I continue to have strange, vivid dreams almost every night.

Last night, I dreamed I was at work, but work was in an enormous suburban high school. It was so big that it needed shopping-mall-style map kiosks posted throughout. Auditions were being held for something that day, and there was a sign posted on a door that said “Wanted: 100 40-year-old men in cone-shaped hats.” It was my job to find rooms for these auditioners to practice and sleep in.

By the time I was done, I realized that it was 9:30 at night, and I hadn’t called Doc to let him know I’d be working late, but when I looked at my phone, I realized that he hadn’t called me either and I thought that was very strange.

I decided I had better get home pretty quick, so I packed up my stuff and went to look for my car… but I couldn’t find it. That is, I couldn’t remember how to get to the parking garage where I always parked my car. It was near the rooms where I worked, but I had no idea anymore how to get there. I began to wander through the school, wondering if the reason that I couldn’t find the garage was because I didn’t drive that day, but even in Dreamland that didn’t make sense. I found myself in the center of the school, in an enormous library. It was very much like a European city plaza, with a large flat central area and steps leading up to another level. Students were lounging all over the steps, which were covered in large red and green candy canes and wrappers. I had to pick my way carefully down the steps to the central plaza, trying not to step on anyone or their candy.

I found a map kiosk near the school’s food court and realized that the parking garage was all the way on the other side of the building.

Then I found myself in a bus stop on the side of the highway, in bright sunlight. Someone was with me, and it kept switching off between being Kathryn and Brittney. We were waiting for a bus that would stop on the OTHER side of the highway. I was unclear how this was supposed to work; would the bus driver see us and wait for us to attempt to cross four lanes of fast-moving highway traffic? Shouldn’t we really go to the other side to wait? There was other no way across except for an overpass a half mile down the road, and I was certain if we walked all the way to that, we’d miss our bus. Brittney decided to see how easily she could cross the road, so she dashed out to the center median, hopped over it, and ran almost all the way to the other side… and then turned around and tried to come back, but by this time there was a car coming. I couldn’t figure out why she didn’t just go all the way across to the bus stop, but luckily the car was able to stop in time to avoid hitting her as she ran back to the median.

Right about this time, a sherriff pulled up to our bus stop to ask what the problem was. I told him that we were trying to get to the bus stop on the other side of the highway, and he started walking off towards the overpass. He said, “why don’t you drive over there,” and handed me his keys. I got into his car, which was actually a small pizza-slice-shaped platform with wheels. I sat down on the platform, wondering where I was supposed to put my feet, and tried to put the top half of the pizza slice on top, but it was made of thin wispy tissue paper and was hard to position into place without it blowing away. There didn’t seem to be gas or brake pedals, or a steering wheel or ignition, either.

And then I woke up.

Last night I dreamed I was dead.

I started out alive, which was the unsettling part. I was watching some guys dressed in green military garb in a helicopter on the ground. The whole side of the helicopter lifted up to open and reveal five men inside. They all had large guns, and they were definitely bad guys. They were talking to a Native American man sitting in a chair next to the helicopter with his friends, and he was also a very bad guy.

The military group wanted him to build them a lot more parts for some weapons they were producing, but I knew that each group of men actually had plans to kill the other group. The Native American man “agreed” and said he needed to get some paperwork out of his file cabinet, which was mysteriously now located in the helicopter. So he climbed in and opened the bottom drawer to get his gun, but when he turned around the military men opened fire and shot him hundreds of times. I was curious as to how they got their bullets to only hit their enemy, who was sitting at point blank range right in the middle of them all, but somehow none of them were hurt.

Then the dream shifted and I found myself inside a hotel room. There was no furniture or decorations in the room at all. I had invented in my head some sort of device or system that would quickly and nearly painlessly kill anyone inside a room: the walls would grow and thicken to 1-foot-thick super-strong metal, and a bomb in the center of the room would explode and vaporize the person in the room. I had thought of it, which was enough to make it become reality, and now I found myself inside one of these rooms. I knew what was about to happen, and I also knew that there was no way out. I was going to die. And I was oddly resigned to this fact, and at peace with it. Doc and I had some sort of psychic mental connection, and I was very connected to him at that moment. I could feel his love and energy, and he had no idea what was about to happen to me.

