‘Dreams’ Category

  1. Random Catch Up

    March 27, 2007 :: 4:18 pm

    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.

    Category Dreams, Movies, Work | Tags: | 2 Comments

  2. Purrin’ With My Homies

    March 8, 2007 :: 9:59 am

    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.

    Category Cats, Dreams | Tags: | No Comments

  3. I Am Superman, And I Know What’s Happening

    December 11, 2006 :: 11:51 am

    Sometimes I have dreams where I do heroic things. I wonder if maybe it’s because I don’t feel much like a hero in waking life?

    I think that to some degree, everybody wants to be seen as a savior, one who does great things for the common good, or at least to have the courage to try. And some people want to be superheroes, taking it to the next level.

    I dreamed last night that someone broke into my house. I was downstairs and heard a noise on the front porch. I opened the door and heard someone on the porch roof, and saw a wire that they’d attached to the ground and used (somehow) to get up on to the roof.

    I had a broom in my hand and was yelling at the person to get off the roof, and trying to swipe at the wire with the broom, but I didn’t step outside because I thought it might be dangerous. The situation didn’t really feel dangerous, though, but I yelled upstairs for Doc to call 911. Then the noise stopped and I knew that the person had gotten inside the house.

    I heard noises in the backyard and ran through the house. Our backyard was large and grassy, and someone I didn’t know had tackled the robber down to the ground. I ran out and took over, ordering him to turn over onto his stomach, and then I jammed my knee into the small of his back and cranked his hands up behind his back to hold him in place. My broom had shrunk to a small stick, but the end was nice and pointed and so I stuck this against his back so he wouldn’t try to get away.

    He had stolen a Walkman cassette player from my office, and it was lying next to him on the grass. I sat there holding him down to the ground, although he wasn’t struggling at all. Then he started telling me his life story, the hardships he’d gone through, and I didn’t know what else to do but listen. It was actually somewhat interesting.

    A bit later, I saw that two police cars had pulled up in front of our house, and then a police officer walked through the back door and took over from me, very casually, like there was no actual danger from this guy. She handcuffed him, and for some reason I started making snide comments about things that he had told me about his life, like “Oh, the poor baby had a rough life, that must have been SO AWFUL.” I was saying these incredibly mean things that this person had told me in confidence; he thought I was being sympathetic but I was just waiting until help arrived so I could make fun of him.

    The strange thing about this dream was that Doc wasn’t in it at all, except that he must have called 911 for me. In real life, of course, he would have been on the front lines in a robbery situation. I wonder what it means that I was the main player in this dream, that I was the one who knew what to do and got the guy secured on the ground and held him until help came. I don’t know that I would have the courage to do that in reality.

    Category Dreams | Tags: | No Comments

  4. say ‘scuba’… it sounds funny!

    November 11, 2006 :: 10:03 pm

    Today, for the first time in my life, I breathed underwater.

    It was terrifying.

    I am taking scuba lessons, along with Doc, K1, and B, in preparation for our vacation in Belize in a few months. Sunny beaches, tropical drinks, lots of hot vacation sex, seafood, rainforests, hiking, snorkeling… and scuba diving. Belize is supposed to be one of the best diving spots in the world (fishies! coral reefs! crystal clear water! something called, dear god, “Blue Hole!”), and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I’d probably end up regretting it if I go there and don’t know how to dive.

    Here’s the kicker: I’m scared to death to actually do it.

    I have always had regular nightmares about being trapped underwater, usually in swimming pools; sometimes when I can’t hold my breath any longer and am about to pass out, I breathe in water and I choke, and sometimes I can actually breathe underwater, which doesn’t make sense and also doesn’t make it any less scary. When I’m not dreaming, I usually do fine in swimming pools and the ocean, so I don’t have a water phobia or anything of that nature.

    After a lot of consideration, the thought of swimming with the fishes and coral reefs just slightly outweighed my completely unreasonable fear, so I told K1 that if she took lessons, so would I. B was kind enough to do all the research, and so now Doc and I each own a mask, snorkel, fins and wetsuit boots, know the names of all the equipment bits and pieces, and can use an incredibly complicated dive chart table thingy.

