I dreamed I was moving out of New Orleans to Schertz, but I kept losing my boxes, and the tape kept going missing, and it seemed like the house might be haunted. Then, I'm not sure if I dreamed going to bed, but it felt like I woke up, but I had sleep paralysis. I was lying in my bed in Mom's house here in Schertz, but I couldn't move, and it felt like someone kept sitting down on my bed, then getting up, then sitting down again. Then it felt like a little dog got put down on the bed, and was creeping around and circling and settling in. I couldn't move, but I could open my eyes, and I couldn't see anyone or anything, and it was really creepy. Then it stopped and I slipped back to sleep.
Once I was all packed up, I was hanging out with friends on Royal St. We walked down to help some historians get set up in a huge old antebellum house. They were giving a lecture in the front hall, and then giving tours of the rest. The house was abandoned and in ruin. And it was haunted. One of the girls in our group was Cordelia from Buffy, and she was being awfully mean to a quiet, awkward, nerdy girl in the group. The quiet girl did a good job of just ignoring her.
As we walked through the house, getting it ready for the tours, I kept getting vision flashes of an old, old story. The man who had built this house was a kind of colonial explorer, and he forged through deep forests and swamps, looking for a site to build New Orleans on. He had a rival he was trying to outdo, and the rival was traveling with his young daughter. And one night, he and the daughter discovered each other in a clearing of the woods.
All while I was getting these vision flashes, I was also walking through the house with the quiet girl. We got along really well, and talked about the things we found. I noticed something strange. There was a sort of light or energy that had started to follow her around. The lights the historians had set up glowed a little bit as she got near them. I realized a ghostly presence was following her closely, but she hadn't realized it yet.
The historians called us downstairs to meet a famous actor that had come to give a speech as part of their tour, dressed in period clothing. Cordelia was doing her best to flirt with the guy, but he seemed interested only in the quiet girl. He asked her to show him through the house, and we all saw how the lights came on as she entered a room, even though they hadn't been wired for power yet. This confirmed something he seemed to know about her.
I began to get flashes of the story of the house again, and I could see them in the story, not as it unfolded, but hinted at in the end. It turned out the quiet girl was descended from the explorer and his rival's daughter, and the story of the house was also the story of his search for the true owner of the house now. The actor was descended from the explorer's best friend, and new the house needed an owner, and was looking for the right person.
Night had fallen, and the rooms of the house were dark when the girl wasn't in them. Visions of the story began to play in front of my eyes in flashes, as though the walls were movie screens, and in the deep darkness between visions, I could feel hands on me, turning me in the the directions I needed to go. They led me to a hidden corner in the high attic, and there I found a huge, dusty old book, and in that book was written the story I had been shown. At the end of the book, the writing was pale and vague, like a shadow of things that hadn't happened yet. But I could see they hinted about the paternity of the quiet girl, who was an orphan and hadn't known her father. They hinted about a legacy he had left her, and a beautiful future, with the actor, in this house. I could see how it would all happen, but then I woke up.
Thursday, December 31, 2015
Tuesday, December 15, 2015
Investigative Journalism ~ 12/15/2015
I dreamed I was working on a story for my high school paper about the abuse of young women. I had it all written out on hundreds of little post-it page marking flags, in pink, yellow, green, blue, and purple. They were stuck in order all over my body, and I carefully transferred them to a notebook before getting up to get my lunch tray.
When I got back to my desk, my notebook was gone, but in a few minutes, my fellow students were all coming up to congratulate me. One of the teachers had seen my story and admired it so much, she'd taken it and had it printed in a special edition of the school paper. Within days, a national news outlet had picked it up, and I was famous.
I started writing more stories, exposing individual cases of abuse. I discovered and wrote about a beautiful young pageant queen who had been caught in bed with her boyfriend. After that, her father confined her on a tiny island, and brought her supplies once a week, sailing his yacht. Her prison could only be reached through a cleverly concealed trap door among the rocks of a tiny outcrop, nearly lost in the waves.
Next, I discovered a farm where tiny baby giraffes were being smuggled in illegally to feed exotic predators. In one cage, a huge python dozed, and in another a hyena slunk out of its little cave, as a famous country singer picked up the little girrafes, about the size of grown cats, and dropped a couple in each cage. When I reported them to the authorities, the country star and his mother denied all knowledge, and I began following them around and yelling, "Liar!" at them every time they talked about it. Then I woke up.
When I got back to my desk, my notebook was gone, but in a few minutes, my fellow students were all coming up to congratulate me. One of the teachers had seen my story and admired it so much, she'd taken it and had it printed in a special edition of the school paper. Within days, a national news outlet had picked it up, and I was famous.
I started writing more stories, exposing individual cases of abuse. I discovered and wrote about a beautiful young pageant queen who had been caught in bed with her boyfriend. After that, her father confined her on a tiny island, and brought her supplies once a week, sailing his yacht. Her prison could only be reached through a cleverly concealed trap door among the rocks of a tiny outcrop, nearly lost in the waves.
Next, I discovered a farm where tiny baby giraffes were being smuggled in illegally to feed exotic predators. In one cage, a huge python dozed, and in another a hyena slunk out of its little cave, as a famous country singer picked up the little girrafes, about the size of grown cats, and dropped a couple in each cage. When I reported them to the authorities, the country star and his mother denied all knowledge, and I began following them around and yelling, "Liar!" at them every time they talked about it. Then I woke up.
Saturday, November 28, 2015
Adventures at Sea ~ 11/28/2015
I dreamed I was staying at a hotel in San Antonio, during a convention to decide who to support in the approaching battle for the kingship. I had gone back in time to the 1920's to help bring about the outcome that would be best for the future of the country. Robert Baratheon had died, and his son Joffrey had been pretty awful, so I went back to the time period to support either his brother Renly or his brother-in-law Tyrion, once I figured out which one was better.
The battle came before I was sure, but I joined in with one of the platoons massed against Joffrey. There I came face to face with my sister, who had come back in time and become Brienne of Tarth. We recognized each other just as the battle begun, and we were swept down a rock beach into the waves to drive off a force that was trying to come ashore by stealth and cut us off from the main body of troops. All I remembered of the battle was how beautiful the pearl-white foam was, that frothed and splashed around my ankles, before the water turned scarlet with blood.
After the battle, when Joffrey had been defeated, we set Renly up as king, but I had a sneaking suspicion that he might have had a hand in Robert's death, and that Tyrion would be the better choice. But of course, I couldn't be sure that it hadn't been Tyrion who had killed the king, either, so I needed to stick around to find out. It turned out that both Brienne and I had been secret daughters of Robert Baratheon, though we had known all along he was our father. When I told a story in a tavern of the nightmares I had about how my father had died, my sister became furious, because her nightmares were so much worse. It seemed like a strange thing to fight over, but I wondered if we might use the fight to our advantage. Maybe we could watch Renly and Tyrion as the rumors spread, and see which acted guiltiest.
But before any of that could come about, I found out that Tyrion had been captured by a sea hag, and was enslaved on her shrimp trawler, doomed to fish up lost souls and dead crustaceans. I sneaked aboard and helped Tyrion overthrow the sea hag, and we brought her ship back into port. It was full of the most amazing aquariums, that seemed empty at first, but then burst into life with dozens of small fish, all different shapes and sizes, but all shining silver, with dark or bright spots or streaks based on their kind. We carefully moved one old goldfish into a new tank. I had to reach in to free him from some gravel that had slid over his fins, and suddenly his tank blossomed with bright green water grasses, tiny iridescent snails, and fast growing hermit crabs.
There was another tank that had frogs in it, and one bright green tree frog kept getting out. We didn't want the free-roaming lobsters that skittered across the floors to eat him, so we kept putting him back and trying to figure out how to secure his tank. There was a tiny gap at the top, to let the water hoses in, that he kept climbing through. If we shut the lit tight enough that he couldn't get out, it slowed the water flow, and the level in the tank dropped, and that wasn't good either. I think we finally fixed things with duct tape.
I don't remember exactly how we fixed it, though, because night had fallen, and the full moon was rising, and the lobsters were coming into shore. We were docked at a long pier by then, and we went out onto the deck and looked out to sea. The water was still and calm with barely any waves, but there were small, triangular ripples on the surface, all pointing into shore. As each neared, I called my sister over and pointed to the enormous lobster swimming just beneath the surface. The smallest of them was a foot and a half long, and their tails were at least six inches thick at the base. As we watched them, my sister pointed to some pale shapes closer to shore, and we walked out onto the pier and up toward the beach to see what they were.
They were dead bodies, being swept in on the small current created by the lobster migration. At least one was a woman, her pale, bloated face and hands poking out of a pink sweater, and her blond hair fanning out on the ripples. The other two were just barely-recognizable limbs, and as we watched, another began to surface. Then I woke up.
The battle came before I was sure, but I joined in with one of the platoons massed against Joffrey. There I came face to face with my sister, who had come back in time and become Brienne of Tarth. We recognized each other just as the battle begun, and we were swept down a rock beach into the waves to drive off a force that was trying to come ashore by stealth and cut us off from the main body of troops. All I remembered of the battle was how beautiful the pearl-white foam was, that frothed and splashed around my ankles, before the water turned scarlet with blood.
After the battle, when Joffrey had been defeated, we set Renly up as king, but I had a sneaking suspicion that he might have had a hand in Robert's death, and that Tyrion would be the better choice. But of course, I couldn't be sure that it hadn't been Tyrion who had killed the king, either, so I needed to stick around to find out. It turned out that both Brienne and I had been secret daughters of Robert Baratheon, though we had known all along he was our father. When I told a story in a tavern of the nightmares I had about how my father had died, my sister became furious, because her nightmares were so much worse. It seemed like a strange thing to fight over, but I wondered if we might use the fight to our advantage. Maybe we could watch Renly and Tyrion as the rumors spread, and see which acted guiltiest.
But before any of that could come about, I found out that Tyrion had been captured by a sea hag, and was enslaved on her shrimp trawler, doomed to fish up lost souls and dead crustaceans. I sneaked aboard and helped Tyrion overthrow the sea hag, and we brought her ship back into port. It was full of the most amazing aquariums, that seemed empty at first, but then burst into life with dozens of small fish, all different shapes and sizes, but all shining silver, with dark or bright spots or streaks based on their kind. We carefully moved one old goldfish into a new tank. I had to reach in to free him from some gravel that had slid over his fins, and suddenly his tank blossomed with bright green water grasses, tiny iridescent snails, and fast growing hermit crabs.
There was another tank that had frogs in it, and one bright green tree frog kept getting out. We didn't want the free-roaming lobsters that skittered across the floors to eat him, so we kept putting him back and trying to figure out how to secure his tank. There was a tiny gap at the top, to let the water hoses in, that he kept climbing through. If we shut the lit tight enough that he couldn't get out, it slowed the water flow, and the level in the tank dropped, and that wasn't good either. I think we finally fixed things with duct tape.
I don't remember exactly how we fixed it, though, because night had fallen, and the full moon was rising, and the lobsters were coming into shore. We were docked at a long pier by then, and we went out onto the deck and looked out to sea. The water was still and calm with barely any waves, but there were small, triangular ripples on the surface, all pointing into shore. As each neared, I called my sister over and pointed to the enormous lobster swimming just beneath the surface. The smallest of them was a foot and a half long, and their tails were at least six inches thick at the base. As we watched them, my sister pointed to some pale shapes closer to shore, and we walked out onto the pier and up toward the beach to see what they were.
They were dead bodies, being swept in on the small current created by the lobster migration. At least one was a woman, her pale, bloated face and hands poking out of a pink sweater, and her blond hair fanning out on the ripples. The other two were just barely-recognizable limbs, and as we watched, another began to surface. Then I woke up.
Wednesday, November 25, 2015
Back to School ~ 11/25/2015
I dreamed that my friend, who was absolutely gorgeous, had a crush on a guy in our dorm, who was Hodgins from Bones, but with long, crazy hair. I had a crush on him, too, but they were just so perfect for each other that it only seemed right to introduce them, since Hodgins was a good friend of mine. My friend asked him out, and he was about to say no, and I asked him why. He said it was because she was so beautiful, he couldn't believe she'd really be interested in him. I insisted that she was also intelligent and inquisitive and would be into all his quirks, if he'd just pluck up the self-esteem to give it a chance. So he did, they immediately hit it off, and became a couple.
Of course, this made me sad for myself, and I spent a lot of time after that jumping into piles of huge maple and sycamore leaves that were changing colors, and even joined a pirate ship for a brief time. Suddenly, I realized it was almost time for English class with my middle school English teacher, so I hurried into the classroom, only to find that it was a 1pm class, not a 1:30pm class, so I was already super late. But when the teacher asked me, and I explained and apologized, everything seemed to be all right.
Partway through the class, though, I started channeling. I saw visions of little remote controlled race cars being driven through desert brush, on a rugged track, with their young owners pelting after them. At the same time, I knew the mother of one of the little girls in the race had been poisoned. When I came to myself, I found I'd walked out of the classroom, down a flight of stairs covered with sand. On each step I'd written a letter, and the result was "pentalchlorine penthate". My English teacher asked what that was, and I explained that it was a fast acting poison that could be made from common household materials, and that I'd learned this watching CSI. Then I woke up.
Of course, this made me sad for myself, and I spent a lot of time after that jumping into piles of huge maple and sycamore leaves that were changing colors, and even joined a pirate ship for a brief time. Suddenly, I realized it was almost time for English class with my middle school English teacher, so I hurried into the classroom, only to find that it was a 1pm class, not a 1:30pm class, so I was already super late. But when the teacher asked me, and I explained and apologized, everything seemed to be all right.
Partway through the class, though, I started channeling. I saw visions of little remote controlled race cars being driven through desert brush, on a rugged track, with their young owners pelting after them. At the same time, I knew the mother of one of the little girls in the race had been poisoned. When I came to myself, I found I'd walked out of the classroom, down a flight of stairs covered with sand. On each step I'd written a letter, and the result was "pentalchlorine penthate". My English teacher asked what that was, and I explained that it was a fast acting poison that could be made from common household materials, and that I'd learned this watching CSI. Then I woke up.
Monday, November 23, 2015
Just a Normal Day in the Life? ~ 11/23/2015
I dreamed that I was a professional photographer, and with other women photographers, I was being targeted by a stalker. Somehow the stalker was manipulating my camera so that every so often a picture would print out with a bite mark across the corner, and, "You will be next!" written in the stalker's blood. The blood was even real, and could be analyzed for DNA, but the stalker wasn't in the system.
When we all found out the same weird thing was happening to us, the other women and I decided to start a support group. We went to meet in Fondren Library, on Rice campus. I was running late, though, and as I got off the elevator on the floor we were meeting on, there was an explosion, and everyone came running, and we evacuated.
I decided to just go on to my next appointment, which was a film class I was taking. I got to the darkened lecture room a bit late, and slipped into the front row, where my seat was. No one said anything, though. The film they were showing was an animated short by a friend of mine, and I thought I recognized myself in one of the characters.
When the lights came back on, the professor asked if anyone knew what corn would look like if it hadn't been genetically modified (i.e. bred for certain qualities over the centuries). I was the only one that knew that corn would be, like, five tiny kernels on little spike of a cob, and pretty much useless for sustaining many people.
After class, my sister wanted to go down to the beach, so we got on a little soapbox car and began rolling down the streets. We knew we were getting close when the concrete barriers and fences and walls were hidden under sand-mud nests built by amphibious crustaceans. They looked like shrimp about five inches long, but narrower throughout their bodies, and they were gray with vivid streaks of magenta and turquoise, that pulsed brilliantly when they were frightened or agitated.
We got to the beach just as a big wave came in and got all the little children wet up to their hips. One of them was my friends' younger son, and he came crying to me that his best pants were now soaked, and could we please go somewhere to dry them off. Then I woke up.
When we all found out the same weird thing was happening to us, the other women and I decided to start a support group. We went to meet in Fondren Library, on Rice campus. I was running late, though, and as I got off the elevator on the floor we were meeting on, there was an explosion, and everyone came running, and we evacuated.
I decided to just go on to my next appointment, which was a film class I was taking. I got to the darkened lecture room a bit late, and slipped into the front row, where my seat was. No one said anything, though. The film they were showing was an animated short by a friend of mine, and I thought I recognized myself in one of the characters.
When the lights came back on, the professor asked if anyone knew what corn would look like if it hadn't been genetically modified (i.e. bred for certain qualities over the centuries). I was the only one that knew that corn would be, like, five tiny kernels on little spike of a cob, and pretty much useless for sustaining many people.
After class, my sister wanted to go down to the beach, so we got on a little soapbox car and began rolling down the streets. We knew we were getting close when the concrete barriers and fences and walls were hidden under sand-mud nests built by amphibious crustaceans. They looked like shrimp about five inches long, but narrower throughout their bodies, and they were gray with vivid streaks of magenta and turquoise, that pulsed brilliantly when they were frightened or agitated.
We got to the beach just as a big wave came in and got all the little children wet up to their hips. One of them was my friends' younger son, and he came crying to me that his best pants were now soaked, and could we please go somewhere to dry them off. Then I woke up.
