Friday, January 24, 2014
Anacronicity ~ 1/24/2014
I dreamed the two main characters of Jean M. Auel's Earth's Children series, the prehistoric Cro Magnon lovers Ayla and Jondalar, were my fellow passengers on the Millennium Falcon. How strange!
Thursday, January 23, 2014
Mom's New Digs ~ 1/23/2014
I had just gotten back from an amazing trip. I'd driven to Castroville, flown to San Francisco, hiked up some amazing mountain there, spent a few days in Seattle, gone out to a nearby mountain and spent some time there, then flown back to Castroville. I had brand new hiking boots that had colored bands on them listing these destinations to commemorate my trip. The Castroville bands were a deep reddish brown, the bands for both mountains were a bright orangey red, and the middle band, for Seattle, was a rich Kelley green. I was finally home, in my own bed. This was in the bedroom of the house in the Hill Country, that I grew up in, but somehow, out the window, I could still see the mountain just outside of Seattle.
This mountain was a giant wedge of gray stone, shaped kind of like a piece from a round cake, laid over on it's side. It was volcanic, but covered with glaciers, and at the foot of the tall, almost sheer side was a wide lake with waters of an almost electric aquamarine. The foothills on either side and the gentle back slope, below the snow line, were swathed in deep evergreens. The volcanic activity at the moment was concentrated on the southern tip of the broad precipice, and was basically a slow seep of magma that, because of the glacial ice, caused enormous billows of steam to rise from the peak, but the magma was cooling in domes, so the southern side was getting taller and taller, but the peak was shaped like a pile of large bubbles.
I lay in bed staring at this, unable to sleep, but unable to get up. I kept trying to call into work to let them know I couldn't make it in, but I was unable to do that, either, and the hours passed, 9am, 10am, and I knew they'd have missed me by now, and would be wondering where I was. I was finally able to reach the phone and call my boss and leave a message that I'd be out that day. Around noon, my mother came in and said it was time to get up and help her move to her new house. Which was, of course, why I couldn't come into work. Naturally. I finally got out of bed, we packed all the boxes, movers came, and everything was carted off to her new house and unloaded.
The center of the house was a large, light and airy kitchen, almost square, with an island in the middle, and a bar of cabinets and counters and a sink looking over into the living room. The front door was reached by going into a building that looked like apartment complexes on the outside, but inside this conglomeration of buildings, the corridors looked like a mid-range hotel, like maybe a Best Western, with beige walls and taupe carpet, elevators and painted bronze, dome-topped trash cans by each door, with chips of pain pocked out here and there, and a bronze mail slot in each door.
When you went through the front door, you entered a corridor between a cavernous living room on the left and maybe a home office sort of room on the left. The corridor opened out into the kitchen, and these two other rooms, and the master bedroom suite, opened from the kitchen, too. Everything was cream and beige and taupe, with warm yellow lights in the ceilings. The kitchen had a back wall of floor to ceiling windows, looking into the branches of a row of small trees. There was a black iron spiral staircase going up to a bedroom/bathroom suite. If you went through the home office, there was a wood-railed back porch that had an identical spiral stair, leading up to an identical suite, which would be mine. Lorne, the empath demon from the television show Angel, was going to live in the other. Brooke's room was off the living room.
There were boxes piled everywhere. Both the breakfast table and the big dining room table were arranged in the living room, with the sofas up against a wall. Chairs and small tables were scattered around, and workmen were still coming in and out to inspect and test and make sure everything was set. We all took a break and went our separate ways to get an early dinner.
Just across a parking lot and a hedge, I found a bar that was showing a football game and serving deep dish pizzas about the size and shape of shoe boxes. I found a corner to sit in and ordered a pizza and watched the game. After a while, I got up and wandered around the bar, then back outside to see the rest of the building. The bar was tucked among a bunch of really ratty and run-down apartments that housed what was pretty much a clothing-optional hippie commune. People of all ages, who didn't bathe or shave, mostly, sat on stoops or called to each other out of open doorways. Some of them were cooking huge vats of soup for a communal dinner. Most were fully clothed, but some walked around partially or completely nude, but no one blinked an eye. Not even me.