There were three objects in the room: the bomb, which was the size and shape of a small alarm clock, a bottle of oxygen, and a note. The note said to breathe in a lot of oxygen before the bomb exploded; it would be easier and less painful that way. So I took the bottle, lifted the cap off, crawled into a corner and laid down with the bottle near my nose, breathing in pure oxygen. I started to feel euphoric; my limbs and face were tingling pleasantly and I had this growing sensation of euphoria creeping down my body. Then the bomb went off. I didn’t hear, see, or feel a thing.

I was dead… but somehow I was also still there. Now I was standing in the room, but I seemed to be invisible. I guess I was just my soul at that point, and my soul still thought it was inside a human-shaped body, so that’s how I felt. When I had exploded, I’d vaporized into tiny yellow particles that were almost like feathers or foam, and they were still floating down all over the room. Three people were inside the room now — a woman and two men — and they were all laughing maniacally in the way that stereotypical movie crazy bad guys do.

I decided that I didn’t want to hang around while these nuts were laughing their heads off and bits of me were floating around the room, so I thought I’d see if I could leave. And I was able to open the door and walk out, just as if I was a person, although living people didn’t perceive the door as having opened at all. I felt GREAT. I was tingling all over, especially in my hands and the back of my jaw, and that sense of euphoria from the oxygen was still with me. I felt light as a feather, thin and wispy and gloriously naked, and I began to run down the hallway of this hotel. I knew that I could run forever and never get tired or lose this amazing feeling. I ran for a long time, all around the hotel, and then went down into the lobby and out one of the doors.

It was night, it was Seattle, and it was raining. I found myself on an enormous concrete patio surrounded by trees and shrubbery. A few people were out, standing at the edge, smoking and getting rained on, and a few more were coming and going between the hotel and the wet cobblestone streets and out to the waterfront. I watched people for a while, knowing that they couldn’t see me.

And then it hit me: while I was running around, enjoying my euphoria and trying to get used to the idea that I was deceased, I’d lost my mental connection to Doc. He was nowhere. There was no way I would ever be able to contact him or see him again. I knew that he had no idea where I was, just that his connection to me had abruptly ended, and he was probably freaking out.

I began to panic.

Then I woke up.

Thanks to Bonnie for this link! This 12-question quiz measures how you compare to the average person in terms of daydreaming. Here are my results, which should not exactly be news to anyone who knows me.

• You spend more time than the average individual ‘lost in thought’ or mind-wandering.
• You use your mind-wandering time wisely! You spend more time than the average individual planning or problem-solving while daydreaming.
• You spend more time than the average individual thinking about unresolved issues while mind-wandering (i.e., you are a problem-solver).
• Your daydreams involve more visual imagery than the average daydreamer. You tend to ‘see’ people, places and events ‘in your head’.
• Your daydreams are more creative than most.

So THAT’S why Katy stares off into space all the time! She’s problem-solving!

I had a couple of very odd dreams last night.

In one, I was on some sort of long hike with Doc and my parents and a bunch of other people. There was camping involved. The end of the trip involved a long walk up a grassy valley to a large building on a hilltop. It was the job of a 3-year-old girl in our group to scrub out the bathtub in this building, to leave it clean for the next group of people that might come by, but I knew that she wasn’t going to do a good job so I did it myself. I know there was a lot more to this dream, involving hang gliders and the military and things, but the details have escaped me.

In another one, I dreamed that McDonald’s had purchased the U.S. government. They replaced the border guards with angry-looking men in Ronald McDonald clown costumes, and they all had machine guns. They would rip people out of their cars at the border and poke them with bayonets while shouting at them. The image of a furious red-haired clown in a yellow suit, his face looming above me and screaming, is now burned into my brain. Yeeks.

Last night I woke up about 4 a.m. and had a hard time getting back to sleep. I laid in bed for a long time and eventually my brain started wandering in that strange way that brains do right before you fall asleep. An image came to me, very clearly: My kitchen, with a plain wooden chair in the middle of the floor. Samuel L. Jackson was standing next to the chair, and he pointed at the seat and shouted “Snakes on a chair!”

This startled me, even in my halfasleepness, but I decided to just let my brain go with it, and I came up with two entire verses, complete with accompanying mental imagery.

Snakes on a chair
Snakes in a suitcase
Snakes in the drawer
Snakes on the floor 

Snakes in my shoes
Snakes in my brain
Snakes down the drain
Snakes on a plane!

Har!

I worked in a retail store at the end of a strip shopping center, similar to a small Wal-Mart or membership club store. It was large and dim with a lot of tall dusty shelves of merchandise that nobody wanted. At the other end of this strip shopping center was a rival retail store.