    We watched a 3 hour DVD and answered a whole bunch of quiz questions this past week (K1 and I both experienced heart-pounding apprehension just watching the video), had classroom sessions last night and this morning, and this afternoon we got into the pool and learned how to use our equipment. Our first challenge was to breathe through the regulator (the thing you stick in your mouth that supplies your air), close our eyes, and go underwater for two minutes. It took everything I had not to panic when I first went under, but I screwed up my courage and took that first breath… and holy shit, I got air.

    It got a little easier after that, but our instructor kept adding levels of complication to our tasks: use a mask, take the regulator out of your mouth and put it back in while underwater, clear water out of your mask, pretend you are out of air and use your scuba-buddy’s alternate air source to breathe while you both ascend to the surface, equalize the pressure in your ears. I found that I wasn’t enjoying myself at all because I was too busy worrying about remembering everything (breathe! equalize! let air in or out of the BCD!) to even look around while underwater.

    The “golden rule” of scuba is to never hold your breath. I have learned a lot about pressure and air expansion and now understand all the horrifying things that can happen to your lungs if you are holding your breath while ascending (by the by, a lung doesn’t actually “explode” but instead somehow “collapses”). I’m doing mostly okay with the no-breath-holding thing, although I did catch myself doing it a few times. Practice, practice.

    Our instructor is a nice enough guy; incredibly chatty (our first 3 hour classroom session could have been done in 1, easily) and makes lots of not-so-funny jokes, but he’s very at ease in the pool and a good leader. Plus, he’s the only one who really knows what he’s doing so I’m going to hang on his every underwater hand sign!

    Tomorrow we will do 3 more dives in the pool, each with more and more levels of complication. Hopefully the basic stuff like breathing will start to become routine and I won’t have to think about it anymore.

    So: I have not enjoyed scuba so far, and I am not sure if I will warm up to it. I think Kathryn feels basically the same as I do. Doc and B, on the other hand, are having a lot of fun and they both seem to feel much more at home underwater than K1 and me. One day of training remains, and then four “open-water” dives that we actually do at a lake in order to gain our official certification. I’ve accepted the fact that scuba just may not be for me, and that’s OK.

    Whatever happens, I’m pretty proud of myself for trying.

    Category Diving, Doc, Dreams | Tags: | 1 Comment

  5. i’m sure this is exactly the plot of some movie…

    November 5, 2006 :: 11:51 am

    Last night I dreamed that I lived in a little apartment in a New York style apartment building, in a row of nearly identical apartment buildings that was completely enclosed in a shell from the outside world. In the center of the neighborhood was an expanse of green space, a little park about the same footprint as an apartment building, and one end of it opened to a dock and the sea beyond, with a big industrial garage door that would open and close.

    Everyone was in a panic and in the process of evacuating because we had been invaded by aliens, although we never actually saw the aliens themselves and there was nowhere to evacuate to. They had landed on the rooftops of our buildings and were slowly taking over. Even though we couldn’t see them, we knew their paths because wherever they went, everything turned dark and crumbly and dead. Walls, plants, furniture. And people who’d been “infected” or whatever began to look like zombies, with tattered clothing and purple circles around their dark dead-looking eyes. I was one of the unofficial leaders trying to get the remaining people to safety, and I was lucky in that even though I was running around everywhere, through infected areas, I hadn’t been turned into a zombie yet. I wasn’t sure where we were going to take people anymore, because the park had been taken over by the aliens. I thought that maybe it was possible for us all to gather on the roofs, since the park wasn’t safe anymore and we had nowhere else to go, but then remembered that the roofs were probably where all the aliens were gathered.

    I noticed that Bob and someone else were up on the 3rd floor of one of the buildings, and they needed help. I found another leader, who radioed to someone out on a boat that she was “Missy” from the health department and she needed two life jackets. I guess they were only giving supplies to the actual people in charge, so we had to pretend to be those people in order to get anything done. Then she told me that I had to go pretend to be this fictional Missy and get those life jackets to (somehow) rescue Bob. I ran down to the dock and realized that Missy from the health department WAS actually there looking for life preservers, and that I’d probably be caught if I tried to pretend to be her. Somehow, I got them anyway. I ran back to Bob’s building and tried to toss an orange life preserver through the open window. It took several tries, but I got one through. Then I bent down to pick up the green one to toss it in, but in that few second interval, his apartment had been taken over, and the window was shut and dark. I was too late.