One of the apartments was in ruins, and an outer wall had been broken in. Through the boards I could see a litter of kittens, and I went to make their acquaintance. They were all about twelve weeks old and had long, silky fur. Three were a rich blue-gray with golden eyes, and two looked like silver-point Himalayans, with wide blue eyes. One of the resident hippie dudes (scruffy and scraggly, but clothed) came over to talk with me about them. He hotly denied that they had fleas, but I pointed to the flea specks all lodged in their coats. Finally I shrugged and turned to go back home.
When I got there, two workmen had just finished testing the hot water in the two upstairs bathrooms. The test involved turning on the hot water taps in the large, sunken tubs, and timing how long it took for the water coming from the faucet to reach 100 degrees Fahrenheit. As they were packing up to leave, a frightened old Chinese woman rushed up the kitchen stair and into Lorne's bedroom. Her feet were bare and caked with mud. She understood no English, but was crying and wailing and we were all at a loss, until her daughter and son-in-law knocked on the door below and asked after her.
It turns out, the old woman had lived in this house, but had gotten too forgetful and senile to be on her own. She had moved in with her daughter, but had wandered out of their home and gotten lost. In a panic, she found her way to us, thinking this was where she lived, and it took a lot of explaining before she recognized what had happened. A winter storm was coming, so the workmen hurried away, but we couldn't let the old woman go out with her feet muddy and bloody, so Mom invited the family to stay as long as they needed. I went downstairs to make sure enough bedding was unpacked, and we'd have places to put everyone overnight, and found a Rubbermaid tub to take upstairs so we could wash the old woman's feet, since apparently the sunken tubs were new, and she didn't trust them at all. I took the tub upstairs and filled it with warm, soapy water, and then I woke up.
This mountain was a giant wedge of gray stone, shaped kind of like a piece from a round cake, laid over on it's side. It was volcanic, but covered with glaciers, and at the foot of the tall, almost sheer side was a wide lake with waters of an almost electric aquamarine. The foothills on either side and the gentle back slope, below the snow line, were swathed in deep evergreens. The volcanic activity at the moment was concentrated on the southern tip of the broad precipice, and was basically a slow seep of magma that, because of the glacial ice, caused enormous billows of steam to rise from the peak, but the magma was cooling in domes, so the southern side was getting taller and taller, but the peak was shaped like a pile of large bubbles.
I lay in bed staring at this, unable to sleep, but unable to get up. I kept trying to call into work to let them know I couldn't make it in, but I was unable to do that, either, and the hours passed, 9am, 10am, and I knew they'd have missed me by now, and would be wondering where I was. I was finally able to reach the phone and call my boss and leave a message that I'd be out that day. Around noon, my mother came in and said it was time to get up and help her move to her new house. Which was, of course, why I couldn't come into work. Naturally. I finally got out of bed, we packed all the boxes, movers came, and everything was carted off to her new house and unloaded.
The center of the house was a large, light and airy kitchen, almost square, with an island in the middle, and a bar of cabinets and counters and a sink looking over into the living room. The front door was reached by going into a building that looked like apartment complexes on the outside, but inside this conglomeration of buildings, the corridors looked like a mid-range hotel, like maybe a Best Western, with beige walls and taupe carpet, elevators and painted bronze, dome-topped trash cans by each door, with chips of pain pocked out here and there, and a bronze mail slot in each door.
When you went through the front door, you entered a corridor between a cavernous living room on the left and maybe a home office sort of room on the left. The corridor opened out into the kitchen, and these two other rooms, and the master bedroom suite, opened from the kitchen, too. Everything was cream and beige and taupe, with warm yellow lights in the ceilings. The kitchen had a back wall of floor to ceiling windows, looking into the branches of a row of small trees. There was a black iron spiral staircase going up to a bedroom/bathroom suite. If you went through the home office, there was a wood-railed back porch that had an identical spiral stair, leading up to an identical suite, which would be mine. Lorne, the empath demon from the television show Angel, was going to live in the other. Brooke's room was off the living room.
