Dream... trying to get home

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.

I don't like dreams about being dead.

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.

Where Does Your Mind Wander To?

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!

Namaste. Now I will kill you.

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.

The Berry Wars

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.

Tornado Dream Time Again

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.

Wonder Bread Freemason Bus!

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.

BLAM!-boo™

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.

Terrible dream

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.

Random Catch Up

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.

I Am Superman, And I Know What's Happening

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.

say 'scuba'... it sounds funny!

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.

i'm sure this is exactly the plot of some movie...

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.

nap dreams

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.

old dreams part 1

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.

more "nobody likes me" dreams

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.

Quick updates

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?!"
   

why do birds suddenly appear?

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.

stolen car dream

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!!

cecil b. de muffin

i giggled myself out of a sound sleep a couple of mornings ago... isn't that weird, when you wake yourself up by laughing?... and shook doc sleeping next to me and said "cecil b. de muffin."

i surely do wish i could remember the context of a dream in which i'd laugh myself awake thinking that.

craaaaaazy dream

i was at a home depot type place, and this started out as the type of dream where i was there but sort of a noninteractive observer to the action, like i was floating invisibly alongside everyone else but just watching what went on. anyway, i was "observing" this mentally challenged employee, that the managers were mistreating and overworking. they told him that for his next task he needed to go upstairs and get a pair of boots and a hard hat. at this home depot, you weren't allowed to own your own hat and boots; you got a rental fee taken out of your paycheck every time you needed to use them. he had to go upstairs to this room that had rows and rows of boots and hats kind of like how a bowling alley has rows and rows of shoes. he started up this really narrow dark wooden staircase that would take him all the way to the 4th floor without any landings. we were having trouble balancing on the narrow rickety stairs, and then partway up, the handrailing came off at the top and was just attached at the bottom of the stairs. we were still holding onto it and it was swinging around wildly. next thing i knew, we were at the top of the stairs, and the dream changed.

there was a hollow football made of silver beads on wires, with little colored gems stuck in every so often, and a "collar" on one end made of much more flexible wires and beads, and it was called a "chalice". lori used a rope catapult to toss this thing from the ground up onto the 4th floor balcony of our house, wrapped in a green khaki backpack. it was a our house but very different from our actual house, gigantic and older, with very large rooms. the balcony was on the 4th floor and had wood floors and only a 1' railing, and everything was painted a smoky blue.

i heard the chalice "thump" on the balcony, went out to retrieve it, and realized it must be a gift for doc. but from whom?? i suspected it was from lori because in the public art gallery on our 4th floor, i thought some of the new paintings were lori's. doc didn't think so, but i did because a lot of them used metallic puff paint which was something that i knew lori used in her work.

then i was in another room of this house, also on the 4th floor, and i was trying to rearrange its furniture. trying to put 2 sofas, a chair, a tv, my desk, and my art studio in this room. i wanted to try putting the desk in the wide shallow closet, just removing the sliding doors, but realized that there were reams and reams of paper on the shelves in this closet and we'd have nowhere else to store our paper if i took it out. when i finally got the tv/sofa area arranged, the room suddenly appeared about three times bigger than before. the floor was covered in beige berber carpet and slightly sloped, and as i investigated how sloped it was, it grew more and more pronounced until the center of the room was a plateau about 2 feet higher than the edges of the room.

microduck death dream

i had a horrible dream a while back. i was in the backyard of my parents' house in plano, before the pool was built. i found a baby food jar in the grass in the backyard -- it was doc's. inside it he kept some water and three tiny, 1/4" long, fuzzy yellow baby ducks, that were his pets. they were tiny but would grow larger over time.

i found the jar and it had been in the grass in the backyard, in the sun, for several days. when i found them and picked up the jar, the ducks turned immediately into black goo and disintegrated in the water. i was mortified that he'd forgotten about them.

if i was going to interpret this dream, i would say that i was working through my own fear of forgetting to care for something that's been put in my charge, and having it die. who knows why, in my dream, i projected it onto doc.