    Back at the park, I looked into a first floor room of one of the buildings and saw a classroom full of little purple-eyed zombie children, staring straight ahead at the zombie teacher with rapt attention. Moments before, it had been a regular classroom full of regular children, and it scared me how instantaneous the transformation was.

    Then I found myself sitting with several other people at a picnic bench in the park, cooking. I had a little kerosene burner on the table in front of me, and a frying pan full of oil. Everyone was looking to me to feed them. Next to the pan was an arrangement of ingredients, and I wasn’t really sure we should eat any of them because most of them were vegetables that had been taken over by the aliens. I guess if alien stir-fry is all you have to eat, though, that’s what you eat.

    I cut several slices from an alien zucchini, and there were dark sad faces in the zucchini. You know those tubes of holiday sugar-cookie dough you can buy that have designs in the middle, so when you cut them into slices, each one has a Christmas tree, or a bunny, or a pumpkin design in the middle? That’s what these zucchini were like, only they had dark unhappy human-looking faces as their designs. But the minute I put them into the hot oil, the slices grew to giant proportions, taking up almost the entire pan, and the dark sad faces turned bright and happy and sunshiny. That is when we realized the answer: the alien menace could be eradicated through heat! I woke up before we got a chance to test whether it was just plain old heat that would do it, or if everything had to be purified in hot oil.

    Category Dreams, Family, Sci-fi | Tags: | No Comments

  6. nap dreams

    September 17, 2006 :: 5:24 pm

    I had some nightmares while napping this afternoon. One sad, one scary. I was in a large house in a neighborhood that backed up onto a river, a very small river that was really more of a creek in size. There were rows of rickety wooden lawn chairs between the house and the river, facing the house. I was sitting in one at dusk with my feet up on the wall of the house, and I looked down and realized the legs of the lawnchair were only about 2 inches from the rim of the riverbank. I moved the lawnchair closer to the house and continued reading my mail. One piece was a flyer for a dentist’s office that featured a large photo of a little girl that looked just like Brittney might have at that age. Another one was for an insurance company that also featured a large photo of Brittney, and I knew that she didn’t know they had used her photo.

    The house I was at alternated between being Auntie Fran’s house (although it didn’t look anything like her actual house) and a shed on Grandma’s property (which she didn’t actually have in real life).

    I got out of my lawn chair and realized that I could go see Grandma’s house. On the other side of the river were rows of new condominiums and fancy shops, facing away from us. I knew that her house was somewhere in those rows of condos, and that the beach and ocean must be on the other side. Bob came outside and we decided to walk across the “river” and onto a sidewalk on the other side that paralleled the river. We walked for a little ways until we came to a T where the sidewalk turned and went between two of the shops out onto the beach on the other side. At this point the timing of the dream changed from dusk to bright daylight.

    On the beach, I kept looking at the shopfronts trying to find Grandma’s house. Hundreds of teenagers were hanging out on the beach and on the front porches of the condo units and in front of the stores. I recognized some of the features of the beach, like the bulkhead wall, but all along the beach, the bank was only about six feet tall. I started crying and I couldn’t stop, and I couldn’t figure out why. Bob and I kept walking and looking for Grandma’s house, and none of the houses looked anything like hers. Finally I just sat down in the sand and began to sob.

    That’s when I woke up, “dry crying.” Sobbing without tears. It was weird.

    In another part of the dream, I was at the movies with Doc, in a huge theatre with non-stadium-style seating. Before the movie was over, the management asked everyone in our section of seats to clear out. We didn’t take them seriously, and we didn’t think anyone else in our section moved either. As the credits began to roll, our whole section of seats suddenly jerked forward and, as if it was on carnival-ride tracks, rolled forward underneath the stage, and dived DOWN, moving faster and faster downhill in pitch blackness. We had no idea what was happening or where we were going (storage? a giant crushing machine) or if we could ever get out.

    Category Dreams, Family | Tags: | No Comments

  7. old dreams part 1

    July 23, 2006 :: 6:02 pm

    I recently found some old notebooks in which I’d written down dreams that I’d had. Here’s an interesting one.