There were boxes piled everywhere. Both the breakfast table and the big dining room table were arranged in the living room, with the sofas up against a wall. Chairs and small tables were scattered around, and workmen were still coming in and out to inspect and test and make sure everything was set. We all took a break and went our separate ways to get an early dinner.
Just across a parking lot and a hedge, I found a bar that was showing a football game and serving deep dish pizzas about the size and shape of shoe boxes. I found a corner to sit in and ordered a pizza and watched the game. After a while, I got up and wandered around the bar, then back outside to see the rest of the building. The bar was tucked among a bunch of really ratty and run-down apartments that housed what was pretty much a clothing-optional hippie commune. People of all ages, who didn't bathe or shave, mostly, sat on stoops or called to each other out of open doorways. Some of them were cooking huge vats of soup for a communal dinner. Most were fully clothed, but some walked around partially or completely nude, but no one blinked an eye. Not even me.
One of the apartments was in ruins, and an outer wall had been broken in. Through the boards I could see a litter of kittens, and I went to make their acquaintance. They were all about twelve weeks old and had long, silky fur. Three were a rich blue-gray with golden eyes, and two looked like silver-point Himalayans, with wide blue eyes. One of the resident hippie dudes (scruffy and scraggly, but clothed) came over to talk with me about them. He hotly denied that they had fleas, but I pointed to the flea specks all lodged in their coats. Finally I shrugged and turned to go back home.
When I got there, two workmen had just finished testing the hot water in the two upstairs bathrooms. The test involved turning on the hot water taps in the large, sunken tubs, and timing how long it took for the water coming from the faucet to reach 100 degrees Fahrenheit. As they were packing up to leave, a frightened old Chinese woman rushed up the kitchen stair and into Lorne's bedroom. Her feet were bare and caked with mud. She understood no English, but was crying and wailing and we were all at a loss, until her daughter and son-in-law knocked on the door below and asked after her.
It turns out, the old woman had lived in this house, but had gotten too forgetful and senile to be on her own. She had moved in with her daughter, but had wandered out of their home and gotten lost. In a panic, she found her way to us, thinking this was where she lived, and it took a lot of explaining before she recognized what had happened. A winter storm was coming, so the workmen hurried away, but we couldn't let the old woman go out with her feet muddy and bloody, so Mom invited the family to stay as long as they needed. I went downstairs to make sure enough bedding was unpacked, and we'd have places to put everyone overnight, and found a Rubbermaid tub to take upstairs so we could wash the old woman's feet, since apparently the sunken tubs were new, and she didn't trust them at all. I took the tub upstairs and filled it with warm, soapy water, and then I woke up.
Thursday, January 16, 2014
TBTT #1 - First Dream Journal Record ~ 1/8/2012
I think I'm going to do a regular Throw Back Third Thursday to post things from my journal that I don't get around to putting in the blog as they come. For my first TBTT, I present the dream that started it all. I have had bizarre dreams all my life, but this one was so strange I just HAD to post about it on social media, and from those sporadic postings and their fans, I finally came to the decision to start this blog. So here it is.
One minute I was standing on a bed in my godparents' kitchen trying to rehang a chandelier I'd taken down to fix (this is even weirder if you've seen my godparents' kitchen).
Then I was looking for an apartment in San Antonio and wondering how I was going to move my washer and dryer, until I remembered, hey, they aren't mine.
Then I was in a cruise ship bar explaining the plot of a novel I was writing to a bartender, which featured a hero/detective who only avoided being poisoned because he had celiac, so he didn't eat any of the poisoned dish.
THEN I was with my family trying to find a steakhouse to eat at, and when we got to our table, we had to plug our chairs in to what appeared to be the ventricles and atria of an anatomically correct robotic heart.
One minute I was standing on a bed in my godparents' kitchen trying to rehang a chandelier I'd taken down to fix (this is even weirder if you've seen my godparents' kitchen).