medicinal trumpet flowers

last night i dreamed about going to the doctor with my mom, who seemed much smaller than she actually is... much more frail and older. the doctor building was on the 2nd floor of a nice office building with a parking lot out front, and nice landscaping. she was cold sitting in the waiting room so i told her i would go out to the car and get her jacket. i took a wrong turn somehow and ended up having walked an entire block down the street to the bottom of a hill. two scruffy men in white lab coats were standing at the corner with a wheelbarrow, collecting orange trumpet-shaped flowers from a lush vine that was growing on a telephone pole. they told me that they were from the doctor's office, and that the flowers from this vine had wonderful medicinal properties, and that this telephone pole on the corner was the only place in the world that the vine grew, so they had to walk down the hill and harvest more every couple of days.

i was fascinated with the guys collecting the flowers but then remembered that i was taking a very long time to get my mom's jacket, so i had to hurry back and get it for her.

just now i looked up "medicinal trumpet flowers" on google, and didn't come up with much of anything. lots of plant websites, nothing that looked terribly interesting. so i entered the same words into googlism.com, and something on that site is broken and giving me an error. so much for interesting results.

scary cat dream

had some freaky dreams last night. first one involved angst getting loose into the backyard, bolting, and hopping the fence. he's a tough old cat but, sadly, doesn't have front claws, and he's really skittish, so i freaked out and thought we'd never see him again. i ran inside, told doc, who didn't seem too concerned about it (this was DEFINITELY a dream), and dug around for the key to the back gate. i ran outside, opened the gate, and realized it was dark and i'd never be able to find him without a flashlight. i went back in and got the big LED flashlight, but it wasn't shining very far and i couldn't see much with it. so i made doc get the other flashlight and come outside with me, and we started searching through the underbrush by the creek, calling his name and shining the lights around. i knew that it was hopeless, that he was gone or hiding and wouldn't come out. i went back inside after a while, and there he was sitting in the upstairs window with the other cats, watching us search for him. when i woke up the first thing i did was go find angst and make sure he was OK. of course he was just fine, sleeping on the sofa in my studio.

in the next one, i was walking with a couple of people for very important reasons that i cannot remember. we were traipsing through a forest and came out onto a 2-lane road. on the other side was an incredibly steep dropoff -- probably 80 degrees or so. it was covered in low to medium brush and snow, and looked completely insane, but the people i was with just went merrily tramping down this hill. i think they were dwarves, and they had blue name labels floating above their heads. apparently i've been playing too much world of warcraft. anyway, i didn't want to try to get down that hill so i thought i'd wait at the top for them to come back after they were done doing whatever it was they had to do. i sat down on the side of the road, but then realized that this was washington state and in this state they simply didn't have "sides of the road" -- there was only about 3 inches from the white stripe marking the edge of the lane, to where the dropoff began. i sat down but realized that i was actually in the road, and there was traffic coming. i tried to scoot as far as i could to the edge but there was no way i could fit on a 3" ledge. i think at this point i went ahead and went down the hill.

i'm not sure about the plot points of the rest of this dream, but we were staying in various houses on our journey, and it was kind of like people were letting us stay in their houses while they were gone, but it was just for a quick sleep for one night and we weren't supposed to disturb anything, and then we needed to leave in the morning. one house had a bed in another room that had two old-style wooden school desks attached to it, one where a nightstand would go and the other on that same side but at the foot of the bed. there were two more school desks in the middle of the room. i think it was at this house that i stole a diet pepsi from their fridge. then at the end of this trip or whatever it was, we were looking at some photos that we'd gotten developed from the trip, and kim was in one of them holding a giant fish, and i said "you know, this trip was really going badly until kim caught that huge fish. then things started to turn around!" and then i woke up.

just don't write it

sometimes, things that you think about as you attempt unsuccessfully to get to sleep, turn out not to make such great blog topics. funny.

the genius of 3 a.m. often doesn't look so fantastic by daylight.