Thursday, November 19, 2015
TBTT#14 The Mongol Hordes ~ 7/17/2012
I was traveling with my family and the MOB across rocky terrain. It was remote and beautiful. It might have been near Yellowstone. We were traveling by train. At some point we stopped and we were all sort of milling around in this town, then everyone got back on the train, disappointed. Apparently I was supposed to get dressed up nice and act like a lady so some important guy would be interested in me and offer to marry me. But I failed. Imagine that. So my family was mad at me for a while. Then, suddenly, BARBARIC HORDES!!! Led by a very Genghis Khan sort of person, they attacked. By which I mean they swarmed into a field and challenged me, then ran at me one by one. I had two swords. I don't know how to use a sword, and didn't in the dream, either. But apparently, "Stick them with the pointy end," was all I knew in life and all I needed to know, because basically, they would each run at me as I held up my swords, and one by one they helpfully impaled themselves upon my blade(s). But I didn't WANT to kill people, and it was a terrible AWFUL feeling, to sense the scrape of metal on bone vibrating up my arm as each was run through. One of them, in a tiger pelt with a bone dagger, couldn't have been any older than twelve. Then, to be efficient, I simply used my swords to shred a Russian telephone book, and that somehow took care of the entire horde. And then I woke up.
Friday, November 13, 2015
I'm Not Cut Out for Academia ~ 11/13/2015
I dreamed that I was writing a thesis about how Agnes and Leah Adamcek, my mom's great-great-grandmother and her twin sister, had married two brothers, Adam and Levi, who were my dad's great-great-grandfather and his twin brother. This connection had been lost to our family knowledge, until I made a chance discovery in some old photo albums. There was a portrait of the sisters tucked into my dad's family's stuff that I recognized from going through my mom's family's stuff, and then I pieced together the story.
I was writing up my thesis when weird stuff started happening. Little things that I barely noticed at first. Like I was walking home along the beach at night, and I hear people walking near me, but couldn't see them, then there was some sort of scuffle, I thought, but it was too far away for me to hear enough to be sure.
Then this guy named Leo introduced himself and said he'd been assigned to guard me. When the library I was doing research in suddenly closed early, and everything went dark. I could feel someone near me, and they started to tug on my notes, but I managed to get away with all my materials, because Leo came in with a flashlight and got me out of there. But he scolded me for working so late, and said the only reason he'd come looking for me was because I'd missed my check in with him.
Then he said he was going to show me something. He ran a cotton swab over my shoes, and dripped some clear liquid over it, and it turned bright pink, like in CSI. He said there was blood on my shoes, and that someone was trying to frame me for a murder that was all over the news. So Leo and I went into detective mode to try to figure out who was trying to frame me.
We discovered that it was this woman who worked as a professional Willie Nelson impersonator. She was wanted for some other crimes, including impersonating Willie *too* well, and trying to steal his identity. We tracked her down at Reliant Stadium, where Willie was performing the next night for the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. The police were trying to catch her for trespassing, but as soon as we showed up, the lights went out, and plunged us into pitch darkness.
I suspected that she'd target me, since she'd been trying to steal my thesis notes for who knows what reason, and sure enough, I could hear her footsteps crunching in the dirt to my right. I was holding a decoy copy of my notes, just a sheaf of paper with some printing on the top page. She grabbed them and began to run. I yelled and set off after her, following the sound of her breathing and footsteps, and the occasional faint glint of her white sneakers in the darkness.
I got so close that I bumped into her. She gasped and tried to speed up, but I took a flying leap and tackled her and started yelling. Then I woke up.
I was writing up my thesis when weird stuff started happening. Little things that I barely noticed at first. Like I was walking home along the beach at night, and I hear people walking near me, but couldn't see them, then there was some sort of scuffle, I thought, but it was too far away for me to hear enough to be sure.
Then this guy named Leo introduced himself and said he'd been assigned to guard me. When the library I was doing research in suddenly closed early, and everything went dark. I could feel someone near me, and they started to tug on my notes, but I managed to get away with all my materials, because Leo came in with a flashlight and got me out of there. But he scolded me for working so late, and said the only reason he'd come looking for me was because I'd missed my check in with him.
Then he said he was going to show me something. He ran a cotton swab over my shoes, and dripped some clear liquid over it, and it turned bright pink, like in CSI. He said there was blood on my shoes, and that someone was trying to frame me for a murder that was all over the news. So Leo and I went into detective mode to try to figure out who was trying to frame me.
We discovered that it was this woman who worked as a professional Willie Nelson impersonator. She was wanted for some other crimes, including impersonating Willie *too* well, and trying to steal his identity. We tracked her down at Reliant Stadium, where Willie was performing the next night for the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. The police were trying to catch her for trespassing, but as soon as we showed up, the lights went out, and plunged us into pitch darkness.
I suspected that she'd target me, since she'd been trying to steal my thesis notes for who knows what reason, and sure enough, I could hear her footsteps crunching in the dirt to my right. I was holding a decoy copy of my notes, just a sheaf of paper with some printing on the top page. She grabbed them and began to run. I yelled and set off after her, following the sound of her breathing and footsteps, and the occasional faint glint of her white sneakers in the darkness.
I got so close that I bumped into her. She gasped and tried to speed up, but I took a flying leap and tackled her and started yelling. Then I woke up.
Thursday, November 12, 2015
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest ~ 11/12/2015
I dreamed I was having a really bad day. I called my friend to help me out, but I couldn't get hold of him, so I went to the ice cream parlor, but they were all out of ice cream and brownies, and all they had left was Italian soda, so I ordered a cherry and blood orange one, and kept trying to get hold of my friend.
He finally texted me back, but he thought it was the girl he'd just started dating texting him, so when he said he'd be there in ten minutes, he didn't mean he'd be there with me, but that he was going to go hang with her. What I didn't know was that she was a shape shifter, and changed into a hornet, and that he was learning to do the same. I also didn't know she was my neighbor in my new apartment complex. (I'd moved into the new units built where Bissonnet Village used to be.)
All I knew was that I finally decided to just go home, and when I got home, to top off my bad day, I found a hornet's nest just inside the window I'd left open on accident. It was a cylindrical sort of cage made out of mud and twigs, and it already had over a dozen little bulges that were incubating eggs. Then the hornet mom flew in and settled herself in the nest, in MY apartment, and I didn't know she was part human, but I do NOT like wasps and bees and such. So I flipped out, and began to bug bomb the nest. I kicked it out onto the balcony patio, and lit it on fire.
Then my friend texted me, still thinking I was his girlfriend, and something about his text explained the whole thing, and I couldn't figure out how on earth I was going to tell him that I'd just poisoned, then torched, his new love and family. Then I woke up.
He finally texted me back, but he thought it was the girl he'd just started dating texting him, so when he said he'd be there in ten minutes, he didn't mean he'd be there with me, but that he was going to go hang with her. What I didn't know was that she was a shape shifter, and changed into a hornet, and that he was learning to do the same. I also didn't know she was my neighbor in my new apartment complex. (I'd moved into the new units built where Bissonnet Village used to be.)
All I knew was that I finally decided to just go home, and when I got home, to top off my bad day, I found a hornet's nest just inside the window I'd left open on accident. It was a cylindrical sort of cage made out of mud and twigs, and it already had over a dozen little bulges that were incubating eggs. Then the hornet mom flew in and settled herself in the nest, in MY apartment, and I didn't know she was part human, but I do NOT like wasps and bees and such. So I flipped out, and began to bug bomb the nest. I kicked it out onto the balcony patio, and lit it on fire.
Then my friend texted me, still thinking I was his girlfriend, and something about his text explained the whole thing, and I couldn't figure out how on earth I was going to tell him that I'd just poisoned, then torched, his new love and family. Then I woke up.
Friday, November 6, 2015
Zydedoche ~ 11/6/2015
I dreamed a new word. "Zydedoche." I encountered it while walking down Bourbon Street with some folks, and none of us knew what it meant. I asked someone to look it up online, and I don't think it was coincidence that it was an acquaintance of mine whose last name is Zadoyko, or that a zydeco band was parading past as we tried to discus it, so that I couldn't hear what anyone was telling me.
I finally got to a place where I could look at the online definition myself, and the "definition" was a charming paragraph that began "Four to one nuns polled from the nun pool say..." and went on to tell me that zydedoche was a form of religious architectural embellishment. But there were no details or pictures, so it didn't really make sense. Also, I kept forgetting to click the sound file to learn how it was pronounced.
Finally, after a little more research, I learned that, while now applied to pretty much any intricate and arcane, obviously religious iconography, including the squiggly golden glyphs painted on the back of giant, purple scarabs in ancient Sumeria, the term zydedoche most accurately referred to a type of tile or block found in many old gothic churches. The term came from the Greek for "double x" or "split x", and rows of different ornamental tiles or stone blocks were always framed with a particular block that featured what looked like two X's, one on top of the other but slightly offset, then split vertically down the middle, with the halves pulled across each other and moved to opposite ends of a rectangle with rounded edges.
Other blocks that the zydedoche framed would be carved with cloud-like curlicues or dramatic chevrons, but always in the upper left, and often in all corners of the panel, you'd find the split x blocks. They were mostly found in Catholic churches now, but it was obvious to scholars that they were a symbol borrowed from older, pagan shrines. Sometimes, the stones were actually taken from older temples and used in church walls, and the motif just became popular and was copied by cathedral masons for centuries.
I was staying with some friends and none of us could sleep. One because she was pregnant, and the baby was keeping her up, another because she was worried about her job, and me, because I just could NOT figure out how to pronounce "zydedoche". I kept trying to go to an online dictionary and find a sound file, but I kept getting distracted by new details of the definition, and I never did click on any pronunciation guides, before I woke up.
I like to think that it was not "ZY-duh-dohsh" or "ZY-dohsh", as I thought in my dream, but "zy-DED-oh-kee," like "synecdoche," which is a real word. Look it up!
I finally got to a place where I could look at the online definition myself, and the "definition" was a charming paragraph that began "Four to one nuns polled from the nun pool say..." and went on to tell me that zydedoche was a form of religious architectural embellishment. But there were no details or pictures, so it didn't really make sense. Also, I kept forgetting to click the sound file to learn how it was pronounced.
Finally, after a little more research, I learned that, while now applied to pretty much any intricate and arcane, obviously religious iconography, including the squiggly golden glyphs painted on the back of giant, purple scarabs in ancient Sumeria, the term zydedoche most accurately referred to a type of tile or block found in many old gothic churches. The term came from the Greek for "double x" or "split x", and rows of different ornamental tiles or stone blocks were always framed with a particular block that featured what looked like two X's, one on top of the other but slightly offset, then split vertically down the middle, with the halves pulled across each other and moved to opposite ends of a rectangle with rounded edges.
Other blocks that the zydedoche framed would be carved with cloud-like curlicues or dramatic chevrons, but always in the upper left, and often in all corners of the panel, you'd find the split x blocks. They were mostly found in Catholic churches now, but it was obvious to scholars that they were a symbol borrowed from older, pagan shrines. Sometimes, the stones were actually taken from older temples and used in church walls, and the motif just became popular and was copied by cathedral masons for centuries.
I was staying with some friends and none of us could sleep. One because she was pregnant, and the baby was keeping her up, another because she was worried about her job, and me, because I just could NOT figure out how to pronounce "zydedoche". I kept trying to go to an online dictionary and find a sound file, but I kept getting distracted by new details of the definition, and I never did click on any pronunciation guides, before I woke up.
I like to think that it was not "ZY-duh-dohsh" or "ZY-dohsh", as I thought in my dream, but "zy-DED-oh-kee," like "synecdoche," which is a real word. Look it up!
Friday, October 23, 2015
I Just Want to Take a Shower ~ 10/23/2015
I dreamed that Mom was hosting Thanksgiving dinner at our house in the Hill Country, and had invited about a hundred people. There were these crazy twenty-somethings running around, a few pairs of best friends who had performed a spell on themselves that melded traits from each into the other, so they could be closer than ever. Two of them were girls who WOULD NOT get out of my bathroom. All they were doing was talking, and I really needed to take a shower before dinner was on the table.
Guests kept coming, and they kept trying to use my bathroom, when there were three other bathrooms in the house. And I'm slinking around all greasy haired, trying to find my clothes and get my shower. Then I find that my sister has taken out all the things I'd gathered and put them back in my room and is showing people to my bathroom to use. I got so mad at her I grabbed her shoulders and started yelling in her face, but I couldn't yell. Then I realized she'd done the meld spell with her best friend, so to get back at them all, I said the counter-spell and they all fell into their individual selves.
While they were sorting that out, I seized my chance, grabbed my stuff, got to the bathroom, locked the door... only the lock wouldn't hold, and people kept trying to get in. My mom told me to let them, that I needed to come help her, anyhow. So I went to go help, figuring I'd do whatever it was as quick as I could. There was an antique bathtub full of hermit crabs and empty shells decorating the living room, and the bigger crabs kept trying to climb out over a pile of shells banked up against the back of the tub, so I spent a few minutes getting all the shells evened out so they couldn't reach. I figured that would buy me enough time to get a quick shower in.
I stomped back to my bathroom, determined to kick everyone out and get my darn shower. Only to find that my mom had seated three of the oldest family members at little tables in there, and was putting their dinner out for them. One of them told me I needed to get out of those pajamas and get ready for dinner, so I poked around for my red, white, and blue shirt with the stars on it, and slunk away to my room to change. My shower was just not to be. Then I woke up.
Guests kept coming, and they kept trying to use my bathroom, when there were three other bathrooms in the house. And I'm slinking around all greasy haired, trying to find my clothes and get my shower. Then I find that my sister has taken out all the things I'd gathered and put them back in my room and is showing people to my bathroom to use. I got so mad at her I grabbed her shoulders and started yelling in her face, but I couldn't yell. Then I realized she'd done the meld spell with her best friend, so to get back at them all, I said the counter-spell and they all fell into their individual selves.
While they were sorting that out, I seized my chance, grabbed my stuff, got to the bathroom, locked the door... only the lock wouldn't hold, and people kept trying to get in. My mom told me to let them, that I needed to come help her, anyhow. So I went to go help, figuring I'd do whatever it was as quick as I could. There was an antique bathtub full of hermit crabs and empty shells decorating the living room, and the bigger crabs kept trying to climb out over a pile of shells banked up against the back of the tub, so I spent a few minutes getting all the shells evened out so they couldn't reach. I figured that would buy me enough time to get a quick shower in.
I stomped back to my bathroom, determined to kick everyone out and get my darn shower. Only to find that my mom had seated three of the oldest family members at little tables in there, and was putting their dinner out for them. One of them told me I needed to get out of those pajamas and get ready for dinner, so I poked around for my red, white, and blue shirt with the stars on it, and slunk away to my room to change. My shower was just not to be. Then I woke up.
Wednesday, October 7, 2015
World's Strangest Theme Park ~ 10/7/2015
I dreamed that Bones was actually a witch. See, the wizarding schools in America had all been closed for decades, and when the UK realized this, Hogwarts set up a school for adult beginners, and Brennen got her letter.
It wasn't that she wasn't brilliant, but the lab she solved crime in, and her multiple degrees, were an unconscious magical projection that even she believed in. As she learned to control her magic, the lab coats and machinery all disappeared, leaving a thin 20-something woman, popping her gum and wearing short shorts and a yellow and orange hoody with teddy bear ears.
So we all went to an amusement park in the heart of London. My best friends and their two boys joined us, and we played a game that was like skee ball with bean bags and slingshots. Certain targets on an old Victorian haunted house were worth different points. The weather vane was worth the most. After every round, a big scraper would clear out the bean bags. The older boy was climbing on the contraption, and before we could scold him off of it, the scraper started. It knocked him down into the bean bag hopper, but a man standing nearby jumped forward and snatched him out before he could be crushed. We were so grateful.
We all took the tickets we'd won and went to do something else. We ended up at a Disney Robin Hood live reenactment, that had gotten mashed up with the Bugs Bunny What's Opera Doc reenactment. And there were also some swans. We watched that for a while, then we went to play this game where you used safety ropes to navigate around the walls of the attic in my grandparents' old house. One person would have to hug the walls and attach the rope to the next tie off point, so everyone could follow, holding onto the rope, and not fall through the holes in the floor.
After that, we went and rested in the trivia room, where you could win tickets by being the first to answer questions correctly. I don't remember the questions, but the first answer was J K Rowling, the second was Maya Angelou, and the third, which I was the first and only person to guess, was Willa Cather.
Then we took our tickets to get prizes, and I wanted to use mine for some tadpoles. There was a big tank, with tadpoles and goldfish, and the tadpoles were colored like bright guppies or betas, showing what color frog they'd grow into. There were red-orange ones, and green ones with a distinctive brown and cream stripe on their sides, but those grew into salamanders. There was a weird, pale yellow sort of water lizard that looked like a skeleton with skin and find. But I really just wanted a blue frog tadpole, and spent hours trying to catch one. The sun went down, and the lights shut off, and I couldn't see the colors any more, and then I woke up.
It wasn't that she wasn't brilliant, but the lab she solved crime in, and her multiple degrees, were an unconscious magical projection that even she believed in. As she learned to control her magic, the lab coats and machinery all disappeared, leaving a thin 20-something woman, popping her gum and wearing short shorts and a yellow and orange hoody with teddy bear ears.
