Infestation ~ 3/27/2015

I dreamed that for one month, just one month, I needed to live in an apartment and leave my home in the Hill Country vacant. When I went back after that month with a friend to see how things were going, I stepped inside and there were huge insects everywhere.

The floor was thick with half-inch long ants, carrying their egg clusters and larvae from one wall in the living room to the opposite wall. There were roaches as long as my finger crawling all over the walls. I crunched my way into the kitchen, and enormous beetles were devouring something dead in a corner. Moths as big as bats kept running into my head. Only half of the lights worked, so there were thousands more scurrying things than I could even identify, covering floors, walls, ceilings, everything.

Every article of furniture I'd left behind was riddled with holes and infested by vermin. My couch was a total loss. I didn't even want to open the closets to inspect the clothes I'd left there. Opening any of the kitchen cabinets was right out. I decided my best option was just to burn the place down.

Then people started showing up. There was a group of guys that had been squatting there, and using my home as a place to stash the exotic animals they were selling illegally. They brought in three big cats that looked like lynxes, except they were longer-legged, bigger, and their fur was silky and golden, with no spots. One of them saw me, and came bounding up to me to attack, but I subdued it, and the men ran off.

Next a friend I hadn't talked to in a while pulled up in an ancient pick up truck. Turns out she was also using the place as a stash for drugs she was selling. Her supplier showed up wanting payment, got mad that I was there, and shot her. Then his gun jammed, so he attacked me with a huge sort of lance. I grabbed the pointy end as he jabbed it at me, and drove it into the wall. The end he held had a saw-toothed blade, and I managed to angle it up so it caught him in the throat. I could feel, all the way down the length of the lance, the sickening grate of blade against bone as the blade went all the way through his neck, and I decapitated him.

My friend who had been shot was unconscious, and the friend I'd brought with me helped me get her back into her truck. Our own car had been engulfed by the insect swarm. We got the truck into neutral and rolling down the driveway, but we couldn't find the key to get it started. We managed to pull into a little town just up the road, because it was all down hill. By that time, the truck's owner was awake, but refused to let us use her truck, not even to get her to a hospital.

So we got out in the town and she drove herself off. We found an old woman and asked her for help. she told us to hop into her own pick up truck, which was the size of a smart car and made out of porcelain. She took us to the guy who had sold it to her, and he went off on his sales pitch about three antique cars he'd fixed up. He rattled off a bunch of letters and wouldn't tell us what they meant. I tried to call my mom to come get us, but couldn't get a hold of her. I finally told the guy I couldn't spend more than $1000, and he said he had a Trans Am I could have for that, but it wasn't in the best shape.  Then I woke up.

Life in a Celebrity's Entourage ~ 3/26/2015

I dreamed that a friend of mine was showing me the bed set she was putting on her wedding registry. It was several very restful shades of royal blue and turquoise in a water pattern.  With ducks.  On each pillowcase, and in rows along the sheets were life-size pictures of a male mallard and a male pintail paddling along. I thought they were... pretty hideous really, but a whole set of them was on sale for $29.99, so I went ahead and bought them for her.

Then it was my turn to join the pony brigade to escort a minor celebrity around the French Quarter.  The pony brigade was made up of a small herd of My Little Ponies, which each stood about knee high, and which each had a miniature twin about six inches tall. Their leaders were a set of white winged horses with red manes and tails, streaked with rainbow strands, and purple sparkles on their flanks.

We took the minor celebrity to the grocery store in Castroville, where we hunted out the perfect type of sausage, because that's what they wanted. We looked at store-made italian sausage and andouille and boudin. We also showed them chorizo and parisa.

After that, I took the celebrity back to Miss Clemson's select boarding hostel for celebrities, where they were staying. I sat guard in the parlour all night, and the next morning I had pancakes with lots of butter and molasses while I waited my turn to use the shower in hall bathroom. I didn't have anywhere to be, so I let one of the other celebrity helpers go first. While I was waiting, I woke up.

Clan Fraser ~ 3/25/2015

I dreamed I was dating Jamie Fraser. He brought me a haunch of venison to roast over the fire. After dinner I went to load the dishwasher and a red wasp flew out of it right at my face. I ducked and ran and decided the dishes could wait.

Then I went to a basketball game where Jamie's nephew, who was smaller than the other players, showed that he was just as good, so they stopped teasing him and respected him, just like a feel-good kid's movie.

After that, I played mahjong with Jamie's female relatives, who included Maggie Smith. We played by placing bottle caps and tiny basketballs and bottles of orange and pogs with different soda logos onto a map of america. Maine was a real coupe because it was divided into four regions that could score together, as well as ferry connections to the rest of New England. But you had to establish a claim to it just right or you'd get trapped there.

Then we all moved out to a remote, forested island, and built a play ground for the children, and I road the bright red merry-go-round with Jamie's cousin's little girl. And then I woke up.

Ice Skates, Golden Gate, and Light Parades ~ 3/20/2015

I dreamed I was ice skating with my little buddies, but instead of being a flat oval, the rink was more like a Hot Wheels track or roller coaster. You started up high and tucked yourself down and let gravity take over, then at the end you climbed back up the stairs to go again. We raced, and I tried not to win, but my higher mass made it hard to slow down.