Amidst a lot of rain, noise, and smoke outdoors, we were hurriedly preparing for war with the other store. Our strategy was to gather as many berries as we possibly could — blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, strawberries — and place them into small bowls with which we would later arm the catapults.

However, as I was artfully arranging berries in a bowl near the front of the store, the automatic doors opened in a swirl of smoke and a black-clad figure from the other store tossed in a live grenade that landed next to me.

And that’s when I realized, oh, it’s THAT kind of war.

Later, in the middle of everyone running around throwing berries and grenades at each other in the parking lot, I was sent out to the Jack-in-the-Box on the other side of the highway to pick up drinks and milkshakes for everyone. I got there and someone handed me an ice cream cone while I waited in line. And when I got to the front I realized I didn’t have any money.

It seems like my dreams about tornadoes come and go in cycles. I’m in a cycle now where I’m having them frequently. The latest one I can remember involved me and Doc driving south down Plano road, nearly to our house. I saw a big tornado headed our way in the rearview mirror and so recklessly drove the rest of the way to the house, running red lights and all.

We screeched into the garage, ran inside, and started gathering things to take to shelter, including the cats in their carriers. In the garage we had a doorway to a set of stairs leading down to a basement, very similar to my parents’ garage stairs to the attic (except down, not up, of course). I flung open the door and suddenly remembered that we were storing a lot of stuff for my parents while they were between houses. Three or four tall bookcases full of books and boxes and junk were piled haphazardly halfway down the staircase, to where it was impossible to get past them into the basement. I found a space for the cat carriers to sit and determined that Doc and I would probably be safe even part way down the stairs.

But it was taking so long to gather things, I couldn’t believe that the tornado hadn’t already hit us. I felt this incredible sense of urgency, like it could happen any minute and we were just wasting time trying to think what we should carry downstairs with us.

Like most of my dreams, the tornado never actually hits. I just experience the fear and urgency beforehand.

Weird Dream
I dreamed last night that Doc joined a secret society, sort of like the Freemasons. They had come to our house in a huge bus shaped like a loaf of Wonder bread. He let them in and they made their pitch, and he decided to join because members got to wear neckties that had a little lever at the top that when you pressed it, made a really loud train whistle sound. He told me that he really didn’t believe what they were telling him, but he signed the papers because he wanted the train necktie. And who wouldn’t?!

Mmmmm Chocolate
In other news, I got accepted to be in a taste test focus group study on chocolate bars! Next week I’ll get paid $60 to spend 90 minutes eating chocolate and giving my opinion. Can’t beat that with a stick.

Work Bites
I spent 8.5 hours at work on Saturday, finishing up a project that was supposed to launch today. We found out yesterday that it has been delayed for another week because the client, at the very last minute, decided that she didn’t like any of the copy we’d written. Just a global “I don’t like it,” no specifics given. I wasted my entire Saturday for nothing. At least I got a free lunch (or was it really free? I did trade my weekend for it!).

Dot-Matrix Printer Bike
I read a few weeks ago about a guy who custom built a bicycle equipped with a laptop computer and cans of water-soluble spray chalk. It received messages that people submitted to a website and printed them out on the sidewalks as he rode down the street. I think he was arrested before he ever got to use it (something about intent to perform criminal mischief/graffiti, and how coincidental that this was during the time of the Republican National Convention in New York City). It’s genius, though.

In my dreams last night, I came up with a fabulous new product idea…

BLAM!-boo™, bamboo building material stuffed with explosives! If you want a house that can self-destruct when necessary, just build your walls out of BLAM!-boo™, and you’ll be able to explode it any time you want!

Somehow, being able to explode one’s house was a very important consideration in my dream.

In another part of my dream, I was in some scenario very much like an action/thriller movie. At the last minute we uncovered enough of an old windowpane to realize that instructions for stopping the airplane explosion were written in the dust on the glass, and I scrambled up to the top of the airplane’s tail and pressed a red button. The explosion had JUST started, but as soon as I pressed the red button, it was like someone hit a “rewind” button and the explosion stopped mid-explose, and then retreated into itself.

In yet another part of my dream, I was at a cocktail party in someone’s mansion that was also a bible museum, and I was supposed to go on the tour of the exhibit but I didn’t want to because my fingers and hands were very tingly and swelling and painful, especially the 4th finger on my right hand, and I was afraid that I soon wouldn’t be able to get my rings off. I thought maybe I’d eaten something I was allergic to, either at the party or in the cab of the semi truck/spaceship that had brought me and some friends from the island we’d been stranded on to the cocktail party, and it was making me tingle and swell up. Then I “woke up” in my dream, and realized that the reason I’d been “dreaming” about my hands feeling that way was because I’d gotten a spider bite on the webbing between my 3rd and 4th fingers. It was huge, about the size of a dime, and very painful.