So we all went to an amusement park in the heart of London. My best friends and their two boys joined us, and we played a game that was like skee ball with bean bags and slingshots. Certain targets on an old Victorian haunted house were worth different points. The weather vane was worth the most. After every round, a big scraper would clear out the bean bags. The older boy was climbing on the contraption, and before we could scold him off of it, the scraper started. It knocked him down into the bean bag hopper, but a man standing nearby jumped forward and snatched him out before he could be crushed. We were so grateful.
We all took the tickets we'd won and went to do something else. We ended up at a Disney Robin Hood live reenactment, that had gotten mashed up with the Bugs Bunny What's Opera Doc reenactment. And there were also some swans. We watched that for a while, then we went to play this game where you used safety ropes to navigate around the walls of the attic in my grandparents' old house. One person would have to hug the walls and attach the rope to the next tie off point, so everyone could follow, holding onto the rope, and not fall through the holes in the floor.
After that, we went and rested in the trivia room, where you could win tickets by being the first to answer questions correctly. I don't remember the questions, but the first answer was J K Rowling, the second was Maya Angelou, and the third, which I was the first and only person to guess, was Willa Cather.
Then we took our tickets to get prizes, and I wanted to use mine for some tadpoles. There was a big tank, with tadpoles and goldfish, and the tadpoles were colored like bright guppies or betas, showing what color frog they'd grow into. There were red-orange ones, and green ones with a distinctive brown and cream stripe on their sides, but those grew into salamanders. There was a weird, pale yellow sort of water lizard that looked like a skeleton with skin and find. But I really just wanted a blue frog tadpole, and spent hours trying to catch one. The sun went down, and the lights shut off, and I couldn't see the colors any more, and then I woke up.
Tuesday, October 6, 2015
Happy Birthday, with Beethoven ~ 10/6/2015
I dreamed I threw my twelve year old sister a Beethoven birthday party using a kit I bought online. It included two Beethoven CDs, a big sack of apples, a soldering iron and some prototype computer boards I'd need to fix, along with schematics, and a coupon for a local opera troupe that would perform using the CDs as accompaniment.
All our friends and family came, and everyone had a good time. I rescued two blue and green birds who got trapped in Momo's house, and took them to a mall that wanted to start a bat colony, because the birds became bats at some point. My sister announced that she was going to get her Masters degree at Pitt, which was in Boston. Their mascot was a green teddy bear. Then I woke up.
All our friends and family came, and everyone had a good time. I rescued two blue and green birds who got trapped in Momo's house, and took them to a mall that wanted to start a bat colony, because the birds became bats at some point. My sister announced that she was going to get her Masters degree at Pitt, which was in Boston. Their mascot was a green teddy bear. Then I woke up.
Friday, September 25, 2015
Back to School in the Weirdest Possible Way ~ 9/25/2015
I dreamed I was a gay man in the time of Hemingway. I might have been friends with Hemingway. I had curly blond hair, an amazing tan, and was built like a Greek god. My orientation was an open secret, but I had to deny the rumors or I could be imprisoned. I was trying to solve an embezzlement crime at a bistro/bar/al fresco theater in Key West.
I found out the embezzler was after me to kill me so I wouldn't expose them. I wasn't armed, so I made a run for it, and got into a small plane that was taking off. The plane exploded over the English countryside, and I struggled to slow my fall with the inflatable rubber recliner I was sitting on. I managed to keep the speed of my descent enough that I didn't injure myself on impact. I could tell that I was an impressive spectacle to anyone watching from the ground.
When I hit the ground, the rubber recliner exploded and deflated and turned into a hammerhead shark skin. I was now Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I'd lost all my clothes. I clutched the shark skin around me and walked over to the Rice dorms, where I was staying.
The only problem was, I couldn't remember where my room was. The dorms were all identical, long, red brick buildings. The alleys in between them were named for the streets of the French Quarter, but not in the right order. I knew I was staying in the second or third building from the field, past the little chapel at the foot of Saint Louis Street.
I looked through ground floor windows and saw a room that looked familiar, but when I got inside and opened the door, but there were four college guys already there, and I remembered that I'd once rented that room through Air BnB, but it wasn't where I was staying now. Of course, I was Buffy wearing nothing but a shark skin, so the guys were flatteringly insistent that I stay.
I thanked them, but left all the same. I wandered up the narrow closes that connected the alleys between dorms. I wandered through the buildings, trying to find a familiar passage that might lead to my room. I found out my ex was teaching there, and dodged around corners to avoid meeting him.
Thank goodness, I finally found Giles. He didn't know where my room was, either, but he took me to the suite he was staying in, where I could change out of the shark skin into something more academically appropriate. He led me to a bathroom, and I shut the door behind me. I turned around to find that the bathroom was like a plushly carpeted beehive of steps and landings, up and down, leading to dozens of toilet stalls, sinks, baths, and showers. I wandered down and around into the depths until I finally felt safe, then locked myself into a toilet stall to change. And then I woke up.
I found out the embezzler was after me to kill me so I wouldn't expose them. I wasn't armed, so I made a run for it, and got into a small plane that was taking off. The plane exploded over the English countryside, and I struggled to slow my fall with the inflatable rubber recliner I was sitting on. I managed to keep the speed of my descent enough that I didn't injure myself on impact. I could tell that I was an impressive spectacle to anyone watching from the ground.
When I hit the ground, the rubber recliner exploded and deflated and turned into a hammerhead shark skin. I was now Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I'd lost all my clothes. I clutched the shark skin around me and walked over to the Rice dorms, where I was staying.
The only problem was, I couldn't remember where my room was. The dorms were all identical, long, red brick buildings. The alleys in between them were named for the streets of the French Quarter, but not in the right order. I knew I was staying in the second or third building from the field, past the little chapel at the foot of Saint Louis Street.
I looked through ground floor windows and saw a room that looked familiar, but when I got inside and opened the door, but there were four college guys already there, and I remembered that I'd once rented that room through Air BnB, but it wasn't where I was staying now. Of course, I was Buffy wearing nothing but a shark skin, so the guys were flatteringly insistent that I stay.
I thanked them, but left all the same. I wandered up the narrow closes that connected the alleys between dorms. I wandered through the buildings, trying to find a familiar passage that might lead to my room. I found out my ex was teaching there, and dodged around corners to avoid meeting him.
Thank goodness, I finally found Giles. He didn't know where my room was, either, but he took me to the suite he was staying in, where I could change out of the shark skin into something more academically appropriate. He led me to a bathroom, and I shut the door behind me. I turned around to find that the bathroom was like a plushly carpeted beehive of steps and landings, up and down, leading to dozens of toilet stalls, sinks, baths, and showers. I wandered down and around into the depths until I finally felt safe, then locked myself into a toilet stall to change. And then I woke up.
Tuesday, September 22, 2015
Weekend Vignettes ~ 9/21/2015
Thursday Night:
I dreamed that I lived with Brennan and Booth from Bones, in a cave, in prehistoric times. There was a hot spring in the cave that shone a luminous blue-green in the torch light. Brennan kept track of the temperature, using her finger and a digital read-out thermometer. It kept fluctuating by about ten degrees, and Brennan was obsessed with figuring out what was causing the temperature change. Booth and I really couldn't care less, but it was interesting to watch her experiment and deduce.
Friday Night:
I dreamed I was in a theater, watching sneak previews of a reality show that was coming out. In the show, my sister's boyfriend was pretending to court Luna Lovegood behind our backs. But I knew it wasn't true, so I wasn't worried, and in fact, helped them keep up the facade a bit, because I knew my sister would benefit from the prize money. Then Zachary Quinto and Leonard Nimoy came into the theater. I was the first to recognize them, and I jumped up to give Nimoy a standing ovation. Everyone else got up to applaud, too, and the Spocks just laughed and laughed.
Saturday Night:
I dreamed I was visiting St. Louis Cathedral with my family and Tanya. It was poised on a cliff high above the river. They were giving a lecture inside about a serial killer who once tried to seek sanctuary there. As people wandered back out, I realized the pews and floorboards were all made of ancient driftwood, starting to rot. I looked out a broken stained glass window to see the west bank of the Mississippi, far below, golden in the afternoon sun. I turned back. Light filled the cathedral, but as a strong wind blew, the floor creaked and swayed, and the pendant lamps swung back and forth a little. So I hurried back out into the square, and then I woke up.
I dreamed that I lived with Brennan and Booth from Bones, in a cave, in prehistoric times. There was a hot spring in the cave that shone a luminous blue-green in the torch light. Brennan kept track of the temperature, using her finger and a digital read-out thermometer. It kept fluctuating by about ten degrees, and Brennan was obsessed with figuring out what was causing the temperature change. Booth and I really couldn't care less, but it was interesting to watch her experiment and deduce.
Friday Night:
I dreamed I was in a theater, watching sneak previews of a reality show that was coming out. In the show, my sister's boyfriend was pretending to court Luna Lovegood behind our backs. But I knew it wasn't true, so I wasn't worried, and in fact, helped them keep up the facade a bit, because I knew my sister would benefit from the prize money. Then Zachary Quinto and Leonard Nimoy came into the theater. I was the first to recognize them, and I jumped up to give Nimoy a standing ovation. Everyone else got up to applaud, too, and the Spocks just laughed and laughed.
Saturday Night:
I dreamed I was visiting St. Louis Cathedral with my family and Tanya. It was poised on a cliff high above the river. They were giving a lecture inside about a serial killer who once tried to seek sanctuary there. As people wandered back out, I realized the pews and floorboards were all made of ancient driftwood, starting to rot. I looked out a broken stained glass window to see the west bank of the Mississippi, far below, golden in the afternoon sun. I turned back. Light filled the cathedral, but as a strong wind blew, the floor creaked and swayed, and the pendant lamps swung back and forth a little. So I hurried back out into the square, and then I woke up.
Tuesday, September 15, 2015
The Vampire Armies of Persia ~ 9/15/2015
I dreamed I was visiting the Pacific Northwest. It was gorgeous, of course. I sat and watched a river flow into the sea under a full moon. It looked like silver, diamond, and pearl turned liquid, and sounded like the singing of souls, or that's how I described it to an old school friend I ran into.
Then the state started sending out notices for us to evacuate, because the vampire armies of Persia were coming. These were vast hordes of shambling, hungry men, women, and children, disfigured by the Persian government. At a young age, their lower jaws were surgically removed, and they were trained to drink blood as their only form of sustenance.
That was a pretty horrifying thought, but my vacation got even darker when I found myself touring a ward where children waited to be operated on. They were sobbing and screaming, and I knew I just needed to keep my head down and get out of there. But it was just too awful, listening to them pleading for their parents and begging not to be turned into monsters. I finally couldn't help breaking into a fit of horrified and angry screams, myself. And then I woke up.
Then the state started sending out notices for us to evacuate, because the vampire armies of Persia were coming. These were vast hordes of shambling, hungry men, women, and children, disfigured by the Persian government. At a young age, their lower jaws were surgically removed, and they were trained to drink blood as their only form of sustenance.
That was a pretty horrifying thought, but my vacation got even darker when I found myself touring a ward where children waited to be operated on. They were sobbing and screaming, and I knew I just needed to keep my head down and get out of there. But it was just too awful, listening to them pleading for their parents and begging not to be turned into monsters. I finally couldn't help breaking into a fit of horrified and angry screams, myself. And then I woke up.
Friday, September 11, 2015
Burn. It. Down. ~ 9/11/2015
I dreamed I was visiting home. Home was in the woods, at the crest of a ridge. I drove around all day, enjoying the scenery. I came back in the evening to find that people I'd met throughout the day were staying in the bed and breakfast that my home had become. One guy had an enormous Great Dane. He took it outside, then came back in to brag about how its BM was a yard long.
I was trying to fix fried rice for dinner, but with all the distractions, I accidentally added uncooked rice to the mixture I had stir fried. I gave up and went to bed early. As I was getting comfy, I noticed a dozen or so black dots scurrying along the ceiling. I realized they were spiders, with bodies about the size of pencil erasers. Since they were headed to a corner, far from my bed, I decided I could just ignore them. But I pulled the sheets over my head, just in case.
Then I peeked out and saw that they had joined a few dozen more friends, over in the corner. I couldn't tell how many, because the corner was dark. I couldn't tell if it was dark because the room was dark, or if there were a LOT of spiders there. I don't really mind spiders so much, taken one at a time, but this was a bit ridiculous. A contingent broke away from the corner and started skittering across the ceiling toward my bed. some of these were as big as quarters. I pulled the covers back over me and tucked the sheets beneath me and tried to figure out what to do.
I decided that I should get up and get dressed and go get someone to help me deal with the spider infestation. But then I felt a few little plops down onto the covers above me, and I froze and had to work up the nerve to throw the covers off and run for it. When I managed to do that, I saw that the room was full of spiders of various sizes, and I took off running.
The rest of the house had a few spiders and cobwebs here and there, but nothing like my room. I began asking the guests for advice. Sonic the hedgehog said he had an idea, and we should watch this. He called to his elephant and lion sidekicks, and they jumped into their sports car. They drove to the lair of the local superheroes, and showed me how the light from the car's headlamps turned the superheroes purple. I told them that I didn't have any more interest in purple spiders than black ones, and headed back home.
When I got back, things were in chaos. There were tiny spiders, and pencil eraser sized spiders and quarter sized spiders everywhere. Some golf ball sized ones were running around, and in a few extra special corners, tarantulas were weaving webs. The worst, though, was the enormous, heavy, softball sized spider, with glistening black armor and clawed legs. It hung from a web that was a flawless circle of glistening silk, and looked much too delicate to support the gargantuan spider that had made it. The web was woven in a corner of the door frame between the kitchen and the living room.
As if that wasn't bad enough, I poked my head into my room to check out the situation in there, and now, not only were the spiders skittering over every surface, SCORPIONS had begun to plop down from the ceiling onto my bed and my desk, and down to run across the floor. There were six scorpions just on one corner of my bed. I decided enough was enough, and I went to the garage and found the shop vac.
Thank God it still worked. I attached a long tube to the hoze nozzle, and began sucking up spiders and scorpions and thick cobwebs in every room. Every so often, the cobwebs would come loose and some stray spiders along the edges would come flying down around me, but I managed to not get any on me for long. I sucked them out of the corners of the ceiling and the floors. I chased them across rooms and vacuumed them up. I managed to get an arachnid-free pair of shoes on, and that was better. I had to detach the tube to deal with the biggest, huge, armored spider, because it wouldn't fit, but the hoze was wide enough, so, though I had to get way too close, I managed to suck up the biggest threat.
There were still a lot of smaller spiders left, but the shop vac was full, so I had to do something to empty it. We all stood around, looking, wondering if the spiders and scorpions had been crushed to death inside, or if they would come leaping out at us, agitated and vengeful. I finally decided the best course of action was to douse the old shop vac in gasoline, burn the whole thing down, and go buy another shop vac. Then I woke up.
I was trying to fix fried rice for dinner, but with all the distractions, I accidentally added uncooked rice to the mixture I had stir fried. I gave up and went to bed early. As I was getting comfy, I noticed a dozen or so black dots scurrying along the ceiling. I realized they were spiders, with bodies about the size of pencil erasers. Since they were headed to a corner, far from my bed, I decided I could just ignore them. But I pulled the sheets over my head, just in case.
Then I peeked out and saw that they had joined a few dozen more friends, over in the corner. I couldn't tell how many, because the corner was dark. I couldn't tell if it was dark because the room was dark, or if there were a LOT of spiders there. I don't really mind spiders so much, taken one at a time, but this was a bit ridiculous. A contingent broke away from the corner and started skittering across the ceiling toward my bed. some of these were as big as quarters. I pulled the covers back over me and tucked the sheets beneath me and tried to figure out what to do.
I decided that I should get up and get dressed and go get someone to help me deal with the spider infestation. But then I felt a few little plops down onto the covers above me, and I froze and had to work up the nerve to throw the covers off and run for it. When I managed to do that, I saw that the room was full of spiders of various sizes, and I took off running.
The rest of the house had a few spiders and cobwebs here and there, but nothing like my room. I began asking the guests for advice. Sonic the hedgehog said he had an idea, and we should watch this. He called to his elephant and lion sidekicks, and they jumped into their sports car. They drove to the lair of the local superheroes, and showed me how the light from the car's headlamps turned the superheroes purple. I told them that I didn't have any more interest in purple spiders than black ones, and headed back home.
When I got back, things were in chaos. There were tiny spiders, and pencil eraser sized spiders and quarter sized spiders everywhere. Some golf ball sized ones were running around, and in a few extra special corners, tarantulas were weaving webs. The worst, though, was the enormous, heavy, softball sized spider, with glistening black armor and clawed legs. It hung from a web that was a flawless circle of glistening silk, and looked much too delicate to support the gargantuan spider that had made it. The web was woven in a corner of the door frame between the kitchen and the living room.
As if that wasn't bad enough, I poked my head into my room to check out the situation in there, and now, not only were the spiders skittering over every surface, SCORPIONS had begun to plop down from the ceiling onto my bed and my desk, and down to run across the floor. There were six scorpions just on one corner of my bed. I decided enough was enough, and I went to the garage and found the shop vac.