    August 24, 1992. I was walking around a small square-shaped park on a track of some sort with Patrick Stewart dressed in his Star Trek uniform. We were building a model log cabin as we went, and so were a number of other people on the track. Some people were lying on the grass in the center of the park. All of a sudden, Patrick Stewart leaned over and gave me an absolutely mad passionate kiss. I was taken aback and thought My god! He’s so old and I’m only 19! But then I thought, oh to hell with it, because I was enjoying it too much to worry. Then he pulled away and said “Damn. Grass fire.” in that deep sexy British voice. There was smoke coming from the grass up a ways, so he went ahead to check it out while I stayed behind. Some of the people on the grass had set their log cabins on fire and it had caught the grass.

    The the dream shifted. I was in some sort of hospital/space center, in a little room with two chairs that you could be strapped into and I suppose experience what it was like to be in space. People had just left so I walked up and said that I wanted to try it. I sat in a chair and a woman told me that I had to take off my aquasocks. Then they listened to my heart and did some other medical-type things. A doctor held up an instrument that looked like a tiny squatty pair of scissors with really short pointy blades. He put the pointy end in my mouth and touched the blades to a spot on the back of the roof of my mouth. Immediately I felt myself falling asleep, as if I was going under anaesthesia. Instinctively I tried to fight it but I also realized it was supposed to happen so I tried to relax and let go. Pretty soon I was semi-conscious again but I couldn’t remember them doing anything. My arm didn’t hurt although I was certain they had drawn blood. The woman said to me “You’ll probably have a heart attack.” I said “What? Now?” She said “No, by the time you’re 30.” I left the room. I guess the experience in space came later.

    Lucky for me, I guess my dreams don’t predict the future.

    Category Dreams, Memories | Tags: | No Comments

  8. more "nobody likes me" dreams

    July 3, 2006 :: 8:28 pm

    Ran 3 point something miles after work today, despite a twinge of nausea and a very strange spaced out feeling that makes me think that there was something funny in the birthday cupcakes at work today.

    I’m not sure how many if any pounds I have dropped, but I feel better physically and my shape is changing into something a bit more pleasing, gradually but I can tell.

    Dreamed the night before last that I was running the trail at White Rock Lake, and we’d gone way past our normal turnaround point, and I realized that we’d run five miles already. The trail went up a hill and ended inside someone’s apartment living room. I recognized many of my friends inside the apartment — Debbie, Kathryn, Ginger, etc. — and realized that it was a party for Kathryn who was getting married, and that I hadn’t been invited. They were kind of finishing up, and there was cake on the table and giftwrap all around the floor, and everyone was dressed fancy and not paying much attention to me. I stood there in my running clothes, sweaty and utterly crushed, and tried to pretend that I wouldn’t have been able to come anyway and I had to get going, had things to do, you know, see you later.

    Category Dreams, Marathon | Tags: | 1 Comment

  9. one night to be confused

    June 23, 2006 :: 7:56 pm

    I had some really unsettling dreams and nightmares last night. The only one I can remember right now involved a bar or club of some sort, that seemed sort of old-fashioned in its layout, almost like an old-time saloon or brothel with a mirror-backed bar and a set of stairs leading to a balcony where bedrooms were. The atmosphere was bronzed like late afternoon sun; everything in the bar was a shade of brown or bronze or metallic tan, including the people. It was beautiful with a hazy sheen, the people had glistening brown skin and beautiful voices. A fat woman wearing metallic bronze leather pants put her hand down her pants and began to touch herself and make these sensual faces, and everyone started watching her. She was wrapped in a metallic bronze cord that almost seemed like it was a part of her body. I was kind of floating up in the air, just a presence observing the action. And the colors reminded me of ice cream, chocolate and vanilla ice cream with swirls of chocolate fudge. The ice cream became real; I was eating a bowl of ice cream and gazing at the colors. Every time I took a bite, I would see another glimpse of a scene from the bar.

    Category Dreams | Tags: | No Comments

  10. Quick updates

    May 25, 2006 :: 9:40 pm

    A couple of quick updates because I’m too tired to write snappy prose tonight.

