Traveling Two-fer ~ 2/26/2014

I dreamed of traveling two nights in a row.

The night before last, dreamed I pulled up to a McDonald's in Bryan, Texas, with my mom, but 6:00am was too early. They didn't open until 6:30am.  We waited for a while, then I wandered in to get breakfast.  I really wanted sausage egg and cheese biscuits, but somehow I ended up with waffles drenched in honey, a cup of coffee that I sweetened with strawberry jam, and several bags (small burlap bags) of chocolate and nougat candies that spilled on the ground, and I scooped them up and put them back in the bags, but I couldn't keep the beetles on the ground from getting mixed in.

I was headed for a cabin in the pine woods in Mississippi, but I'd come to Texas first to meet up with some people.  While I was talking with my mom, I told her about a dream I thought I'd had when I was very small that I'd been at a babysitter's who had a brother or cousin who was a little person.  It seemed odd to me, because I was sure I'd never actually met any little people, but Mom said, no, actually, that had been the case.  We had lived for just a couple of months in a town called Stair Step, Texas, and my babysitter had lived with her brother who was a little person.  I decided I would drive back down to I-10, instead of up to I-20, so I could visit Stair Step, and try to meet this person again. But I woke up before I got there.

Last night I dreamed that I lived in the French Quarter, which was located in London near Soho.  My dad was visiting me and meeting my friends.  One of my friends was a grad student in biology, and I helped him feed his snakes.  The snakes were all small, like garter snakes, but had the loveliest cream and toffee dappled patterns.  We fed them cubes of freeze-dried worms like I used to feed my betas.  My dad met another friend who was doing graphic design, but we had a hard time convincing him that making a cartoon of Beethoven dressed as a hipster with a background that integrated the score from one of Beethoven's symphonies was any sort of real work.

After Dad left, some other friends came to visit.  I took them to a famous cemetery that was a few blocks into the Marigny.  It was a big square-shaped plot of land with a circular moat encircling the most imposing monuments.  Among these was Hugh Hefner's grave, which all my friends wanted to see.  We crossed the moat stream over lovely little stone bridges that leapt gracefully in slender spans from deep gray rocks frosted with emerald green moss.  It was a spot of quiet repose and peace.

Except for the funeral home on one side of the cemetery, which was haunted.  We didn't see any apparitions, but large antique dolls that were dressed in lace and sat on small rocking chairs around the home got up and began to chase us.  As if they weren't creepy enough standing still.

We ran back to my house in the Quarter, hoping to outdistance the ominous spirits.  We got tangled up in an all-female flash mob on the uptown lakeside corner of the enormous Esplanade and Rampart Street roundabout.  The flash mob was wearing fluorescent pink, orange, and yellow sports bras and wrist and ankle bands and black biker shorts, and they were all dancing to "Hot, Hot, Hot".  We got through them, crossed the roundabout (I looked the correct way for traffic at all times), and were on our way back into the Quarter when I woke up.

Sunlight ~ 2/21/2014

I dreamed a world where vampires existed and were out in the open, like in Charlaine Harris' books.  I bought a large house on Royal St. right by the cathedral, that was an old warehouse renovated into an open, airy, three story home for vampires and vagrants to live in.  The vagrants were warned about the vampires, and had to be okay with it, and understand the dangers, and the vampires had to promise not to bite anyone in the house.  The only problem was that one whole wall of the living area was windows facing the sunset, and the wall that caught the sunrise had many large windows, too.  As long as the vampires weren't touched by rays of direct sunlight, they'd be fine, but a single beam of sun could burn, and if it hit the face, could cause the entire body to go up in flames.  Because of the buildings around the home, the only time direct sunlight entered the windows was right at sunrise and sunset, and I made sure there were dark, heavy blankets to wrap up in, and went through several test runs with willing participants to try to find the spots in the large room where the sun wouldn't touch.  I was one of the testers, because I, too, was a vampire.