Then I was looking for an apartment in San Antonio and wondering how I was going to move my washer and dryer, until I remembered, hey, they aren't mine.
Then I was in a cruise ship bar explaining the plot of a novel I was writing to a bartender, which featured a hero/detective who only avoided being poisoned because he had celiac, so he didn't eat any of the poisoned dish.
THEN I was with my family trying to find a steakhouse to eat at, and when we got to our table, we had to plug our chairs in to what appeared to be the ventricles and atria of an anatomically correct robotic heart.
Nice Work? ~ 1/15/2014
I dreamed I was employed by the Catholic Church to clean decomposing corpses out of a nearby forest.
No, I am NOT going to go into any more detail than that. Isn't that bat-shit crazy enough?
No, I am NOT going to go into any more detail than that. Isn't that bat-shit crazy enough?
Sunday, January 12, 2014
¡Viva la Revolucion! ~ 1/12/2014
I lived in an enormous house with all the people I've ever met. I came out pretty on top during the revolution, because I had seen it coming, and had hidden the kitchen knives in nooks and crannies throughout the house, and every time someone tried to contain me, I knew where a knife was, and fended them off. I didn't have to actually kill anyone. They decided I was too much trouble to subdue, since I didn't pose any real threat. It was pretty awesome.
Everything seemed fairly normal in the morning, so I set out to walk to work. I left the enormous house, which was perched on a cliff overlooking a quiet bay. About a block from home I was transfixed by a vast, shifting cloud of luna moths fluttering bright green against the milky clouds, surrounded by a flock of canaries swooping in to eat them. The whole jumble swirled and writhed in the sky, billowing and undulating in the air just off the cliff.
I turned to a member of the new regime, who had a monitoring station set up nearby. I could see the images where he was charting the movements of the two intermingled swarms, and on a larger screen we could observe the patterns being tracked world wide. There were huge schools of fish in the ocean spelling out words and forming animated line drawings, giant cartoons where a sword fish went and poked a shark, then sped away, sort of like the roadrunner teasing the coyote. I don't think the birds and moths were making any sort of pictures, but all unusual swarming behaviors were being watched. It was a strange new world.
I continued on my way to work, but at some point I just resigned myself to being late, because a few blocks further on, up the inlet where a small river emptied into the bay, there was a tall, leafless tree, and in the upper branches I could see an enormous brown bear. It had a rust brown head and chest and front legs, but his rump and hindquarters were white and dappled with brown and tan spots. There were some people fishing upstream, an older man fly fishing, and farther up, on a pier, a young brother and sister casting for perch. I wondered if they'd seen the bear, and if I should warn them, but the bear hadn't noticed me, and I didn't want to draw attention, so I stayed still in the shadow of a tree across the path and watched.
From his perch in the upper branches, the bear had spied a birds' nest lower down, on some very small limbs he was never going to be able to climb to. But this bear was smarter than your average bear. He climbed down, ignoring the squawking, wheeling parent birds that darted at his head, and found a rod and reel that the fly fisher had left leaning against a boat beached near the tree. The bear took the fishing rod in his mouth, climbed back above the nest on the sturdier limbs, and proceeded to let down the line, hook the nest, and jerk it loose with a few tugs, then let it fall to the ground.
The bear climbed down and began to lap up the spilled contents of the broken eggs, and I decided, of course, to take a picture with my iPhone. I was getting everything lined and zoomed up when I saw in the image on my phone that he had noticed me. As he lumbered angrily in my direction, I took a great shot, then darted out of the way of his charge, but I stumbled as his massive shoulder slammed into my hip. I rolled down the small hillock I'd been standing on, and scrambled upright as he skidded to a stop and turned back towards me.
I stood up as tall as I could and turned to face him squarely. I stomped my food and he froze, and I looked him right in the eyes and hollered, "GIT! GIT OUT OF HERE! GO ON!" He cringed and cowered, and I stomped and yelled some more, and he turned and scampered off into the forest. The guy with the monitoring station called me back over to watch more of the strange swordfish cartoons going on in the oceans, and I don't think I ever did make it to work.