    1. We took 2nd place at the video festival last week. It was somewhat of a surprise. Details to come, I promise! I’ll also post the movie here for you to download or view.
    2. I ran a 5K after work today. Not an actual race, but just 3.3 miles (approximately) around the indoor track. I felt really quite amazing, actually, and I could have run longer if I’d really tried. I would have been exhausted, but I could have found the strength to go maybe 4 miles. I think it is vastly easier for me to achieve those types of distances when I run with Yvonne, partly because I have someone interesting to talk to and take my mind off what I’m doing, but also because she is better than me and I feel like it’s a (good) challenge for me to keep up with her endurance.
    3. I am apparently incapable of properly operating the stopwatch/lap counter on my snazzy new iPod, and so I guess I’ll need to invest in a regular stopwatch or lap clicker or something of the sort. I wonder if a pair of Nikes and a nano would do the trick?
    4. I dreamed last night that I told Yvonne that I’d discovered a new way to really tighten up copy. You just inserted the word “And” at the beginning of every sentence, and voila! Fantastic copy, so easy to edit now! When I woke up, even in my half-asleep state, I thought to myself “Now what the fuck was THAT about?!”

    Category Dreams, Marathon, Movies | Tags: | No Comments

  11. why do birds suddenly appear?

    March 9, 2006 :: 9:13 am

    i’m remembering my dreams better lately. i wonder why that is?

    last night a couple dozen tiny bluebirds attached themselves to my face and i couldn’t get them off, and i started panicking. there was also a toddler who was screaming “bumble! bumble” and following bumblebees around the backyard. at one point i had to help bring in some wet wood from the backyard for a fire, so i put on my “wellies” — rubber boots except they looked like bowling shoes made of rubber. the wood gatherers didn’t really need my help but i wanted an excuse to wear my rubber boots.

    Category Dreams | Tags: | No Comments

  12. stolen car dream

    March 7, 2006 :: 3:17 pm

    i had a really weird dream last night/early this morning, and when i halfway woke up from it i made myself repeat the major plot points out loud so as not to forget them, and lo and behold i think it worked!

    i decided to drop by brittney’s house unannounced, late at night. she lived in plano, in a house with her mom and i think her sister and brother. it was actually like a combination of brittney and kim. i got in the car and started driving towards the highway. there was a girl walking in the road in front of me, and as i approached i realized it was brittney’s goddaughter taylor. as i drove behind her the dream shifted into me walking behind her as she walked up the stairs at brittney/kim’s house.

    i started to wonder why i came over unannounced, because she didn’t seem very happy to see me. and i stood there thinking, oh my god, why am i here? doc was with me now, and he stayed in the house while i went back outside to the car. i’d parked it on the street near several other vehicles. but now it was gone. i frantically ran up and down the street thinking i’d parked it somewhere that i just didn’t remember, but it was definitely gone.

    i ran back inside and got doc, and told him what had happened. as he came back outside with me, a police car drove slowly up the street with its lights flashing. and i thought “now that’s odd, i didn’t even call them yet, how did they know to come out here?” but it drove on by up to the other end of the street. we followed it and near the end of the street there was a family standing outside their house. all the kids were running around playing in the street and in the yards. i asked a man what was going on and he said “they’re still inside.”

    i looked at his house and saw huge, cartoonish, oversized ladders poking out of his roof from broken skylights. each of the ladders had a big triple-hook thing hanging from it by a rope. the police cars were on the street and i realized that some people had broken into his house while they were out, and that they were still inside the house and the police were dealing with them.

    then i spotted my car sitting in the middle of the street, and realized that the thieves had stolen my car, driven it up to the end of the street, and then broken into this man’s house. a minute later i saw the police struggling on the front lawn with a man, wrapped in ropes and hooks, who was covered in blood and struggling violently like a caged animal. they were having trouble holding him. it was extremely frightening, and i was worried that none of the children or the parents were getting out of the way of this potentially explosive scene. i think that they eventually subdued him.

    i went over to check on my car, and it looked okay except for the driver’s side window which was broken out. i found myself getting disproportionately upset about that, considering what this family had just gone through. i got the attention of one of the officers and told him that the car i’d reported stolen was now found, but it had been used by the thieves and they’d broken out my window.

    this was when i woke up.

    i think that i’ve been subconsciously thinking a lot lately that our car is not going to last too much longer. little things have been going wrong with it for years, and i think i’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop with it finally dying beyond repair, or even getting stolen or broken into.

    it wouldn’t be the end of the world; the car is 9 years old and i’ve had it for 8. i just hate the thought of having a car payment again!!

    Category Car, Dreams | Tags: | 1 Comment

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