Thank God it still worked. I attached a long tube to the hoze nozzle, and began sucking up spiders and scorpions and thick cobwebs in every room. Every so often, the cobwebs would come loose and some stray spiders along the edges would come flying down around me, but I managed to not get any on me for long. I sucked them out of the corners of the ceiling and the floors. I chased them across rooms and vacuumed them up. I managed to get an arachnid-free pair of shoes on, and that was better. I had to detach the tube to deal with the biggest, huge, armored spider, because it wouldn't fit, but the hoze was wide enough, so, though I had to get way too close, I managed to suck up the biggest threat.
There were still a lot of smaller spiders left, but the shop vac was full, so I had to do something to empty it. We all stood around, looking, wondering if the spiders and scorpions had been crushed to death inside, or if they would come leaping out at us, agitated and vengeful. I finally decided the best course of action was to douse the old shop vac in gasoline, burn the whole thing down, and go buy another shop vac. Then I woke up.
Saturday, August 29, 2015
Saving the World with Advice from a Fortune Cookie ~ 8/29/2015
I dreamed the world was in danger and I was all alone. I wished the hero from my favorite childrens' book could come and help me, but I knew Alastar Adams wasn't real. Still, I had an old DVD of the movie based on his books, and in the movie there was a phone number I could call...
In a last ditch act of desperation, I called the number, and Alastar answered! He agreed to come help, and, with hope renewed, I gathered a few friends. Alastar came, and I explained the situation, but he kept being distracted by my really pretty friend. Eventually, though, we all knew the plan. Alastar discovered how to activate the hidden elevator in the highest, narrowest tower of Hogwarts, where we would find the evil we needed to battle.
He wanted my friend to stay behind, because he'd fallen in love with her and wanted to protect her, but she insisted on coming. We all waited in the elevator lobby, waiting for the right car to come, but nothing we could do seemed to be working to summon it. Then I turned around, and tucked away back in a corner behind us, a small door had opened to take us up to the secret tower.
Gandalf still hadn't shown up, but we couldn't wait for him. We got in the elevator and headed up to the dark mystery that awaited us. We stepped out of the elevator into a circular room, cluttered with toys and stage scenery and props, but no sign of the evil wizard we had to defeat. Suddenly, a toasty golden fortune cookie appeared, floating before me, bearing Gandalf's mark.
I took the cookie and broke it open, and there was a fortune for each of us, giving us advice on how we could defeat the evil wizard. I passed the fortunes around, and just then, our enemy appeared. We began to throw curses and props at him, as we hid behind the scenery, and we finally had him backed into a corner, but couldn't figure out what to do to finish him off. My friend looked at her fortune, which just had pictures of balls and a monkey head on it. She stooped down to pick up some of the toys at our feet, and Alastar realized that the wizard had been guarding a prison lock, so my friend threw the balls at the control panel and managed to get the door open.
Out came Gandalf, who had been trapped there, and he sent us away so he could duel the evil one with us safely out of the way. Since it was the evening of the college spring formal, and we all needed to get ready, we walked out onto Canal Street, and headed to our dorms up Royal and Chartres. My friend and Alastar were, of course, going together. There was another guy who had helped us out a lot, so I felt like I should be nice to him, but he was really a foul-mouthed jerk, so I was really glad that, in spite of how much he'd been hitting on my, he already had a date.
There was a good friend I'd have really liked to go with, because I had a secret crush on him, but he had a girlfriend. In fact, just the other day, he'd shown me a pair of earrings he'd bought because he said they'd go great with her dress. I'd told him they were beautiful, which was true, but I had to swallow back all my sadness, because I had a dress they'd go great with. When I got back to my dorm room, though, I found the earrings wrapped in a little package on my desk.
It turned out that the jerk guy was now going out with his former girlfriend, and had been for a while. The earrings were for me, to go with my dress, and there was a necklace, too. So I got ready and went out to find him. The door monitor in the dorm lobby gave me a note that said, "Cheese and Broth." So I figured we were meeting at The Melting Pot, on Canal and Bourbon, which I'd walked past on my way back to my dorm room. I hadn't seen him, but I went to look anyway.
It turned out he wasn't able to get a reservation there, but he was waiting next door, so I sat down to have dinner, and then I woke up.
In a last ditch act of desperation, I called the number, and Alastar answered! He agreed to come help, and, with hope renewed, I gathered a few friends. Alastar came, and I explained the situation, but he kept being distracted by my really pretty friend. Eventually, though, we all knew the plan. Alastar discovered how to activate the hidden elevator in the highest, narrowest tower of Hogwarts, where we would find the evil we needed to battle.
He wanted my friend to stay behind, because he'd fallen in love with her and wanted to protect her, but she insisted on coming. We all waited in the elevator lobby, waiting for the right car to come, but nothing we could do seemed to be working to summon it. Then I turned around, and tucked away back in a corner behind us, a small door had opened to take us up to the secret tower.
Gandalf still hadn't shown up, but we couldn't wait for him. We got in the elevator and headed up to the dark mystery that awaited us. We stepped out of the elevator into a circular room, cluttered with toys and stage scenery and props, but no sign of the evil wizard we had to defeat. Suddenly, a toasty golden fortune cookie appeared, floating before me, bearing Gandalf's mark.
I took the cookie and broke it open, and there was a fortune for each of us, giving us advice on how we could defeat the evil wizard. I passed the fortunes around, and just then, our enemy appeared. We began to throw curses and props at him, as we hid behind the scenery, and we finally had him backed into a corner, but couldn't figure out what to do to finish him off. My friend looked at her fortune, which just had pictures of balls and a monkey head on it. She stooped down to pick up some of the toys at our feet, and Alastar realized that the wizard had been guarding a prison lock, so my friend threw the balls at the control panel and managed to get the door open.
Out came Gandalf, who had been trapped there, and he sent us away so he could duel the evil one with us safely out of the way. Since it was the evening of the college spring formal, and we all needed to get ready, we walked out onto Canal Street, and headed to our dorms up Royal and Chartres. My friend and Alastar were, of course, going together. There was another guy who had helped us out a lot, so I felt like I should be nice to him, but he was really a foul-mouthed jerk, so I was really glad that, in spite of how much he'd been hitting on my, he already had a date.
There was a good friend I'd have really liked to go with, because I had a secret crush on him, but he had a girlfriend. In fact, just the other day, he'd shown me a pair of earrings he'd bought because he said they'd go great with her dress. I'd told him they were beautiful, which was true, but I had to swallow back all my sadness, because I had a dress they'd go great with. When I got back to my dorm room, though, I found the earrings wrapped in a little package on my desk.
It turned out that the jerk guy was now going out with his former girlfriend, and had been for a while. The earrings were for me, to go with my dress, and there was a necklace, too. So I got ready and went out to find him. The door monitor in the dorm lobby gave me a note that said, "Cheese and Broth." So I figured we were meeting at The Melting Pot, on Canal and Bourbon, which I'd walked past on my way back to my dorm room. I hadn't seen him, but I went to look anyway.
It turned out he wasn't able to get a reservation there, but he was waiting next door, so I sat down to have dinner, and then I woke up.
Friday, August 21, 2015
Career Path Inspiration ~ 8/20/2015
I dreamed I was staying at the Hotel Monteleone. It had a shopping arcade on the ground floor. Two people in the last week had bought lottery tickets there, and won the jackpots, so I thought about buying a ticket on my way to work.
I worked as a script writer for an Asguard vs Olympus reality show. The gods really came down and did battle, though sometimes battle was answering trivia questions or playing chess. The ratings fell, though, after we selected a new show host through a fan contest. She wasn't very popular, and the show was going to be cancelled soon.
I was chatting with her boyfriend and found out his name was John Strait Garrison. His parents gave him his middle name in honor of George Strait. We got to talking about country music, and I decided to go home.
I got back to the country just in time to help my brother pick out a new horse. There were a bunch of wild horses nearby, and he caught a black and white colt to break and train. We were riding the bus home, and a white-bearded old man who was the local community leader offered to do a blessing ceremony. He asked me to sing the top line, so as everyone else chanted in a drone, I sang four descending notes over and over. The old man lit the incense and sang the words while the colt chewed on a bulb of garlic that was hung like a pendant around my neck.
When we got home, men in suits were there and told us we had to release the colt. I took her out on the front porch and she turned into a grasshopper. But somehow we always knew which grasshopper was her, and she stayed in our yard for always. Then I woke up.
I worked as a script writer for an Asguard vs Olympus reality show. The gods really came down and did battle, though sometimes battle was answering trivia questions or playing chess. The ratings fell, though, after we selected a new show host through a fan contest. She wasn't very popular, and the show was going to be cancelled soon.
I was chatting with her boyfriend and found out his name was John Strait Garrison. His parents gave him his middle name in honor of George Strait. We got to talking about country music, and I decided to go home.
I got back to the country just in time to help my brother pick out a new horse. There were a bunch of wild horses nearby, and he caught a black and white colt to break and train. We were riding the bus home, and a white-bearded old man who was the local community leader offered to do a blessing ceremony. He asked me to sing the top line, so as everyone else chanted in a drone, I sang four descending notes over and over. The old man lit the incense and sang the words while the colt chewed on a bulb of garlic that was hung like a pendant around my neck.
When we got home, men in suits were there and told us we had to release the colt. I took her out on the front porch and she turned into a grasshopper. But somehow we always knew which grasshopper was her, and she stayed in our yard for always. Then I woke up.
Thursday, August 20, 2015
TBTT#13 Next on CSI ~ 7/6/2012
I had an incredibly vivid and detailed CSI dream last night. Greg Sanders had been kidnapped, lured by a pretty blond co-ed, and forced to begin helping a bad guy dig up some sort of buried treasure. I was Catherine Willows, and I was sent in to get Greg out. The bad guy was threatening to blow up about a city block if we didn't help him, and his device consisted of explosives rigged to an electrical circuit where the charge was being generated by an electric eel and some sort of electric fish that had rainbow spots, that were both writhing about angrily in plastic grocery bags. To close the circuit and detonate the bomb, the bad guy had only to tap two metal prongs with a huge metal ring he was wearing. While we were digging for the treasure, which seemed to be buried under refuse that contained, among other debris, the carcasses of many brightly colored octopi, Greg and I hatched this plan to disarm the bomb. The linchpin of our plan was to somehow switch the metal wring with a plastic one. Somehow it worked, and when the bomb didn't detonate, the rest of the team came in and we saved the day. Then I went to the mall.
Tuesday, August 18, 2015
Bad Neighbors ~ 8/18/2015
I dreamed that my ex married one of my least favorite people, and they moved in next door. We both lived in lots adjoining my parents', and I found out that Mom and Dad were giving us both money to support our kids, which was nice of them, since only my son was related to them. Then I found out that least-favorite was angling to get some of my share of that money, since, she said, they often took care of my son, but I never took care of theirs. This began to extend to every aspect of our lives, including food on my plate when we all ate dinner with my parents.
Nobody seemed to see anything wrong with this, but me. I went to bed crying most nights, and there was this tissue box that would make loud static noises unless I had it pressed right against my side. Then I woke up.
Nobody seemed to see anything wrong with this, but me. I went to bed crying most nights, and there was this tissue box that would make loud static noises unless I had it pressed right against my side. Then I woke up.
Wednesday, August 12, 2015
Working in the Quarter ~ 8/12/2015
I dreamed I was a fifteen year old Japanese boy working in the French Quarter as a transvestite prostitute. I managed to piss off the leader of a biker gang, who was like the union leader of all the buskers who worked in the Quarter. He put a price on my head. I climbed into a truck full of green recycling bins. I curled up in a ball and pulled a bin over me to hide, but a group of Swedish school children came out of the Gumbo Shop, and they could see my feet. I was wearing bright green socks. They kept pointing and trying to lift the bin I was hiding under. Then I woke up. I found I was sleeping curled up in a tight little ball with all my muscles tensed, and now I'm sore.
Tuesday, August 11, 2015
Back to School in the Worst Way ~ 8/11/2015
I dreamed I was back in middle school. The only redeeming part was that, unlike actual middle school, the kids were all friendly, and didn't pick on me for being a nerd. My teacher didn't like me. In fact, she hated me. She interpreted something I had said weeks ago as a personal insult, and was determined to punish me now.
We had to do some sort of project based on some domino dice we drew out of a box. They were called dice, but they were each half a domino, but they went up to 43. Some of them had letters. Some of them had country names.
I had to do a research project, based on my dice, about Arkansas and Estonia. We all had 20 minutes to look up a smattering of facts. I had already had to do Arkansas before, so I just called that stuff up from memory. I thought I knew where Estonia was, at least, but I didn't feel very confident about my knowledge, so I went back to the reference section.
All the E encyclopedias were gone. There were some thick reference books marked "E", but all they contained was the spines of a bunch of English journals, as an index volume. There was another book ingeniously constructed so that, if you flipped the pages side to side, was a dictionary, and if you flipped them up and down, it was a thesaurus. Estonia was not listed. By now I was pretty sure the teacher had hidden them all.
I lifted up the top of my desk to look inside, and found a bunch of sharpened pencils, some crayons, and other assorted scholarly detritus, but nothing to help me out with Estonia. I did, however, tuck the pencils in my pocket, because I was pretty sure by then that the teacher was a vampire, and she was going to hold me after class until the sun went down so she could attack me.
Eventually I woke up.
We had to do some sort of project based on some domino dice we drew out of a box. They were called dice, but they were each half a domino, but they went up to 43. Some of them had letters. Some of them had country names.
I had to do a research project, based on my dice, about Arkansas and Estonia. We all had 20 minutes to look up a smattering of facts. I had already had to do Arkansas before, so I just called that stuff up from memory. I thought I knew where Estonia was, at least, but I didn't feel very confident about my knowledge, so I went back to the reference section.
All the E encyclopedias were gone. There were some thick reference books marked "E", but all they contained was the spines of a bunch of English journals, as an index volume. There was another book ingeniously constructed so that, if you flipped the pages side to side, was a dictionary, and if you flipped them up and down, it was a thesaurus. Estonia was not listed. By now I was pretty sure the teacher had hidden them all.
I lifted up the top of my desk to look inside, and found a bunch of sharpened pencils, some crayons, and other assorted scholarly detritus, but nothing to help me out with Estonia. I did, however, tuck the pencils in my pocket, because I was pretty sure by then that the teacher was a vampire, and she was going to hold me after class until the sun went down so she could attack me.
Eventually I woke up.
Saturday, August 8, 2015
Short but Surreal ~ 8/8/2015
I dreamed I was Miss Elizabeth Bennett, and that I was newly married to Abraham Lincoln. We were sitting to have our wedding portrait sketched. I don't remember much else, but that seems crazy enough.
Friday, August 7, 2015
Helping a Goddess in Distress ~ 8/7/2015
I dreamed I was eating dinner with Tanya before Friday game night. But she just wanted a salad from a vegan place, and I definitely needed meat, so we split up. While I was in the cowboy-themed restaurant next door, my laptop somehow got connected to their network, and text boxes from one of the document suite maps I was working on got pasted all over their computerized menu boards.
So I missed game night, because I had to clean up that mess. The boards were really sophisticated, though. They were like touch screens, only you didn't have to touch them. You gesture toward them from a particular spot in the restaurant, and manipulate them that way. So I spent hours swiping right and left to find all the content I'd accidentally added, pointing to select, then swiping up to delete, as the last lingering patrons asked me all about my job.
Just as I was finishing up, a beautiful Indian woman stumbled in, very distressed, along with a little boy and a teenaged girl so blond and pale she was almost albino. I asked what I could do to help. She took me aside and revealed that she was a goddess, and these were two of her three children. She had lost her younger daughter, who was her oldest child by her divine spouse. The girl with her was half human, and the boy was her second child by the god. She had a way to retrieve her lost daughter, but she needed help.
You see, she could call her divine child to her if she reentered her true goddess form, but in this state she was monstrous, a giant worm, streaked with blue and green and gold, with a dragon head and horns. She would be a danger in that form to anyone more frail than she. This was not a problem for the daughter she would call; as her firstborn child by the god, she too had the power to change, and, in fact, would be changed by her mother's call, and would return to their human state when her mother did.
But her half human daughter and her second born son would be in danger, as would any other mortals nearby. So she needed a private place to change and someone to look after her children. I agreed to help, and we all piled into my smart car. We got stopped in a sketchy neighborhood by a crowd of people blocking the road. They'd gotten up an impromptu dog fight. Then I revealed my own super power, and transformed into an enormous, spectral black dog with a bark like a lion's roar, and I chased them all away.
We continued on to the motel where the goddess had a room she planned to change in. I took the other children next door to wait. But after an hour of meditation, attempting to sink into her true state through chanting the holy words with pure intent, she was unable to change because her door didn't lock properly, and people kept walking by, which worried and distracted her.
I mentioned that my family had farmland only an hour away, and the abandoned homestead was empty. The children and I could stay there and lock ourselves in, and she could find a secluded clearing away from everyone for her change. She agreed and we drove out there.
We had just gotten settled in the derilect old house, and the goddess had left us, when the little boy fell while exploring the attic stairs and broke his leg. The good news was, when his mother returned to human form, all would be healed, but we knew that would take hours, and if the boy gave in to the screams of pain that welled up in his throat, he might call the monster down on us all.