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
Cold and Repetition ~ 1/7/2013
Two dreams last night. First, I dreamed I was creating a canyon, with a stony peak on one side. I was building it out of rust-red rock, and the rock was cold. Not, the rock felt cold. The rock was made out of coldness. The walls of the canyon were building up around me, veined with white streaks of calcite, punctuated with cactus and dagger yucca. The white streaks were shivers from the cold, and each cactus and yucca was a brief spasm of shaking from the cold.
I woke up and discovered I was, in fact, shaking from the cold. The heater in my hotel room would only work full blast, so I hadn't turned it on, and my blankets weren't enough to keep me warm. I turned the heater on full blast, then, but it didn't warm up fast enough, so I finally pulled the hair dryer out of the bathroom to heat up my little air pocket in the blankets, and finally got warm enough for all my muscles to un-clench and for me to stop shaking and relax back into sleep.
Then I dreamed there was this bank of guitar strings labeled A to Z, and when you plucked or struck them, they played a note from a famous song or artist beginning with that letter. My friend David was able to correctly identify all of them with one listen. So that was interesting, but I was too busy to pay much attention, because I was flying up to the Liberty Bowl with the MOB.
Joanna gave me a flyer to put in my car window so I could stay parked at Rice, and the same style flyer to put with my baggage so it would get loaded and delivered properly. We all got on a plane, and started flying north. But then the captain realized that they had forgotten to install one of the tables in the plane's lounge, so he said, all right, everyone buckle up, and to turn around he did this huge upside down loop-de-loop, like a roller coaster ride. It was terrifying. We all got back to Houston, and Joanna gave me another flyer to put in my car, and another for my baggage. When we got back, after the game, Joanna gave me another set of flyers. And then things started to get really repetitive.
We were going to go back up to Memphis to play another Liberty Bowl game, but I needed to get my measuring cups and spoons, and a spice rack. I had to conduct a crucial experiment where I would measure out a certain amount of an herb or spice, put it on a shelf, and see what happened.
So I measured out a tablespoon of coriander, and put it on the shelf. Goodnight started talking about an Alton Brown show, and someone else interrupted with, wait, didn't that happen while y'all were in Florence, and Dave and Tera said yes, and began to describe how a star soprano had come down the spiral staircase from her balcony singing an aria from Carmen, to the delight of everyone in the cafe. She was wearing a flamenco dress, and had her hair pulled back in a tight bun. Then someone turned a page in Vogue, then closed the magazine to show Madonna on the cover, and a small, iridescent shell spun on a wire and scooped the tablespoon of coriander off the shelf and into a pot of boiling water, and everything when silent.
Next I measured out a teaspoon of rosemary, and put it on the shelf. Goodnight started talking about an Alton Brown show, and someone else interrupted with, wait, didn't that happen while y'all were in Florence, and Dave and Tera said yes, and began to describe how a star soprano had come down the spiral staircase from her balcony singing an aria from Carmen, to the delight of everyone in the cafe. She was wearing a flamenco dress, and had her hair pulled back in a tight bun. Then someone turned a page in Vogue, then closed the magazine to show Madonna on the cover, and a small, iridescent shell spun on a wire and scooped the tablespoon of coriander off the shelf and into a pot of boiling water, and everything when silent.
Then I measured out an eight of a teaspoon of ground allspice, and put it on the shelf. Goodnight started talking about an Alton Brown show, and someone else interrupted with, wait, didn't that happen while y'all were in Florence, and Dave and Tera said yes, and began to describe how a star soprano had come down the spiral staircase from her balcony singing an aria from Carmen, to the delight of everyone in the cafe. She was wearing a flamenco dress, and had her hair pulled back in a tight bun. Then someone turned a page in Vogue, then closed the magazine to show Madonna on the cover, and a small, iridescent shell spun on a wire and scooped the tablespoon of coriander off the shelf and into a pot of boiling water, and everything when silent.