So we found some spots, and we each laid claim to one, and stashed the blankets around the rooms. Each day a bell would sound to warn us of the coming of the sun, and we'd scamper to our stations, wrapped up, and then the bell would tell us when it was over and we could come out.  But someone kept moving furniture and stealing blankets, or putting holes in them, and we were getting burned and killed day after day. I finally took to building a fort out of blankets and the coffee table, and someone came by as the sun rose and tried to kill me by stealing the blanket hanging over my fort, but fortunately I was also mostly wrapped up in a second blanket, and only got burns on my hands.

That night I went out and bought lots and lots of huge blackout curtains, and hung them in all the windows, but I had to weight them down with lead to make them too heavy for a person to open.  We figured that should do the trick around sunup and sundown, but also let us have the indirect light the rest of the time.

What I remember most, though, was thinking how beautiful each brilliant shaft of gold was, streaming in, glinting, piercing us like daggers.  Terrifying, painful, ruthless, but beautiful.

Dancing Dinosaurs ~ 2/18/2014

I was at a church function in a stone-pillared, gothic-revival style cathedral. It was some sort of fundraiser for the associated catholic elementary school. As our boat skimmed down the stream in a side aisle, I stared bemused at a stage full of Tyrannosaurus rexes dancing to ragtime piano with boaters on their huge heads and canes in their tiny hands. I walked out of the dark cathedral into the late afternoon sun and wandered down curving suburban lanes lined with two story double shotguns. I found myself at a pale blue clapboard house with white trim and a huge fiberglass facade on the upper porch of the Mad magazine kid wearing a gray fedora and a huge, toothy smile.  Basically it was a Marching Owl Band frat house. I spent some time inside helping clean things up and get the rooms ready for furniture to be moved in. When I left, it was dark, and I wandered into a neighborhood of small brick homes, lost and unsure where I was. Suddenly I realized I was being followed, possibly by the dinosaurs, but I'm not sure, and I had to get back where I'd come from, then to the airport as fast as I could. I saw a white horse dappled with black grazing in the tall lush grass of a moonlit field. His bridle was hanging on the wooden fence. I called him over, made friends, put the bridle on, and rode him at a gallop down the streets, taking short cuts through alleyways and jumping small drainage ditches. I made it back to the MOB house and warned them that something was coming, then rode on, over the tracks of a wide rail yard as the sun rose, trying to reach the airport, where I would fly to Europe. But before I got there, I woke up.

New Orleans Is So Much Stranger in My Head ~ 2/15/2014

I can't remember where it started, but my recollection of my dream picks up with a former colleague having an argument with our team leader.  I was on my cell phone listening to my colleague's account, which included his pride about how he turned the team leader's comments back on him with a heavy dose of sass, showing the team leader how his side of the argument was illogical, and getting him in a fair amount of trouble.

I had just hung up the cell phone when something made me look over my left shoulder and up into the sky.  Two hundred feet up in the air was a sort of stop light intersection in the sky.  I could see the team leader carrying a brief case and walking up in the air, as though on an invisible sidewalk.  He stopped at the intersection, as though waiting for invisible traffic to cross, then the walk sign came on, and he continued walking in the sky, crossing the intersection up in the air.  Of course, there were a lot of these intersections in New Orleans, and people crossed them all the time, so why not?  I continued walking down the ground level street.

I turned and started walking down Carondelet. A couple of blocks off of Canal, my eye was caught by a new pub.  I looked through the window and saw that the interior was a cathedral made out of beer bottles.  It was apparently modeled off of a similar, if grander, tavern in Belgium. I had to go in and check it out. I wandered all the way back to the beer bottle apse back behind the bar, where the altar would be. There were side chapels and columns and a central choir.

I headed back up to the entrance, weaving my way around the pools and ponds of a cypress swamp. Spanish moss hung from the trees, and it was dark amid the trees and vines.  I stepped into a canoe and began to paddle down a small, dark stream, flowing silently over fallen trees, moving smoothly through the swamp.