So for hours I held him and he crushed my hand in his agonized grip while he bit back cries of pain. Tears ran down his face, and his half sister ran back and forth to the sink, bringing cold wet cloths to drape over the break and wash his face. It was all we could do. Suddenly I heard a truck driving by. It was one of my uncles, I saw from a window. I was so worried he'd stop and find us, and somehow cause a scene that would bring the monster back.
He ended up just driving on, which was good, but I kept hearing more and more trucks as the sky lightened and the farmers got to work. I began to worry that the remote place I'd offered wasn't remote enough. Had anyone found and disturbed the goddess? But just then the little boy stood up on a leg healed good as new, and we all ran out to the carport.
Dozens of people were gathered along the dirt road to watch as a beautiful, dark-skinned woman and girl walked toward the house where we waited. And then I woke up.
So I missed game night, because I had to clean up that mess. The boards were really sophisticated, though. They were like touch screens, only you didn't have to touch them. You gesture toward them from a particular spot in the restaurant, and manipulate them that way. So I spent hours swiping right and left to find all the content I'd accidentally added, pointing to select, then swiping up to delete, as the last lingering patrons asked me all about my job.
Just as I was finishing up, a beautiful Indian woman stumbled in, very distressed, along with a little boy and a teenaged girl so blond and pale she was almost albino. I asked what I could do to help. She took me aside and revealed that she was a goddess, and these were two of her three children. She had lost her younger daughter, who was her oldest child by her divine spouse. The girl with her was half human, and the boy was her second child by the god. She had a way to retrieve her lost daughter, but she needed help.
You see, she could call her divine child to her if she reentered her true goddess form, but in this state she was monstrous, a giant worm, streaked with blue and green and gold, with a dragon head and horns. She would be a danger in that form to anyone more frail than she. This was not a problem for the daughter she would call; as her firstborn child by the god, she too had the power to change, and, in fact, would be changed by her mother's call, and would return to their human state when her mother did.
But her half human daughter and her second born son would be in danger, as would any other mortals nearby. So she needed a private place to change and someone to look after her children. I agreed to help, and we all piled into my smart car. We got stopped in a sketchy neighborhood by a crowd of people blocking the road. They'd gotten up an impromptu dog fight. Then I revealed my own super power, and transformed into an enormous, spectral black dog with a bark like a lion's roar, and I chased them all away.
We continued on to the motel where the goddess had a room she planned to change in. I took the other children next door to wait. But after an hour of meditation, attempting to sink into her true state through chanting the holy words with pure intent, she was unable to change because her door didn't lock properly, and people kept walking by, which worried and distracted her.
I mentioned that my family had farmland only an hour away, and the abandoned homestead was empty. The children and I could stay there and lock ourselves in, and she could find a secluded clearing away from everyone for her change. She agreed and we drove out there.
We had just gotten settled in the derilect old house, and the goddess had left us, when the little boy fell while exploring the attic stairs and broke his leg. The good news was, when his mother returned to human form, all would be healed, but we knew that would take hours, and if the boy gave in to the screams of pain that welled up in his throat, he might call the monster down on us all.
So for hours I held him and he crushed my hand in his agonized grip while he bit back cries of pain. Tears ran down his face, and his half sister ran back and forth to the sink, bringing cold wet cloths to drape over the break and wash his face. It was all we could do. Suddenly I heard a truck driving by. It was one of my uncles, I saw from a window. I was so worried he'd stop and find us, and somehow cause a scene that would bring the monster back.
He ended up just driving on, which was good, but I kept hearing more and more trucks as the sky lightened and the farmers got to work. I began to worry that the remote place I'd offered wasn't remote enough. Had anyone found and disturbed the goddess? But just then the little boy stood up on a leg healed good as new, and we all ran out to the carport.
Dozens of people were gathered along the dirt road to watch as a beautiful, dark-skinned woman and girl walked toward the house where we waited. And then I woke up.
Thursday, August 6, 2015
Sea Lions in Bryan Bayous ~ 8/6/2015
I dreamed I was visiting my godparents at their house in Bryan with all my family (Daddy and Pat were still alive). The home next door to theirs was gone, and they had bought the land. They had workers there putting in a baseball field, but they had the outfield beside the house, instead of the diamond, and I was worried that they'd end up with a lot of broken windows.
It was raining, and Mom and I went for a drive, but we were a bit confused, because the T intersection right past their home had been turned into a roundabout, and there were a bunch of signs saying STOP in 300 ft or 200 ft or 100 ft, so it looked like there were stop signs every hundred feet, but their weren't really.
The concrete-lined drainage creeks were completely full from the recent rains, and the water was so clear you could see all the way to the bottom, a hundred yards down, and watch the sea lions gathering. There was a huge colony of sea lions. The babies stayed near the banks, and looked like puppies with longer bodies and flippers. I met a young man who's job was to observe the herd and care for any abandoned young. I sat and talked with him for a while, and he introduced me to two of the pups, who were super adorable and cuddly.
I was sitting on the edge of one of the bridges watching the sea lions when my mom came to tell me some bridges were washing out nearby, and I should be careful. So I set off walking on the more solid roads, and ran into a friend. We decided that, since he had a blond beard and long hair, he should spike up his hair and paint it green next Halloween, and go as a pineapple head. He tried to show me a swing dance move while we were walking, but we couldn't get into step right to make it work.
Throughout all of this, I kept having trouble with my sinuses, and the left half of my head kept filling up with gunk that I would periodically stop and blow out, using dozens of tissues. Eventually, I woke up.
It was raining, and Mom and I went for a drive, but we were a bit confused, because the T intersection right past their home had been turned into a roundabout, and there were a bunch of signs saying STOP in 300 ft or 200 ft or 100 ft, so it looked like there were stop signs every hundred feet, but their weren't really.
The concrete-lined drainage creeks were completely full from the recent rains, and the water was so clear you could see all the way to the bottom, a hundred yards down, and watch the sea lions gathering. There was a huge colony of sea lions. The babies stayed near the banks, and looked like puppies with longer bodies and flippers. I met a young man who's job was to observe the herd and care for any abandoned young. I sat and talked with him for a while, and he introduced me to two of the pups, who were super adorable and cuddly.
I was sitting on the edge of one of the bridges watching the sea lions when my mom came to tell me some bridges were washing out nearby, and I should be careful. So I set off walking on the more solid roads, and ran into a friend. We decided that, since he had a blond beard and long hair, he should spike up his hair and paint it green next Halloween, and go as a pineapple head. He tried to show me a swing dance move while we were walking, but we couldn't get into step right to make it work.
Throughout all of this, I kept having trouble with my sinuses, and the left half of my head kept filling up with gunk that I would periodically stop and blow out, using dozens of tissues. Eventually, I woke up.
Tuesday, August 4, 2015
Dark Prognostication ~ 8/4/2015
I dreamed I gave up everything to become a writer. I quit my job, I move away from home, and spent a year working on my second novel and trying to sell my first. No one bought either, and I finally moved back in with my mother. Only my mother had moved into an addition on my high school boyfriend's family home. So that was SUPER weird. I avoided being at home as much as possible, and started hanging out in the high school band hall.
In my dream it was my high school band, instead of my college band, that scattered to formation and welcomed alumni. But there were no older students in the trumpet section. Only freshmen and old farts. So one girl said it was too stressful, because you had to stand really rigidly still and at attention, and I couldn't figure out what she was talking about at all.
I tried to play in one rehearsal, and I did all right from memory on the standards, but I couldn't read the music, so I bombed on everything that was new since my time. After rehearsal I tried to go look at the rest of the school and see if any of my old teachers were around, but security wouldn't let me in. Then I realized how weird and pathetic I was, wandering around my old high school with nothing to show for my life. Then I woke up.
Thursday, July 16, 2015
TBTT#12 In Soviet Russian, Bad Dreams Have You ~ 6/27/2012
File another one under "my subconscious hates me": I dreamed I was traveling through Russia just after the dissolution of the communist block. I was staying with a family of American expats, father, mother, little boy of ten, little girl of four. The first night, when I went to bed, something in the mattress screeched, and not in a box spring sort of way. I poked around and flushed out a rat the size of a capybara. Or maybe it was a capybara. Anyhow, I caught it in a pillowcase and took it outside and released it in a field. When I came back in, all hell had broken loose. The mother was screaming curses in the kitchen, and whatever her husband was muttering to her was NOT calming her down. The little boy was sitting on the couch staring at the TV through tears, and when he saw me, he turned red and looked away. The little girl was crying, too. Just weeping silently, tears squeezing out of an eye swelling shut and running over a swollen, bleeding lip. Up until now, she'd wanted nothing to do with me, wouldn't talk or look me in the eye, but now when she saw me, she put her arms out and I picked her up and held her. I told her what a big, pretty girl she was, and how she'd be a strong woman some day. She put her little arms around my neck, and her damp little cheek against mine an whispered, "Can you make it better?" I held her and rocked her and told her I didn't know if I could, but I promised I would try my best. And then I woke up.
Monday, June 29, 2015
My Short Stint as a Chef in a Chinese Restaurant ~ 6/29/2015
I dreamed I was hired at a Chinese restaurant to prepare and cook steak. That was my only job. I had been the owner's girlfriend, before he somehow got himself transformed into a ten year old boy.
Once the other woman who worked in the kitchen tried to help me by preparing one of the steaks. She left it almost raw, and I had to cut that one up, turn it into stir fry, and start over with a fresh rib eye.
Once I tried to help her by carrying out an appetizer order that was essentially a bowl of oil and vinegar to dip finger foods in. The colors and arrangement were lovely, and included two delicate flower petals arranged on the very edge of the liquid. The special part of this dish was that, after being carried to the table, the vinegar, which was infused with red pepper and carrot shreds, so it had a pinky-orange tinge, would not have mixed at all into the oil, and the petals would not be disturbed. So it was important to carry it very smoothly, which I found I couldn't do. I had to set the ruined bowl back on the counter, and the other woman had to start over.
I'd brought my own knives and cast iron skillet to use, and it was a constant struggle to keep anyone else from using or cleaning them. I finally found my skillet soaking in a sink full of soapy water, with the patina and seasoning scrubbed off. So I quit. Then I woke up.
Once the other woman who worked in the kitchen tried to help me by preparing one of the steaks. She left it almost raw, and I had to cut that one up, turn it into stir fry, and start over with a fresh rib eye.
Once I tried to help her by carrying out an appetizer order that was essentially a bowl of oil and vinegar to dip finger foods in. The colors and arrangement were lovely, and included two delicate flower petals arranged on the very edge of the liquid. The special part of this dish was that, after being carried to the table, the vinegar, which was infused with red pepper and carrot shreds, so it had a pinky-orange tinge, would not have mixed at all into the oil, and the petals would not be disturbed. So it was important to carry it very smoothly, which I found I couldn't do. I had to set the ruined bowl back on the counter, and the other woman had to start over.
I'd brought my own knives and cast iron skillet to use, and it was a constant struggle to keep anyone else from using or cleaning them. I finally found my skillet soaking in a sink full of soapy water, with the patina and seasoning scrubbed off. So I quit. Then I woke up.
Thursday, June 25, 2015
My Very Own Telepathic, Mass-Murdering Stalker ~ 6/25/2015
I dreamed I was being stalked by a mass-murderer who could read and control minds. I finally got him trapped in one of the rooms in the basement of the building I worked in. It was a combination office building and hotel. First I lured him into room 14, then locked the door between us, but room 14 had another entrance. I finally got him cornered and locked into room 9. I tried to convince everyone how dangerous he was, and that we needed to call the police. At first they agreed with me, but within an hour, he'd convinced them to forget all that and give him a job helping manage our computer networks. At least my boss agreed he had to stay locked in room 9.
I realized that all of this had made me late for the HCB concert. I made it on stage just after the first movement of Holst's Suite in E flat for Military Band. I finished out the concert okay, but afterwards one of my drummer friends came up and said he needed to talk to me about something. He said that calmly enough, but then he started laying into me about how I needed to stop dimming the lights in that hall we played, because the percussion couldn't see their music. I tried to explain calmly that I'd never touched the light switches, and had no idea how to work them, and hadn't he noticed I'd come in after the concert had started? He yelled at me some more, then stalked off, leaving me in tears.
I say in the Rice student center for a while, watching a news story on television and trying to calm down. A local newscaster was doing an interview with an amateur baseball team that had an unconventional way of dealing with poor sportsmanship. When the opposing pitcher had yelled a curse word at the ump, they'd all charged the mound to give him a group hug. After showing the footage, though, the newscaster started going on and on about how a guy had yelled at him for dimming some lights during a concert, and the baseball players he was talking to started giving each other confused looks.
When the news story was over, I realized I needed to change out of my pajamas, so I went to Meyer Lounge, because that was empty. I tried to hurry while my best friend stood watch and teased me about how tongue-tied I'd gotten around that cute guy we'd seen. That cute guy was actually the mass murdering stalker, who was, honestly, pretty cute. My friend told me I was no longer allowed to get so embarrassed and hot-faced. About that time I realized I'd packed two bras but no underpants, and people started coming into the room. I rushed through a French window into a little walled courtyard, hoping I would be less visible there as I tried to pull on my jeans and shirt, but I was in a panic, because nowhere in the courtyard was hidden from the windows back into the building.
I finally managed to get dressed, and went to sit with friends to watch a news broadcast of an awful murder suicide. Three young men had been building a rig to lift themselves into the air using helium balloons. The broadcast was aired as a projected three dimensional hologram, into the sky above us where we sat in North Lot. We watched as the rig rose into the sky.
Their contraption comprised a seating area for two people connected by a long tether to a canopy of balloons that was also lifting a secondary platoform with an auxilliary set of balloons. As we watched, the perpetrator began to climb up along the canopy tether, tilting his friend sideways. He pulled out a knife and began to saw at the tether above the joint to the secondary rig, so that both would fall.
Suddenly I realized that it was the mass murdering stalker. I closed my eyes, unable to watch as the rigs plummeted to earth from hundreds of feet up. Somehow I knew that in spite of the reports, the stalker had survived and was still out there. Then I woke up.
I realized that all of this had made me late for the HCB concert. I made it on stage just after the first movement of Holst's Suite in E flat for Military Band. I finished out the concert okay, but afterwards one of my drummer friends came up and said he needed to talk to me about something. He said that calmly enough, but then he started laying into me about how I needed to stop dimming the lights in that hall we played, because the percussion couldn't see their music. I tried to explain calmly that I'd never touched the light switches, and had no idea how to work them, and hadn't he noticed I'd come in after the concert had started? He yelled at me some more, then stalked off, leaving me in tears.
I say in the Rice student center for a while, watching a news story on television and trying to calm down. A local newscaster was doing an interview with an amateur baseball team that had an unconventional way of dealing with poor sportsmanship. When the opposing pitcher had yelled a curse word at the ump, they'd all charged the mound to give him a group hug. After showing the footage, though, the newscaster started going on and on about how a guy had yelled at him for dimming some lights during a concert, and the baseball players he was talking to started giving each other confused looks.
When the news story was over, I realized I needed to change out of my pajamas, so I went to Meyer Lounge, because that was empty. I tried to hurry while my best friend stood watch and teased me about how tongue-tied I'd gotten around that cute guy we'd seen. That cute guy was actually the mass murdering stalker, who was, honestly, pretty cute. My friend told me I was no longer allowed to get so embarrassed and hot-faced. About that time I realized I'd packed two bras but no underpants, and people started coming into the room. I rushed through a French window into a little walled courtyard, hoping I would be less visible there as I tried to pull on my jeans and shirt, but I was in a panic, because nowhere in the courtyard was hidden from the windows back into the building.
I finally managed to get dressed, and went to sit with friends to watch a news broadcast of an awful murder suicide. Three young men had been building a rig to lift themselves into the air using helium balloons. The broadcast was aired as a projected three dimensional hologram, into the sky above us where we sat in North Lot. We watched as the rig rose into the sky.
Their contraption comprised a seating area for two people connected by a long tether to a canopy of balloons that was also lifting a secondary platoform with an auxilliary set of balloons. As we watched, the perpetrator began to climb up along the canopy tether, tilting his friend sideways. He pulled out a knife and began to saw at the tether above the joint to the secondary rig, so that both would fall.
Suddenly I realized that it was the mass murdering stalker. I closed my eyes, unable to watch as the rigs plummeted to earth from hundreds of feet up. Somehow I knew that in spite of the reports, the stalker had survived and was still out there. Then I woke up.
Tuesday, June 23, 2015
Family Vacation ~ 6/23/2015
I dreamed I was walking around modern day Edinburg with my father, who was part my real dad and part Jamie Fraser. We were trying to decide what pub to eat at, and I was irritating him with my terrible English and even worse Scottish accents.
Then I was back with Mom and Brooke in a dive of a motel near Schlitterbahn. We were going to go to the water park, but first I had to finish editing this specification. It was handwritten on aging parchment, the handwriting was awful, and I couldn't tell what it was about, but there were doodles of squirrels in the margins. There were two business men talking nearby, and I handed in my work to them. One had dropped a postcard, which I picked up to return to him, but first I had to edit that, too.