The exact same things kept happening in the exact same sequence as I measured out other spices. I was looking at Madonna on the cover of Vogue for the sixth or seventh time when Joanna told me I really needed to hurry up and get on the plane, and I could hear the guitar strings playing again in the white room with the big window next door, so I woke up. At least I was still warm.
I woke up and discovered I was, in fact, shaking from the cold. The heater in my hotel room would only work full blast, so I hadn't turned it on, and my blankets weren't enough to keep me warm. I turned the heater on full blast, then, but it didn't warm up fast enough, so I finally pulled the hair dryer out of the bathroom to heat up my little air pocket in the blankets, and finally got warm enough for all my muscles to un-clench and for me to stop shaking and relax back into sleep.
Then I dreamed there was this bank of guitar strings labeled A to Z, and when you plucked or struck them, they played a note from a famous song or artist beginning with that letter. My friend David was able to correctly identify all of them with one listen. So that was interesting, but I was too busy to pay much attention, because I was flying up to the Liberty Bowl with the MOB.
Joanna gave me a flyer to put in my car window so I could stay parked at Rice, and the same style flyer to put with my baggage so it would get loaded and delivered properly. We all got on a plane, and started flying north. But then the captain realized that they had forgotten to install one of the tables in the plane's lounge, so he said, all right, everyone buckle up, and to turn around he did this huge upside down loop-de-loop, like a roller coaster ride. It was terrifying. We all got back to Houston, and Joanna gave me another flyer to put in my car, and another for my baggage. When we got back, after the game, Joanna gave me another set of flyers. And then things started to get really repetitive.
We were going to go back up to Memphis to play another Liberty Bowl game, but I needed to get my measuring cups and spoons, and a spice rack. I had to conduct a crucial experiment where I would measure out a certain amount of an herb or spice, put it on a shelf, and see what happened.
So I measured out a tablespoon of coriander, and put it on the shelf. Goodnight started talking about an Alton Brown show, and someone else interrupted with, wait, didn't that happen while y'all were in Florence, and Dave and Tera said yes, and began to describe how a star soprano had come down the spiral staircase from her balcony singing an aria from Carmen, to the delight of everyone in the cafe. She was wearing a flamenco dress, and had her hair pulled back in a tight bun. Then someone turned a page in Vogue, then closed the magazine to show Madonna on the cover, and a small, iridescent shell spun on a wire and scooped the tablespoon of coriander off the shelf and into a pot of boiling water, and everything when silent.
Next I measured out a teaspoon of rosemary, and put it on the shelf. Goodnight started talking about an Alton Brown show, and someone else interrupted with, wait, didn't that happen while y'all were in Florence, and Dave and Tera said yes, and began to describe how a star soprano had come down the spiral staircase from her balcony singing an aria from Carmen, to the delight of everyone in the cafe. She was wearing a flamenco dress, and had her hair pulled back in a tight bun. Then someone turned a page in Vogue, then closed the magazine to show Madonna on the cover, and a small, iridescent shell spun on a wire and scooped the tablespoon of coriander off the shelf and into a pot of boiling water, and everything when silent.
Then I measured out an eight of a teaspoon of ground allspice, and put it on the shelf. Goodnight started talking about an Alton Brown show, and someone else interrupted with, wait, didn't that happen while y'all were in Florence, and Dave and Tera said yes, and began to describe how a star soprano had come down the spiral staircase from her balcony singing an aria from Carmen, to the delight of everyone in the cafe. She was wearing a flamenco dress, and had her hair pulled back in a tight bun. Then someone turned a page in Vogue, then closed the magazine to show Madonna on the cover, and a small, iridescent shell spun on a wire and scooped the tablespoon of coriander off the shelf and into a pot of boiling water, and everything when silent.
The exact same things kept happening in the exact same sequence as I measured out other spices. I was looking at Madonna on the cover of Vogue for the sixth or seventh time when Joanna told me I really needed to hurry up and get on the plane, and I could hear the guitar strings playing again in the white room with the big window next door, so I woke up. At least I was still warm.
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