When I actually woke up for real this morning, I was quite surprised to discover that my fingers were just fine. No spider bites. I wonder if maybe I was lying funny on my hands and they’d fallen asleep, and that’s why I was dreaming about that.

I had a terrible dream last night. I woke up this morning crying and shaking. If you are sensitive to stories about animals getting injured, please don’t read this. I know I’m going to have a hard time typing it out.

I was in a hospital, foll0wing around the “Dr. Cox” character played by John C. McGinley on “Scrubs.” I carried five fresh artichokes with me, and a paring knife. I would occasionally stop and cut off the bottom or top of an artichoke to reveal the insides. In my dream, artichoke middles contained little metal rods with beautiful sparkling glitter and glass beads on top.

I followed Dr. Cox into a patient’s room, and he said that the patient had total amnesia and had no idea who he was. We had to help him remember. I thought I recognized him and said “Brandon?” But it wasn’t who I thought it was. My cat Neko was in the room, lounging on the bottom floor of her cat tower.

A nurse opened the door to the patient’s room and the “Sun” and “Jin” characters from “LOST” walked in carrying baseball bats. The only way to help the patient remember who he was, was for them to hit Neko with the baseball bats. I was terribly upset about this but knew that it was the only way, and it was very important so we had to do it. They took turns smashing her with the bats. I could hear her little leg bones breaking; they made sounds like shattering glass. She wasn’t protesting; she just lay there passively letting them do their work.

I knew that if they hit her in the head they would kill her so I tried to turn her around so her rear legs were facing them instead of her head. Finally I couldn’t take it anymore and I threw myself on top of her, shielding her from the blows and crying “Please stop, you’ll kill her, please don’t.” Vaguely in the background I heard the patient suddenly remember his identity. I was too busy crying to care, and I couldn’t remember why murdering my cat would help this guy and why I would let anyone do this to her.

The absolute saddest part of this whole thing, the part that is making me cry even now, is that Neko knowingly sacrificed herself to help a complete stranger. She knew she was going to die and she did it anyway.

I dreamed the other night that at work we had a new building, similar to the old apartment building we used to work in, but more house-like. I shared an office with Amy, in the 2nd floor bathroom. Her desk was in the tub, and mine was in the sink. Our printer sat on top of the toilet. If anyone wanted to bring us anything, they had to shimmy up the drainpipe on the outside wall, and shove their papers in through the window.

Ben and I are phone-interviewing candidates for our open web designer position, and most of the people that we really like want way too much money — like, $60-$90,000 annually. It’s really disheartening. There are two people we’re bringing in this week who fall somewhat within the salary range we’re offering, so hopefully one of them will work out. If not, it’s back to the drawing board, reposting the position and probably end of summer before we’re able to hire someone. I’m the only designer on staff right now, and my workload is completely insane. I may only be the dried out empty husk of a designer by the end of summer, if we have to wait that long to get some help.

Last night Doc and I watched “The Science of Sleep.” It was a pretty good movie, and a really spot-on representation of the strangeness of the dream state. Things kept shifting, changing, appearing in different places at different sizes, in different environments.

I had a nice productive weekend. Saturday I was awake at 6:30 and doing yoga by 7. I know, crazy. I couldn’t get back to sleep after Neko woke me up. I did some gardening and a bit of housecleaning, and Doc and I saw a movie (”The Last Mimzy,” which was good except for the cheeseball ending that the studio probably made them slap on there for a family-friendly feel), looked at bamboo hardwood flooring options, and then invited Brittney and Chris over for dinner. We grilled sausages and chicken, roasted potatoes, I made a roasted tomato soup, and we ate outside on the patio. I spent most of Sunday re-vamping Doc’s website. He was just wanting minor updates and an additional section, but I insisted that it would be easier to start from scratch and rebuild the pages.

I don’t know if I’m stressed out lately, or if it’s hormones, or the onset of warmer weather, but my skin is in terrible shape. It’s driving me crazy. I do not want to be 34 and have the skin problems of a teenager.

A few nights ago, I dreamed that I heard rap music coming through somebody’s closed car windows. A few minutes later I woke up slightly, and realized that I was actually hearing the incredibly loud, rhythmic purring of Neko standing on Doc and kneading him in his sleep.