Finally I was ready to go to the water park. But then we needed to get breakfast, so we stopped at the nearby diner. Then Brooke wanted to buy a new swimsuit, so we stopped at Target. Then I realized my stockings had big holes in them. Then I realized I was wearing black stockings and black suede ankle boots with three inch heels to a water park. Then I remembered that the Houston Concert Band had a concert I was supposed to play in on Rice Campus, so I hurried over.
We had a rehearsal in the student center, then afterwards a few of us broke into an a cappella version of Proud Mary (the Ike and Tina rendition). My friend Erik broke in to remind us to get down to the Grand Hall for the concert, but I couldn't find my trumpet. By the time I found it, I was 10 minutes late. I tried to sneak on stage during the applause after the first piece, and it worked well enough, until I found they'd removed my chair. Someone got me another real quick, though, and the show went on.
After the concert, I went back to the Hurricane Ridge gift shop, where I was supposed to meet Mom and Brooke to continue our vacation in Olympic National Park. I decided I wanted to buy a t-shirt while I waited for them, but that section wasn't open, so I followed a sales lady into a white-walled room full of display cases that held mineralogical samples and leather jewelry. I thought maybe I wanted an oxblood red leather anklet, but the woman the clerk was helping was getting that, and I didn't want to be a copycat. Then I woke up.
Then I was back with Mom and Brooke in a dive of a motel near Schlitterbahn. We were going to go to the water park, but first I had to finish editing this specification. It was handwritten on aging parchment, the handwriting was awful, and I couldn't tell what it was about, but there were doodles of squirrels in the margins. There were two business men talking nearby, and I handed in my work to them. One had dropped a postcard, which I picked up to return to him, but first I had to edit that, too.
Finally I was ready to go to the water park. But then we needed to get breakfast, so we stopped at the nearby diner. Then Brooke wanted to buy a new swimsuit, so we stopped at Target. Then I realized my stockings had big holes in them. Then I realized I was wearing black stockings and black suede ankle boots with three inch heels to a water park. Then I remembered that the Houston Concert Band had a concert I was supposed to play in on Rice Campus, so I hurried over.
We had a rehearsal in the student center, then afterwards a few of us broke into an a cappella version of Proud Mary (the Ike and Tina rendition). My friend Erik broke in to remind us to get down to the Grand Hall for the concert, but I couldn't find my trumpet. By the time I found it, I was 10 minutes late. I tried to sneak on stage during the applause after the first piece, and it worked well enough, until I found they'd removed my chair. Someone got me another real quick, though, and the show went on.
After the concert, I went back to the Hurricane Ridge gift shop, where I was supposed to meet Mom and Brooke to continue our vacation in Olympic National Park. I decided I wanted to buy a t-shirt while I waited for them, but that section wasn't open, so I followed a sales lady into a white-walled room full of display cases that held mineralogical samples and leather jewelry. I thought maybe I wanted an oxblood red leather anklet, but the woman the clerk was helping was getting that, and I didn't want to be a copycat. Then I woke up.
Monday, June 22, 2015
Summer Camp Adventures ~ 6/22/2015
I dreamed I was standing on the rim of a canyon I was about to kayak down. The stone walls were dark gray and beige, and the water was a murky jade green. There were very shallow pokets of sand tucked into crevices in the canyon walls, and a guide was warning me against relying on them if I fell out of my kayak, that the sand slopped sharply into the water, and would be easily dislodged if I tried to pull myself out there. He warned me also, that, as still as the water looked, the undercurrents were fierce, and basically, I should be prepared to see the entire length of the canyon through, and not try to get out of the water until I'd passed through.
So I kayaked through the canyon and reached a jungle forest. I beached my kayak and continued on foot. I followed a gray squirrel up the slanting bole of a downed tree, trying to take its picture. Suddenly, the squirrel disappeared into a hole in the trunk, and I turned around to see that we'd woken a colony of jungle cats, who had been lazying up in the canopy. They were the size of panthers, but had pointed ears more like a house cat, and they were rainbow colored. Purple, red, yellow, orange, green, blue, they all raised their heads to gaze at me with golden eyes, and I figured, well, while I was here, I might as well take a picture, because this was pretty awesome. So I stood still for a bit, snapping photos, then, when they started to relax again, I backed slowly down the tree and got out of the jungle.
I reached the camp where I'd be staying, just in time to participate in the first creative project. We were supposed to watch and summarize one of those inspirational teen movies from the learning channel. In this movie, a young girl falls in love with her best friend's brother, only to lose her best friend when she becomes angry that they're dating. The main character was played by Dawn from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the brother was played by Riley, but the best friend was someone I'd never seen act before.
I wrote my summary and was about to hand it in when I realized I'd completely missed the end of the film, where an animated cat, exploding like a big round firework into hundreds more identical animated cats somehow made clear the angsty turmoil of the brother's feelings. He didn't love the girl as much as he thought she deserved, since she loved him so much, and he hated himself for that, and was starting to hate her. I explained this to him as he sat beside the camp instructors in lawn chairs on the muddy bank across a small river from me.
So I finished my write up, copied and pasted some "Back to previous page" .php code into it, and sent the whole thing to the guy's sister, so she could better understand and not hate her best friend. Then I went to claim my bunk in the huge, beige, cinder-block gym and barracks building that we'd all be living in. There was a lot of confusing stuff there, but I can't remember it, and then I woke up.
So I kayaked through the canyon and reached a jungle forest. I beached my kayak and continued on foot. I followed a gray squirrel up the slanting bole of a downed tree, trying to take its picture. Suddenly, the squirrel disappeared into a hole in the trunk, and I turned around to see that we'd woken a colony of jungle cats, who had been lazying up in the canopy. They were the size of panthers, but had pointed ears more like a house cat, and they were rainbow colored. Purple, red, yellow, orange, green, blue, they all raised their heads to gaze at me with golden eyes, and I figured, well, while I was here, I might as well take a picture, because this was pretty awesome. So I stood still for a bit, snapping photos, then, when they started to relax again, I backed slowly down the tree and got out of the jungle.
I reached the camp where I'd be staying, just in time to participate in the first creative project. We were supposed to watch and summarize one of those inspirational teen movies from the learning channel. In this movie, a young girl falls in love with her best friend's brother, only to lose her best friend when she becomes angry that they're dating. The main character was played by Dawn from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the brother was played by Riley, but the best friend was someone I'd never seen act before.
I wrote my summary and was about to hand it in when I realized I'd completely missed the end of the film, where an animated cat, exploding like a big round firework into hundreds more identical animated cats somehow made clear the angsty turmoil of the brother's feelings. He didn't love the girl as much as he thought she deserved, since she loved him so much, and he hated himself for that, and was starting to hate her. I explained this to him as he sat beside the camp instructors in lawn chairs on the muddy bank across a small river from me.
So I finished my write up, copied and pasted some "Back to previous page" .php code into it, and sent the whole thing to the guy's sister, so she could better understand and not hate her best friend. Then I went to claim my bunk in the huge, beige, cinder-block gym and barracks building that we'd all be living in. There was a lot of confusing stuff there, but I can't remember it, and then I woke up.
Thursday, June 18, 2015
TBTT#11 Worst Road Trip Ever ~ 6/26/2012
Officially the least restful dream EVER. I was on a cross-Texas trip that involved at least three rental cars and a couple of short flights. I was in Houston with no luggage and the keys to a rental car in Lubbock. When I got back to Lubbock, I couldn't find the car at first, then when I found it, one of my bags was in it, along with the wiper blades to a rental car in Del Rio. Once I got that sorted, I realized that my luggage and my own car were in an airport parking garage in El Paso. By 8pm, I finally got everything straightened out, found my car, found my luggage, found my keys after having lost THOSE, only to find that I had 10 hours to get back to Houston to make a flight I had scheduled there, and there was a huge thunderstorm parked over the West Texas desert...
Monday, June 8, 2015
Murderers in Hotels from Another Dimension ~ 6/8/2015
I dreamed that I was wheeling my bike down a stairwell, preparing to ride it home from Castroville, Texas, when I overheard a plot to kill the A&M University president, and frame a guy they'd brought from the past with his wife. The real perpetrators were on the board of directors. So I told the cops, and they said they'd watch the people in question, and put me in charge of protecting the potential patsy.
So I got on my motorcycle and found the people from the pioneer days. I explained briefly what my concerns were, and said that I had promised to keep the man safe. His wife begged me to take him out of the way until the whole thing was solved. So he got onto the back of my motorcycle, and I drove us into an alternate dimension.
You'd think this would have kept us safe, but unfortunately, the exact same thing was happening in THAT dimension, only all the major players were dressed as Greek gods, and we were all confined in a sprawling hotel. My charge got tired of it all really quick, and insisted he needed to be with his wife. He took my motorcycle when I wasn't looking and disappeared.
My mom and sister and my sister's boyfriend showed up at the hotel, and we all went in to watch a presentation of some sort. When we got out, we were supposed to fill out a questionnaire. There were two lists of activities, and we were supposed to choose our favorite "Axiotic" and "Lantithic" pastimes. I couldn't for the life of me remember what axiotic and lantithic meant, and everyone kept trying to explain, but they used a lot more words I didn't understand.
So I refused to fill out the questionnaire, and asked if we'd booked a room for the night, because I really needed to just get some rest. Most of the people were going home, so there was plenty of space available, so Mom said we'd go ahead and stay. The hotel people showed us up to an enormous suite.
I had a little loft room of my own, which arched windows looking out over the sea.there was no bed, but the belhop said they were bringing up a mattress to make up, so I sat on the hard floor and watched the water go gray as the sun set behind rain clouds. The walls were white with the black and red and blue grid designs of a Mondrian painting, and it must have been a room intended for little athletes, because I saw that when the bed was in place, I'd be able to shoot basketballs at a little hoop while I was lying down.
I was all set to spend a quiet night here when we learned that Heather Taffet, the serial killer from Bones, was after me. The hotel people started moving me from one location to another to try to keep me safe. Finally they took me up to a room at the very top of a tower so tall that it swayed from side to side in the winds of the storm that was not all around us. The windows on all sides of the room showed the dark gray clouds rolling around, and were splattered with loud surges of rain, lit every few seconds by lightning.
I tried to close my eyes and ignore the back and forth rocking of the room and the raging storm, but then I realized that Taffet's plan was to fly an airplane right into this tower, and that someone must have been in league with her and put me here on purpose. I could see the airplane barreling out of the clouds, and I tore out of the room and down the stairs as fast as I could, with the roar of the impact just behind me.
The lower floors were in a panic. I found my family and we were all ready to leave when they guy who took my motorcycle showed back up. We decided to split up, and I got on the back of the bike behind him and we took off. He took me to a huge ballroom filled with masked figures in fancy dress, and we were just in time to tip the authorities off that the university president was about to be attacked by the chairman of the board of directors. The authorities saw the attack and were able to stop it, exonerating the man from the past, whom I delivered to his wife, safe and sound, and then I woke up.
So I got on my motorcycle and found the people from the pioneer days. I explained briefly what my concerns were, and said that I had promised to keep the man safe. His wife begged me to take him out of the way until the whole thing was solved. So he got onto the back of my motorcycle, and I drove us into an alternate dimension.
You'd think this would have kept us safe, but unfortunately, the exact same thing was happening in THAT dimension, only all the major players were dressed as Greek gods, and we were all confined in a sprawling hotel. My charge got tired of it all really quick, and insisted he needed to be with his wife. He took my motorcycle when I wasn't looking and disappeared.
My mom and sister and my sister's boyfriend showed up at the hotel, and we all went in to watch a presentation of some sort. When we got out, we were supposed to fill out a questionnaire. There were two lists of activities, and we were supposed to choose our favorite "Axiotic" and "Lantithic" pastimes. I couldn't for the life of me remember what axiotic and lantithic meant, and everyone kept trying to explain, but they used a lot more words I didn't understand.
So I refused to fill out the questionnaire, and asked if we'd booked a room for the night, because I really needed to just get some rest. Most of the people were going home, so there was plenty of space available, so Mom said we'd go ahead and stay. The hotel people showed us up to an enormous suite.
I had a little loft room of my own, which arched windows looking out over the sea.there was no bed, but the belhop said they were bringing up a mattress to make up, so I sat on the hard floor and watched the water go gray as the sun set behind rain clouds. The walls were white with the black and red and blue grid designs of a Mondrian painting, and it must have been a room intended for little athletes, because I saw that when the bed was in place, I'd be able to shoot basketballs at a little hoop while I was lying down.
I was all set to spend a quiet night here when we learned that Heather Taffet, the serial killer from Bones, was after me. The hotel people started moving me from one location to another to try to keep me safe. Finally they took me up to a room at the very top of a tower so tall that it swayed from side to side in the winds of the storm that was not all around us. The windows on all sides of the room showed the dark gray clouds rolling around, and were splattered with loud surges of rain, lit every few seconds by lightning.
I tried to close my eyes and ignore the back and forth rocking of the room and the raging storm, but then I realized that Taffet's plan was to fly an airplane right into this tower, and that someone must have been in league with her and put me here on purpose. I could see the airplane barreling out of the clouds, and I tore out of the room and down the stairs as fast as I could, with the roar of the impact just behind me.
The lower floors were in a panic. I found my family and we were all ready to leave when they guy who took my motorcycle showed back up. We decided to split up, and I got on the back of the bike behind him and we took off. He took me to a huge ballroom filled with masked figures in fancy dress, and we were just in time to tip the authorities off that the university president was about to be attacked by the chairman of the board of directors. The authorities saw the attack and were able to stop it, exonerating the man from the past, whom I delivered to his wife, safe and sound, and then I woke up.
Monday, June 1, 2015
Dogs Everywhere ~ 6/1/2015
I dreamed I kept walking by a pet shop in a mall, and there was a game at the back, and every time I walked past, they were giving some kid a different weird prize that they were calling a shark leg. The first one was a really slender, turquoise and forest green plastic lamprey. The second was the hind-quarter of a black dog. The third was an ice cream cone. But that kid's mom looked right at the game's host and said she was calling the cops, and when he protested, she insisted he remove the stolen gun from her son's ice cream cone. He did so and the whole game speedily decamped.
So I went into Half Priced Books, and I was thrilled to find a copy of A Hundred and One Dalmatians, the book Disney based their movie on. I always liked the book better, and it was my very favorite for a long time when I was little. So I bought it for $7, so I could read it to all my little buddies when they came to visit. Then I started wondering if I'd actually sold my copy, and was now buying it back, and how ridiculous that would be.
I went home for the holidays, though, and verified that Mom still had my old copy. I spent the night at our house in the hill country, and then we were all going to drive into San Antonio to work, then meet up again out at La Grange. Mom kept asking me to do things to help out, but I kept finding them impossible to do. Like, I was supposed to go get something from the garage, but it wasn't where she said it was, and when I went back to ask her where else to look, she told me to go pack up our matching Christmas shirts, and also our plain white shirts, in case that looked better in the family portrait, but I hadn't brought my Christmas shirt or white shirt because no one told me.
When I went back to tell her this, she said no, what she had asked me to do a hundred times now was to feed the boys breakfast, because my friends' two boys were staying with us. So I went to pour them cereal, but it kept disappearing from the bowls, so I put Poptarts in the toaster, but they never came up, so I started browning some sausage in my cast iron pan, but it evaporated, so in desperation I threw in some leftover macaroni and cheese, and that finally stayed whole, and warmed up, but when I served it, both boys were yelling at the top of their lungs, but I couldn't figure out what was wrong, but it was now 8am, and I needed to get to work.
But Mom said, well, first you need to bake the cake. And then you need to do the dishes. Or you could do them after work. And I reminded her I was leaving straight from work to go to Momo's like everyone else. So she said that was fine, but I just needed to get these other chores done. I finally just walked out to get in my car to drive to the office, but my car kept turning itself back around.
Finally I got the car to stop bringing me back home, and I was running really late, but instead of taking me into work, it took me to this house full of dogs. Which at first seemed cool, but none of the dogs were interacting with me doggishly, and it was kinda weird for so many of them to be in a frat house, and then the frat guys came home, and when they called each dog by name, it shook itself like dogs do when they're wet, and transformed into a gorgeous young woman. These women then set about keeping the house clean, cooking dinner, and, of course, performing other services behind closed doors.
One of the girls got mad at her "owner" and turned back into a dog, snarling, hackles raised, ready to attack. But the frat boy shook himself and became a dog also, and they got into a vicious fight, until he pinned her by the throat and then proceeded to assert his dominance in every possible way, at which point, thankfully, I woke up.
So I went into Half Priced Books, and I was thrilled to find a copy of A Hundred and One Dalmatians, the book Disney based their movie on. I always liked the book better, and it was my very favorite for a long time when I was little. So I bought it for $7, so I could read it to all my little buddies when they came to visit. Then I started wondering if I'd actually sold my copy, and was now buying it back, and how ridiculous that would be.
I went home for the holidays, though, and verified that Mom still had my old copy. I spent the night at our house in the hill country, and then we were all going to drive into San Antonio to work, then meet up again out at La Grange. Mom kept asking me to do things to help out, but I kept finding them impossible to do. Like, I was supposed to go get something from the garage, but it wasn't where she said it was, and when I went back to ask her where else to look, she told me to go pack up our matching Christmas shirts, and also our plain white shirts, in case that looked better in the family portrait, but I hadn't brought my Christmas shirt or white shirt because no one told me.