Only the canoe apparently belonged to a colony of cannibals who lived up in the trees. And they didn't liked that I borrowed it.  They hauled me and my canoe up into the canopy where their village was, and I hopped out and began to jump from limb to canoe to vine to limb, using a hooked walking staff to haul the canoes they suspended towards me so I could jump into them.  It felt kind of like a strange video game, and suddenly I was looking at it from outside, like it WAS a video game, with colorful if unsophisticated graphics.

Finally I got back down to water level, ran to the end of a doc, jumped into another canoe, and started paddling down the river again, and finally reached the entrance of the bar. I stepped back out onto Carondelet and woke up.

Meta ~ 2/5/2014

All I really remember about last night's dreams was that I dreamed that I was dreaming, and in my dream dream, I was lucid and imagining what I would write for the blog. So here goes. The only image I can remember from my dream. Two little girls. Humanoid but with a catlike cast to their features and thick, straight, bushy hair like manes around their round heads. One had hair straight out in all directions like a perfect sphere, while the other had the sides smoothed down, though still full, and the top formed into a thick wedge pointing straight up. They had freckles and buck teeth, in spite of their feline aspect, and their nut-brown hair had streaks of dark and light up the center, like a chipmunk's coat. So, these two cat-chipmunk-girl-children wore white tank tops and bright neon polka dotted skirts, one hot pink and the other lime green, matching rolled down socks, and saddle shoes, with necklaces and bangles and rings all made up of matching plastic daisies with yellow centers. They were pretty much the height of 80s cool, and I think they were the stars of a kids' show, and I dreamed that I dreamed I saw them, and dreamed that I dreamed I would tell you all about them, so now I have!

Staying Alive ~ 2/2/2014

I dreamed I was a space explorer. With a friend I touched down on an ocean planet in a small metal watercraft.  We rowed about, testing the water, scanning for life forms, looking for land. Slowly on some level I realized that, it had been real at first, but then we had been... not quite captured, more like gathered, into a large assembly. We had been scooped up in a container that resembled a giant plastic soda bottle, upside down with the bottom cut off and the top gone, so it formed a huge clear funnel, and all the water had drained out while we had been blinded by the mirage.

The illusion that had kept us complacent, of our craft beneath us and ocean around us slowly faded, and we found ourselves in an enormous hall, a dark, post-apocalyptic amphitheater filled with sentient beings of many sorts. We had been gathered to form an army, and we were being sorted and thinned out based on our usefulness as warriors. I knew I was pretty much doomed. My friend had been a fully trained second lieutenant in some squadron and I was just a scientist and recorder.  We watched as a woman in a white coat sent one fairly un-martial girl to the showers, which was an obvious euphemism. We knew I'd be next, so my friend insisted, when they chose her as an officer, that she couldn't do without me as her assistant.

I was allowed to live and conscripted into this army. Our first job was to go all over the base, patrolling and searching for some of the planet's inhabitants who had contracted an awful, disfiguring, and zombifying disease. We should be immune, as humans, along with most of the other conscripts. There was a chance, though, that weakened health could make even us vulnerable.

The base was subterranean, beneath the sea that completely covered all of the planet surface except a smattering of tiny islands. An entire layer of the planet's crust was riddled with a labyrinth of dwellings, businesses, military installations, and all sorts of other spaces. We formed into teams of a dozen or so and  combed through the maze for the victims of this plague. They were pretty gruesome when we found them. They were mindless, violent. And their lower jaws had contracted to a narrow strip of sharp teeth, so their mouths never closed right and they drooled all over the place.

I saved my squad once, and killed a batch of the  plague hosts, by throwing a chair up into a skylight to a higher level and burying then in an avalanche of shattered glass. But I was a panicked little jelly of fear by then, so my friend got me assigned to an elderly diplomat as his personal assistant. We were just negotiating what I would have to do for him to keep from getting sent to the showers, and I was getting the feeling it might not be very pleasant, in spite of his grandfatherly demeanor, when I woke up.