?" I look at my mother, who seems to have gotten through to someone on her phone. Which is a Razr (Motorola best be cuttin' me a check for product placement in my dreams). "They don't believe me!" I wail. My mother looks annoyed yet nonplussed.

The lady offers platitudes and words of false comfort, but ultimately, she's not sending anyone because she doesn't believe me.

Then I get fucking angry, even though I'm still shaking and sobbing.

"Ma'am, what is your name?" I bark at the 911 lady. I can feel her getting nervous. She mumbles something that I have trouble hearing. "WHAT?! Say that again, please." She says it again but I can't for the life of me make it out. It sounds like a jumble of syllables not meant for English-trained ears. I ask her to spell it, but I can't hear what she says in reply. It's like my ears have stopped working. I can hear, but I can't understand.

I've almost reached the end of my rope with this woman, and I yell at her that I can't wait until someone important hears about what a bitch she's being. And then I wake up.

Design tyrant

I woke up earlier to posted about the dream I had last night (well, the one I could remember most clearly), piddled around, and then, in a monumental display of delicious laziness, crawled back into bed and went back to sleep for an hour, during which time I dreamt that I cracked open a paper and began to notice tons of horrible, awful design infractions perpetrated by a particular designer at work. My mother looked on as I scanned the page in disgust, noting incorrect subhead styles, missing column sigs, horrible photo placement, jacked-up head hierarchy, tacky colored type, etc. I grabbed a pen and began angrily circling the things that were wrong with the page, all the while grumbling about the designer's complete cluelessness and dreading bringing up the issues to him because he'd never take me seriously as some sort of authority.

Back to basics

I'm in a location that feels familiar yet seems completely unknown to me. It's expansive, like there are no ceilings are walls and it's dark outside. I'm trying to gather my things for school, and I get the feeling that I'm late.

I'm rifling through a bag of makeup, trying to get ready. I get the acute sensation that I'm unhappy with what I'm wearing but that there's no time for me to change. I realize that I have mere minutes to make it to school, and that my ride — my sister, maybe? — is dragging her feet and I'm going to be late.

That's not the worst of my problems, though. Apparently, all the books and notepads I'm supposed to take with me have been scattered and I can't seem to find them. I'm looking in particular for an abnormal psychology book whose cover I can clearly picture but that isn't turning up anywhere. Someone hands me a yellow legal pad, as if to say, Here, use this, but my anxiety is swelling and the clock is ticking so finally and I erupt and tell the people around me (who and how many, I'm not sure) that I'm just going to take my own car and get going.

My car turns out to be my mother's white Explorer, and as soon as I turn the key and it starts, the sun gets ridiculously bright and I feel like I've accidentally caused a supernova that's going to swallow the earth. Damn Fords. But the sun settles back down and dims to its normal light level, and I realize I'd rather not drive after all. Besides, I don't have all my shit together and I don't like what I'm wearing.

Why does it never occur to me in these stupid anxiety/school dreams to pretend to be sick?