When I went back to tell her this, she said no, what she had asked me to do a hundred times now was to feed the boys breakfast, because my friends' two boys were staying with us. So I went to pour them cereal, but it kept disappearing from the bowls, so I put Poptarts in the toaster, but they never came up, so I started browning some sausage in my cast iron pan, but it evaporated, so in desperation I threw in some leftover macaroni and cheese, and that finally stayed whole, and warmed up, but when I served it, both boys were yelling at the top of their lungs, but I couldn't figure out what was wrong, but it was now 8am, and I needed to get to work.
But Mom said, well, first you need to bake the cake. And then you need to do the dishes. Or you could do them after work. And I reminded her I was leaving straight from work to go to Momo's like everyone else. So she said that was fine, but I just needed to get these other chores done. I finally just walked out to get in my car to drive to the office, but my car kept turning itself back around.
Finally I got the car to stop bringing me back home, and I was running really late, but instead of taking me into work, it took me to this house full of dogs. Which at first seemed cool, but none of the dogs were interacting with me doggishly, and it was kinda weird for so many of them to be in a frat house, and then the frat guys came home, and when they called each dog by name, it shook itself like dogs do when they're wet, and transformed into a gorgeous young woman. These women then set about keeping the house clean, cooking dinner, and, of course, performing other services behind closed doors.
One of the girls got mad at her "owner" and turned back into a dog, snarling, hackles raised, ready to attack. But the frat boy shook himself and became a dog also, and they got into a vicious fight, until he pinned her by the throat and then proceeded to assert his dominance in every possible way, at which point, thankfully, I woke up.
Sunday, May 31, 2015
Magical Meatloaf ~ 5/27/2015
I dreamed I was working on shipping docks on a point of land jutting out into darkness. My dad, my godfather Bud, and his son-in-law Tom all worked there too. The bosses wanted to give my dad an award, but he wouldn't accept it unless they also recognized Bud.
I had to leave the point, along with a group of friends and acquaintances, including Neil Degrasse Tyson, because we all had magical abilities, and evil wizards were trying to recruit us. If we didn't agree to join them, they'd kill us. We had to leave everything behind, including our names. They had put a hex on our true names, so if we spoke them aloud, the evil wizards would find us.
We'd been away from our rooms for a while, to find a safe place for our golden retriever Rustler. I stumbled upon a message about how the evil ones had found the rooms while we were out, and they'd jinxed all the thermostat levels so that if the heating or cooling went above level 2, they'd be signaled that we'd returned. I hurried back to find my companions had indeed turned up the air conditioning, but the level hadn't gone to 3 yet, so I turned it back down and explained.
I went to visit a friend of mine who was working on an educational cartoon. He was telling all sorts of useful parables using xkcd-style stick figure drawings. He was hiding out, to, so he couldn't distribute his work. I agreed to help, and took a pile of pamphlets with me to hand out.
I snuck home real quick to check on my mom and dad. I wasn't going to go in, but my mom caught sight of me and insisted I help her with dinner. We were going to have meatloaf muffins. Dad was preparing the muffin trays. He had a stick figure cartoon of Darth Vader and a storm trooper pinned up for inspiration. He was using a mixture of black pepper and gun powder to form letters in the pan so that, when turned out, the muffins would spell, "I find your lack of faith disturbing!" Then he could run a wick from muffin to muffin, and when he lit it, the letters would look like sparklers.
My mom handed me a bowl and said to mix all the hamburger meat and eggs I could find, and to Aldo mix in chunks of cake that she had lying around, instead of bread crumbs. I told her I'd use the chocolate and vanilla chunks, but I was NOT putting strawberry cake in, because that was just disgusting.
So I mixed up all I could find, but instead of looking like ground beef, it looked a lot like brownie batter, and pounds and cups of ingredients collapsed down into not enough to fill half of one muffin pan. I knew this wouldn't work with Dad's lettering, so I scrounged around and found more eggs and some chunks of yellow cake in my room. I also found bunches of herbs that I knew I could use, as long as I left out the woody stalks.
When even that didn't help, I went to Mom for help. She sent me out on the front porch to catch ants to add in. But she gave me specific instructions not to include the purple schooner ants, especially if they were carrying a brood of young. Purple schooner ants were about three inches long, purple, of course, and their abdomens looked like three marbles stuck together. In one of the marbles, the females carried at least a dozen squirming young. The worst of it was that they didn't crawl on the ground. Instead they hovered in the air, only dropping to the ground to feed.
Out on the porch, I could see them in the porch light, dropping down by the hundreds. They were the only ants I could see, so I went back inside to tell Mom, and then I woke up.
I had to leave the point, along with a group of friends and acquaintances, including Neil Degrasse Tyson, because we all had magical abilities, and evil wizards were trying to recruit us. If we didn't agree to join them, they'd kill us. We had to leave everything behind, including our names. They had put a hex on our true names, so if we spoke them aloud, the evil wizards would find us.
We'd been away from our rooms for a while, to find a safe place for our golden retriever Rustler. I stumbled upon a message about how the evil ones had found the rooms while we were out, and they'd jinxed all the thermostat levels so that if the heating or cooling went above level 2, they'd be signaled that we'd returned. I hurried back to find my companions had indeed turned up the air conditioning, but the level hadn't gone to 3 yet, so I turned it back down and explained.
I went to visit a friend of mine who was working on an educational cartoon. He was telling all sorts of useful parables using xkcd-style stick figure drawings. He was hiding out, to, so he couldn't distribute his work. I agreed to help, and took a pile of pamphlets with me to hand out.
I snuck home real quick to check on my mom and dad. I wasn't going to go in, but my mom caught sight of me and insisted I help her with dinner. We were going to have meatloaf muffins. Dad was preparing the muffin trays. He had a stick figure cartoon of Darth Vader and a storm trooper pinned up for inspiration. He was using a mixture of black pepper and gun powder to form letters in the pan so that, when turned out, the muffins would spell, "I find your lack of faith disturbing!" Then he could run a wick from muffin to muffin, and when he lit it, the letters would look like sparklers.
My mom handed me a bowl and said to mix all the hamburger meat and eggs I could find, and to Aldo mix in chunks of cake that she had lying around, instead of bread crumbs. I told her I'd use the chocolate and vanilla chunks, but I was NOT putting strawberry cake in, because that was just disgusting.
So I mixed up all I could find, but instead of looking like ground beef, it looked a lot like brownie batter, and pounds and cups of ingredients collapsed down into not enough to fill half of one muffin pan. I knew this wouldn't work with Dad's lettering, so I scrounged around and found more eggs and some chunks of yellow cake in my room. I also found bunches of herbs that I knew I could use, as long as I left out the woody stalks.
When even that didn't help, I went to Mom for help. She sent me out on the front porch to catch ants to add in. But she gave me specific instructions not to include the purple schooner ants, especially if they were carrying a brood of young. Purple schooner ants were about three inches long, purple, of course, and their abdomens looked like three marbles stuck together. In one of the marbles, the females carried at least a dozen squirming young. The worst of it was that they didn't crawl on the ground. Instead they hovered in the air, only dropping to the ground to feed.
Out on the porch, I could see them in the porch light, dropping down by the hundreds. They were the only ants I could see, so I went back inside to tell Mom, and then I woke up.
Wednesday, May 20, 2015
Why I've Been Awake Since 4AM ~ 5/20/2015
I dreamed I borrowed a motorcycle to drive home from New Orleans one evening. I practiced driving it around the quiet neighborhood. To speed up, you pulled the handlebars toward you. To slow down, you pushed them away. I wound around the quiet streets, lined with old oaks and shotgun houses as the sun went down. Finally reasonably comfortable that I could drive the thing, I began to try to find my way out of the neighborhood.
I ended up right back at the house of the friend who'd lent me the motorcycle. There were a few people sitting out on the porch, including my friend's landlord/roommate. All of them were pretty amused at me. They gave me directions and I set off again. And I got lost again, and ended back at their house again. I took a break, went in to get a drink, and followed my friend from her rooms over a walkway to the house next door and back, as she chatted with me. I set off one last time, and as the sun rose, I finally found my way out of the neighborhood.
It took me most of the day to get to San Antonio. I kept getting turned around and having to use the position of the sun in the sky to set myself right. I finally ended up getting bogged down in construction at I-10 and Loop 410, and exited the highway. I knew Culebra road was northwest of the interchange, and I could just take surface streets up to it if I kept the sun on my left. I knew there was a patch of pretty bad neighborhood between where I was and where I needed to be, but as there were still a couple of hours of daylight left, I figured I'd be fine.
But I kept ending up going down cul-de-sacs and roads closed for construction and roads that narrowed into sidewalks, meandering through low-rent apartments and rundown houses. I ended up walking the motorcycle through a seedy apartment complex as the sun was setting again, and stopped to get my bearings and watch the children playing. One curly-haired little girl came over to hand me her doll, and her older brother was fascinated by my motorbike. I struck up a conversation, and they invited me into their home. I decided to go with them, because maybe their family could help me find my way.
Instead, I was told off by their grandfather, who found me sitting in the living room. He yelled at me that I needed to stay away from his grandkids, and that me coming into their home as a stranger was really creepy, and if I didn't leave, he'd call the police. So I left. I walked past a large stone church with a dark, wood-shingled roof and bright stained glass windows, but no one was around. I hoped I could cut through the retirement community next door as a shortcut. If I could just get to the other side, I knew I could find Thousand Oaks Drive, and take that over to Eldridge Parkway, which would lead me over to Culebra.
I wheeled my bike through an archway, hoping to find a parking lot and street on the other side. Instead I ended up in a strange room that had an old brass firemen's pole down from the floors above, a few rounded steps down from the corresponding but slightly offset story of the adjoining building, and some slides down to the ground level. The floor and all the steps and slides were smoothly polished wood that gleamed as golden as the old brass. From this room I ended up in the suite of rooms belonging to an old woman. Her grandson saw me and helped me out her front door, which was on the opposite side from where I entered, and, sure enough, brought me out on to Thousand Oaks. He showed me a map, and it looked like Thousand Oaks would take me all the way to Culebra, but then he told me that road construction had that end blocked off. But I pointed out that I could walk the bike around, and he agreed that should work just fine.
It was really late when I found myself headed northwest on Culebra Road. My dad called to tell me that Mom had come into town to pick me up, but hadn't been able to see me, so she'd stopped at the San Antonio Light newspaper offices. I'd already passed those up, but only by a block or two, so I turned back. I saw the blue neon sign gleaming in the dark up ahead, and wheeled my bike into the dim parking lot. A few reporters were hanging around a news van, and I found my mom chatting with them. We loaded the motorcycle into her van and she drove me home.
The next day I walked around Castroville. I went to Super S and found a boxed mix for a gluten free chocolate Doberge cake. The sample cake was at least eight inches tall, and I decided I needed to try it. So I got the mix home, but found out I'd gotten lemon Doberge, instead of chocolate. I made the cake anyway, and it was very good. That evening, I found my friend Roy in the high school gym, doing Karaoke with a few other friends. He wasn't singing, though. The place had a machine that would remove instrumental tracks, too, so he was playing guitar. He stood in the center with his equipment, and the floor around him spun in a circle, and was scattered with rolling office chairs for singers. I sat down in one of them and Jo Dee Messina's "Bye Bye" came on the karaoke machine, and Roy played guitar and I sang.
When the song was done, I pushed myself in my rolly chair off the gym floor and up a nearby freeway exit ramp. I couldn't make it all the way up, which was probably a good thing. A voice began to lecture me that if I thought my suicidal behavior showed some ammount of self-control, in that I appeared to wish to exert control over the ending of my life, I was wrong. That true control came from living in balance. I tried to argue that I hadn't been trying to kill myself, but I couldn't see who was talking, so I just gave up and rolled my office chair back down off the ramp.
When I came to the edge of a lake, I got up. I could see black-robed Bene Gesserit women swimming around the center of the lake. Without taking off my own black robes, I stepped down into the murky water to join my sisters. I swam around, trying to find balance, I guess. I dove beneath the surface, but then found that I'd gone in much deeper than I'd meant. I began to struggle my way back up to the surface, my lungs bursting for air, but I knew I wasn't going to make it, even though I could see the light gleaming silver above me. I woke up mid-stroke, and lay paralyzed in my bed for a few seconds, still holding my breath, before I realized that if I inhaled, I wouldn't be inhaling water, so I took a breath and woke up completely.
I ended up right back at the house of the friend who'd lent me the motorcycle. There were a few people sitting out on the porch, including my friend's landlord/roommate. All of them were pretty amused at me. They gave me directions and I set off again. And I got lost again, and ended back at their house again. I took a break, went in to get a drink, and followed my friend from her rooms over a walkway to the house next door and back, as she chatted with me. I set off one last time, and as the sun rose, I finally found my way out of the neighborhood.
It took me most of the day to get to San Antonio. I kept getting turned around and having to use the position of the sun in the sky to set myself right. I finally ended up getting bogged down in construction at I-10 and Loop 410, and exited the highway. I knew Culebra road was northwest of the interchange, and I could just take surface streets up to it if I kept the sun on my left. I knew there was a patch of pretty bad neighborhood between where I was and where I needed to be, but as there were still a couple of hours of daylight left, I figured I'd be fine.
But I kept ending up going down cul-de-sacs and roads closed for construction and roads that narrowed into sidewalks, meandering through low-rent apartments and rundown houses. I ended up walking the motorcycle through a seedy apartment complex as the sun was setting again, and stopped to get my bearings and watch the children playing. One curly-haired little girl came over to hand me her doll, and her older brother was fascinated by my motorbike. I struck up a conversation, and they invited me into their home. I decided to go with them, because maybe their family could help me find my way.
Instead, I was told off by their grandfather, who found me sitting in the living room. He yelled at me that I needed to stay away from his grandkids, and that me coming into their home as a stranger was really creepy, and if I didn't leave, he'd call the police. So I left. I walked past a large stone church with a dark, wood-shingled roof and bright stained glass windows, but no one was around. I hoped I could cut through the retirement community next door as a shortcut. If I could just get to the other side, I knew I could find Thousand Oaks Drive, and take that over to Eldridge Parkway, which would lead me over to Culebra.
I wheeled my bike through an archway, hoping to find a parking lot and street on the other side. Instead I ended up in a strange room that had an old brass firemen's pole down from the floors above, a few rounded steps down from the corresponding but slightly offset story of the adjoining building, and some slides down to the ground level. The floor and all the steps and slides were smoothly polished wood that gleamed as golden as the old brass. From this room I ended up in the suite of rooms belonging to an old woman. Her grandson saw me and helped me out her front door, which was on the opposite side from where I entered, and, sure enough, brought me out on to Thousand Oaks. He showed me a map, and it looked like Thousand Oaks would take me all the way to Culebra, but then he told me that road construction had that end blocked off. But I pointed out that I could walk the bike around, and he agreed that should work just fine.
It was really late when I found myself headed northwest on Culebra Road. My dad called to tell me that Mom had come into town to pick me up, but hadn't been able to see me, so she'd stopped at the San Antonio Light newspaper offices. I'd already passed those up, but only by a block or two, so I turned back. I saw the blue neon sign gleaming in the dark up ahead, and wheeled my bike into the dim parking lot. A few reporters were hanging around a news van, and I found my mom chatting with them. We loaded the motorcycle into her van and she drove me home.
The next day I walked around Castroville. I went to Super S and found a boxed mix for a gluten free chocolate Doberge cake. The sample cake was at least eight inches tall, and I decided I needed to try it. So I got the mix home, but found out I'd gotten lemon Doberge, instead of chocolate. I made the cake anyway, and it was very good. That evening, I found my friend Roy in the high school gym, doing Karaoke with a few other friends. He wasn't singing, though. The place had a machine that would remove instrumental tracks, too, so he was playing guitar. He stood in the center with his equipment, and the floor around him spun in a circle, and was scattered with rolling office chairs for singers. I sat down in one of them and Jo Dee Messina's "Bye Bye" came on the karaoke machine, and Roy played guitar and I sang.
When the song was done, I pushed myself in my rolly chair off the gym floor and up a nearby freeway exit ramp. I couldn't make it all the way up, which was probably a good thing. A voice began to lecture me that if I thought my suicidal behavior showed some ammount of self-control, in that I appeared to wish to exert control over the ending of my life, I was wrong. That true control came from living in balance. I tried to argue that I hadn't been trying to kill myself, but I couldn't see who was talking, so I just gave up and rolled my office chair back down off the ramp.
When I came to the edge of a lake, I got up. I could see black-robed Bene Gesserit women swimming around the center of the lake. Without taking off my own black robes, I stepped down into the murky water to join my sisters. I swam around, trying to find balance, I guess. I dove beneath the surface, but then found that I'd gone in much deeper than I'd meant. I began to struggle my way back up to the surface, my lungs bursting for air, but I knew I wasn't going to make it, even though I could see the light gleaming silver above me. I woke up mid-stroke, and lay paralyzed in my bed for a few seconds, still holding my breath, before I realized that if I inhaled, I wouldn't be inhaling water, so I took a breath and woke up completely.
Tuesday, May 19, 2015
Murder, Intrigue, and Gourmet Chocolate ~ 5/18/2015
I dreamed I was on a band trip in Korea to solve a series of murders. Korea was like a combination of Las Vegas and an upscale shopping mall. There were fancy shops and twinkling lights everywhere. Some of the people in our group, including my good friend's mother, suddenly became ghosts. They would only regain corporeality if we solved the mystery.
We could predict who was going to be next, but not how they would be killed. We found the word "siostre" carved in strange characters onto the bottom of a dugout canoe, rotting at the side of a small river. This was an important clue, we were sure, but we didn't know what it meant.
The next victim was killed right in front of me as I was trying to keep watch and protect him. Some mechanism was triggered and a wire contraption came out of the wall behind him, slipped around his neck, and would have garroted him, if that hadn't been rendered completely unnecessary by the attached blade that slit his carotid.
There were silky red fibers caught in the joints of the contraption, and I thought I recognized them. As pandemonium filled the room, I looked across and met the eyes of the Columbian ambassador, who was still and watchful amid the chaos... and who wore a Columbian flag cravat in which one of the red starts of the flag was apparently missing, split by a tear in the silky red fabric.
But when we questioned him, he denied all involvement and invoked diplomatic immunity. Just as we were going to let him go, I saw a woman in a dark gray suit and deep scarlet tie raise a gun and point it at his back. I sounded the alarm, and she ended up shooting and wounding him, but we caught her. She, of course, was the murderer.
With the mystery solved and all the temporary ghosts returned the physical plain, I rejoined my group. Only to find that, by being late and missing several gatherings, I had lost all three of my happy snail marks, and would not be receiving any tokens that I could exchange for gourmet chocolate truffles at the world-renown chocolate shop in our hotel.
So I went and bought my own chocolates, and got on the bus to go home. We left the bright lights of Korea and drove east, over the large bridge that separated Southeast Asia from New Orleans. I realized I'd never noticed before how close an entire other continent was to my home. And then I woke up.
We could predict who was going to be next, but not how they would be killed. We found the word "siostre" carved in strange characters onto the bottom of a dugout canoe, rotting at the side of a small river. This was an important clue, we were sure, but we didn't know what it meant.
The next victim was killed right in front of me as I was trying to keep watch and protect him. Some mechanism was triggered and a wire contraption came out of the wall behind him, slipped around his neck, and would have garroted him, if that hadn't been rendered completely unnecessary by the attached blade that slit his carotid.
There were silky red fibers caught in the joints of the contraption, and I thought I recognized them. As pandemonium filled the room, I looked across and met the eyes of the Columbian ambassador, who was still and watchful amid the chaos... and who wore a Columbian flag cravat in which one of the red starts of the flag was apparently missing, split by a tear in the silky red fabric.
But when we questioned him, he denied all involvement and invoked diplomatic immunity. Just as we were going to let him go, I saw a woman in a dark gray suit and deep scarlet tie raise a gun and point it at his back. I sounded the alarm, and she ended up shooting and wounding him, but we caught her. She, of course, was the murderer.
With the mystery solved and all the temporary ghosts returned the physical plain, I rejoined my group. Only to find that, by being late and missing several gatherings, I had lost all three of my happy snail marks, and would not be receiving any tokens that I could exchange for gourmet chocolate truffles at the world-renown chocolate shop in our hotel.
So I went and bought my own chocolates, and got on the bus to go home. We left the bright lights of Korea and drove east, over the large bridge that separated Southeast Asia from New Orleans. I realized I'd never noticed before how close an entire other continent was to my home. And then I woke up.
Thursday, May 7, 2015
The Wonderful World of Harry Potter ~ 5/7/2015
I dreamt that Harry Potter went to Hogwarts, which was a 52 story office building built above Momo's house, on her land near La Grange. There were large lobbies on the upper floors with floor to ceiling windows and galleries looking down on fountains and indoor plants. The Griffindors lived above one of these, on about the 45th floor. Ravenclaws were up above, Hufflepuffs below, and Slytherins in the basement.
At the end of the school year, all witches and wizards born in July, including Harry, Neville, and Luna, went into a bacchanal killing trance for one evening. They hunted the other students, and the final exam was basically staying alive. I, too, was a student born in July, and all I could remember the next day was colluding with my fellow July students on hunting tactics in the very beginning, chasing screaming people toward the stock tank, then walking into the water to wash the blood off of my boots.
I had four pairs of boots. I pulled them all out later to see if any of them would jog my memories. One pair was a light tan ostrich skin. Another pair was a pale buff ostrich skin. There were my black ropers, of course, and then the pair I wore that night, which were cracking and shapeless because of the water. Those were a deep oxblood calfskin, so they didn't show any stains. I gave up trying to remember.
I went home to find that my mom had bought me a new X-Files computer game. I had all the X-Files games now. But my dad had already opened it up and was playing it in the TV room, so I sat and watched. It was a first person shooter with lots of metal corridors and gray aliens. While I waited for him to finish, I patted my sister's dog, who had curled up in my lap. Our other dogs, all black and white in various sizes, came to greet me, and followed me to the grocery store.
In the back of the grocery store there was a big, swampy, sandy-banked river garden. The dogs had a good roll in the damp sand while I talked a bit with the children that all waded around tending the plants in tall mud boots. The children, it turned out, were mentally different, and in some cases quite disturbed, in one way or another. But they could see and talk to ghosts. After chatting with them a while, I realized that I, too, could see and talk to ghosts.
I started to wonder if I'd really seen my father, playing my computer game, or if it was actually his ghost. I learned there were a number of ghosts in my house. There was a round, pretty black woman with shoulder-length ringlets. There was a little blond girl and her blond aunt. There was a middle-aged priest with ruddy cheeks and brown hair, who used to dress up as Santa Claus every Christmas. And there was an evil old queen, with a big, fat round face all chalky pale, glinting eyes, silver gray curls, and at least four chins.
The evil queen had the power to kill other ghosts for good, by pushing them down the sink drain with the disposal running. Once a ghost was sucked completely down, they were completely gone. The rest of us decided she must be stopped. I particularly wanted her gone because I was really afraid by now that it was the ghost of my father I was seeing, and I didn't want him sucked down into the disposal forever. I wanted to keep him however I could.
One of the children from the river garden came to help us find the queen. She was the identical twin sister of the little girl ghost, and she had never spoken since the day her sister had died. But she came and spoke to me now, and told us how to lie in wait and follow the evil queen as she stalked around looking for other ghosts to slaughter. We tailed her into the kitchen and found her trying to force the priest down the kitchen sink. The disposal was running, and only his head was visible. His face was twisted in anguish.
We grabbed him and pulled him out by his hair, and before she could stop us, we began to push the queen down the drain. We held her hands so she couldn't reach out and turn off the disposal. She didn't moan or shriek or show any sort of pain. She cackled and grinned evilly at us all the while, her eyes glittering malevolently, until only her eyes and the top of her head was showing. We struggled to force her all the way in, but then I woke up.
At the end of the school year, all witches and wizards born in July, including Harry, Neville, and Luna, went into a bacchanal killing trance for one evening. They hunted the other students, and the final exam was basically staying alive. I, too, was a student born in July, and all I could remember the next day was colluding with my fellow July students on hunting tactics in the very beginning, chasing screaming people toward the stock tank, then walking into the water to wash the blood off of my boots.
I had four pairs of boots. I pulled them all out later to see if any of them would jog my memories. One pair was a light tan ostrich skin. Another pair was a pale buff ostrich skin. There were my black ropers, of course, and then the pair I wore that night, which were cracking and shapeless because of the water. Those were a deep oxblood calfskin, so they didn't show any stains. I gave up trying to remember.
I went home to find that my mom had bought me a new X-Files computer game. I had all the X-Files games now. But my dad had already opened it up and was playing it in the TV room, so I sat and watched. It was a first person shooter with lots of metal corridors and gray aliens. While I waited for him to finish, I patted my sister's dog, who had curled up in my lap. Our other dogs, all black and white in various sizes, came to greet me, and followed me to the grocery store.
In the back of the grocery store there was a big, swampy, sandy-banked river garden. The dogs had a good roll in the damp sand while I talked a bit with the children that all waded around tending the plants in tall mud boots. The children, it turned out, were mentally different, and in some cases quite disturbed, in one way or another. But they could see and talk to ghosts. After chatting with them a while, I realized that I, too, could see and talk to ghosts.
I started to wonder if I'd really seen my father, playing my computer game, or if it was actually his ghost. I learned there were a number of ghosts in my house. There was a round, pretty black woman with shoulder-length ringlets. There was a little blond girl and her blond aunt. There was a middle-aged priest with ruddy cheeks and brown hair, who used to dress up as Santa Claus every Christmas. And there was an evil old queen, with a big, fat round face all chalky pale, glinting eyes, silver gray curls, and at least four chins.
The evil queen had the power to kill other ghosts for good, by pushing them down the sink drain with the disposal running. Once a ghost was sucked completely down, they were completely gone. The rest of us decided she must be stopped. I particularly wanted her gone because I was really afraid by now that it was the ghost of my father I was seeing, and I didn't want him sucked down into the disposal forever. I wanted to keep him however I could.
One of the children from the river garden came to help us find the queen. She was the identical twin sister of the little girl ghost, and she had never spoken since the day her sister had died. But she came and spoke to me now, and told us how to lie in wait and follow the evil queen as she stalked around looking for other ghosts to slaughter. We tailed her into the kitchen and found her trying to force the priest down the kitchen sink. The disposal was running, and only his head was visible. His face was twisted in anguish.
We grabbed him and pulled him out by his hair, and before she could stop us, we began to push the queen down the drain. We held her hands so she couldn't reach out and turn off the disposal. She didn't moan or shriek or show any sort of pain. She cackled and grinned evilly at us all the while, her eyes glittering malevolently, until only her eyes and the top of her head was showing. We struggled to force her all the way in, but then I woke up.
Tuesday, May 5, 2015
Craft Store Adventures ~ 5/5/2015
I dreamed I was in a huge craft store, like Garden Ridge Pottery, trying to decide if I wanted to carve a pumpkin this year, or buy a wooden or ceramic one to paint, or even just by a pre-painted jackolantern decoration. My friend Tanya was definitely buying a ceramic one to paint, and I was helping her pick out supplies, and made sure she didn't forget to buy antiquing. I was looking at the different colors of antiquing, then realized I was actually looking at a spice rack with cinnamon and cardamom and nutmeg and chili powder and all spice and all sorts of other brown and red powdered spices.
I must have messed up something, because suddenly I found myself in the craft store jail. This was a row of cells along the back wall with dirt floors strewn with hay and bars for their front and side walls. Everyone could see in, like we were animals in the zoo. We got one little locker to put our stuff in, but we were only allowed one travel sized bottle of shampoo, one of conditioner, and supplies for the work they gave us. I almost got into more trouble because I was storing toiletries for the guy in the next cell, since he didn't have a locker. But when I explained why I had extra to the guard, he accepted that.
We also had laces and little bits of fabric and sewing kits, because our task while we were imprisoned was to make a Snow White doll from a kit they gave us. But when we laced up her little bodice, we learned they had tricked us, because all the kits had rips somewhere, so there was no way we could dress the dolls as quickly as they wanted. But we could still do it slowly, so we set ourselves to sew up the rips and lace up the dolls and have done with it.
Eventually they let me out, and I began to wander the store again to decide what decorations I wanted to buy. There was one really neat ceramic pumpkin I could paint, but it was huge and cost $324, which was a lot more than I wanted to spend. There were smaller ones, but nothing was quite right, and I really wanted to paint my own. I also wanted a rabbit, so I took a break and went into the garden off to the side of the store. They had okra, and I went to find Tracey to see if she wanted some for the gumbo. I knew she had frozen, but fresh-picked would be so much nicer.
When I found her, she was beside a discount table, and there they had this absolutely adorable do-it-yourself haunted house kit. It was only $24, and I decided THAT was what I wanted, instead of a ceramic pumpkin. I picked it up, and Tracey reminded me that I needed to save money for a rabbit. But I decided the rabbit could wait, and this is what I would buy that day. So I set off for the registers, and then I woke up.
I must have messed up something, because suddenly I found myself in the craft store jail. This was a row of cells along the back wall with dirt floors strewn with hay and bars for their front and side walls. Everyone could see in, like we were animals in the zoo. We got one little locker to put our stuff in, but we were only allowed one travel sized bottle of shampoo, one of conditioner, and supplies for the work they gave us. I almost got into more trouble because I was storing toiletries for the guy in the next cell, since he didn't have a locker. But when I explained why I had extra to the guard, he accepted that.
We also had laces and little bits of fabric and sewing kits, because our task while we were imprisoned was to make a Snow White doll from a kit they gave us. But when we laced up her little bodice, we learned they had tricked us, because all the kits had rips somewhere, so there was no way we could dress the dolls as quickly as they wanted. But we could still do it slowly, so we set ourselves to sew up the rips and lace up the dolls and have done with it.
Eventually they let me out, and I began to wander the store again to decide what decorations I wanted to buy. There was one really neat ceramic pumpkin I could paint, but it was huge and cost $324, which was a lot more than I wanted to spend. There were smaller ones, but nothing was quite right, and I really wanted to paint my own. I also wanted a rabbit, so I took a break and went into the garden off to the side of the store. They had okra, and I went to find Tracey to see if she wanted some for the gumbo. I knew she had frozen, but fresh-picked would be so much nicer.
When I found her, she was beside a discount table, and there they had this absolutely adorable do-it-yourself haunted house kit. It was only $24, and I decided THAT was what I wanted, instead of a ceramic pumpkin. I picked it up, and Tracey reminded me that I needed to save money for a rabbit. But I decided the rabbit could wait, and this is what I would buy that day. So I set off for the registers, and then I woke up.
Sunday, May 3, 2015
Post-Apocalypse ~ 5/3/2015
I dreamed I lived in a post apocalyptic world controlled by mutant people with no ties to their former humanity. We lived in an abandoned office building in rooms with red lights, because that way they couldn't see our lights and know we were there. If they found us, they would brain wash us into being killing machines like they were, and we'd lose all pigment in our skin and be milk-pale albinos.
The sun shone a harsh, purplish white in the sky and there was no longer free flowing liquid water. We had to drink bottled water and eat packaged junk food. We weren't supposed to have children because we were afraid the radiation in the atmosphere would warp their development and make them come out like the murderous white mutants.
I had a partner, and he and I would hibernate for weeks, then he would go out to forage for food packs, but if he stayed away too long, the radiation would make him forget what he was doing and who he was, and he'd wander back in days later all confused and I'd have to remind him about everything.
We decided to try to have a child, in spite of the risks, and that seemed to be something he could hold onto in his mind, so he got better at making longer foraging trips. I had to stay in our rooms to minimize my radiation exposure. Then, when it got close to time to have the baby, I was buried up to my chest in a special sand that would shield the baby from things in the air that could harm it as it was born. I waited in the sand room, which was very dark, except when the dim, blood-red lights were turned on for the birth.
After the baby was born, we had to all go out sometimes to see the doctor and get as much food as possible. The roads were awful. Huge sections had been blown out, leaving gaping holes in the middle of elevated freeways. Some of them were covered by grates, but avoiding those that weren't while driving at freeway speeds was like an awful video game.
Sometimes we got a friend to drive us. The first time, we had to give very careful directions, because all the streets around and through the old office complex started with "Yelling." We lived in the building wing that had its entrance on Yelling Cave Drive, which was the next left after Yelling Bear Drive. We had to hurry out of the car and up our elevator to the fifth floor where we had our rooms, because the white mutants had offices across the street, and didn't know we were basically squatting in the back wings of our complex. We were riding in the elevator with a coworker of mine and a fox when I woke up.
The sun shone a harsh, purplish white in the sky and there was no longer free flowing liquid water. We had to drink bottled water and eat packaged junk food. We weren't supposed to have children because we were afraid the radiation in the atmosphere would warp their development and make them come out like the murderous white mutants.
I had a partner, and he and I would hibernate for weeks, then he would go out to forage for food packs, but if he stayed away too long, the radiation would make him forget what he was doing and who he was, and he'd wander back in days later all confused and I'd have to remind him about everything.
We decided to try to have a child, in spite of the risks, and that seemed to be something he could hold onto in his mind, so he got better at making longer foraging trips. I had to stay in our rooms to minimize my radiation exposure. Then, when it got close to time to have the baby, I was buried up to my chest in a special sand that would shield the baby from things in the air that could harm it as it was born. I waited in the sand room, which was very dark, except when the dim, blood-red lights were turned on for the birth.
After the baby was born, we had to all go out sometimes to see the doctor and get as much food as possible. The roads were awful. Huge sections had been blown out, leaving gaping holes in the middle of elevated freeways. Some of them were covered by grates, but avoiding those that weren't while driving at freeway speeds was like an awful video game.
Sometimes we got a friend to drive us. The first time, we had to give very careful directions, because all the streets around and through the old office complex started with "Yelling." We lived in the building wing that had its entrance on Yelling Cave Drive, which was the next left after Yelling Bear Drive. We had to hurry out of the car and up our elevator to the fifth floor where we had our rooms, because the white mutants had offices across the street, and didn't know we were basically squatting in the back wings of our complex. We were riding in the elevator with a coworker of mine and a fox when I woke up.
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