Then I lost a skate, and was tooling around the track looking for it. This rapper with lots of chains and gold teeth, surrounded by fans and groupies, saw me searching, and gave me a brand new pair in exactly my size, much better than my old pair.

I stopped off for a while at a friend's double shotgun house in uptown, that they were renovating, but then it was time for me to go to San Francisco for a conference.  I missed the exit for my hotel, coming south from the airport, and ended up on the Golden Gate Bridge. Fortunately I was in the left hand lane, and there were plenty of turn arounds built in. I managed to exit on Cooper Street this time, and found the Embassy Suites on the shore.  All the rooms had balconies, and valet parking and room service were all included in the price.

So I handed off my car keys and the belhops said just leave my luggage and go get checked in.  All the rooms had balconies, was the big selling point of this place, and sure enough my room had a balcony looking over a beach. It also had a broad ramp from the balcony down to the sand. My friends Joanna and Arianne, who were joining me for the conference, showed up then, and we talked about what we wanted to do.

I really wanted to go find some fried chicken and eat down on the beach. Joanna was game, but Arianne didn't want to go to the beach at all. When I asked why, she said it was because of killer whales. I looked down from my balcony to the moonlit sand and waves. The sea was gentle and transparent and even in the moonlight, faintly, opalescently turquoise. The water was so clear that we could see the dark, feathery branches of cypress trees inundated only at high tide. I didn't see any killer whales, and didn't even want to swim, just sit on the sand and eat chicken, but I agreed that was more of a day time plan.

I went outside just in time to catch the end of the Box Parade. A bunch of giant boxes strung with imaginative loops and whirls of Christmas lights and set on carts hauled by a couple of people each were making their way up the road and over another nearby bridge to the warehouse they'd be stored in. I kept trying to get pictures, but people kept walking between me and the parade and messing up my camera's focus.

Then suddenly it was the next day, Sunday, and my two friends and I were making our way from the Embassy Suites to a nearby corporate office building for the conference, via a tunnel system that connected the two. I was just grumbling about being up early on a weekend, when I woke up.

Diamonds, Apples, and Good Scotch Whiskey... Oh, and Pirates ~3/12/2015

I dreamed my friend Stefi worked in a mall jewelry store. One day she had a severe allergy attack, and needed medication, but she didn't have any cash, and the pharmacy only took cash. To solve this problem, she bought a diamond ring from her store at her employee discount, on credit, pried the diamond out, and sold it for cash at retail price.

After I was done visiting her, I went to the mall theater to watch the new Disney Pixar movie about underwater robots. As I watched carefully, some characters off to the edge of the screen stepped down out of the movie, coming to life as humans. I followed them out of the theater, and they accepted me into the family they were forming.

I settled into our new home and got to work on a set of work instructions I was writing that had to fit into a table shaped like an apple. Someone kept messing with my styles, so that some of the lines were too long and didn't fit into the apple shape. I got it all fixed finally, and set it aside. Then I realized that I had also created an apple-shaped template for a crossword puzzle, and my family set to work all devising their own puzzles with apple themed clue lists.

One of the mom-aged women in our family group answered her mother's puzzle correctly, except she used the name she wanted to have, Rose Ellen, for the clue that she was the answer to. During the night her mom snuck in and corrected it to Rose Marie, and in the morning they started fighting about it. We were all on a boat in the Caribbean, and when the mother-figure's husband-figure came to mediate, they threw him into the water.

The owner of the movie started coming after us, then, because this family was totally not kid-movie appropriate, and Disney still owned the rights. He followed us in a pirate ship, and the husband that had been thrown overboard had been hauled up and rescued, and was after us, too.  But they weren't very good sailors, and we got away by tricking them into running aground on a reef.

We came ashore ourselves some ways off, and went to go find an apartment or rental house to live in. Then this ghostly gray old woman showed up with stringy wet hair. It turned out the husband-figure had died, but was reanimating this old woman's corpse to come haunt us.  We all stepped back and let his wife deal with this.

He/she finally convinced our family that the least we could do was go back and help him clear the bar that he'd found not far from the ship. So we went back and found a bunch of mostly empty bottles.  He told us to just mix all the remainders into some big bottles, because it didn't really matter. We got started on that, and I wandered over to one end of the bar. There was a tiny rack on the wall filled with tiny bottles of Tobasco. I asked if he wanted these, too, and he said he'd already taken care of them.

At that moment I saw someone about to tip at least three drams of Glenmorangie into a communal bottle, and I grabbed it away and explained that that is NO WAY to treat good whiskey, and I started looking for a small bottle to put it in on its own. One of the family asked me about it, and how to pronounce the name, which was Braranfrgh. We decided it would be something like "braganfire". I found an unused biological specimen bottle, put the last of the scotch into that, and very adamantly told everyone NOT TO MIX this with anything.

Then a super-polite British pirate who looked like Colin Firth came to harass us, but we convinced him that all that big pirate ship over there needed was to have the water bailed out, and he should go commandeer it, so he went off and did that and left us alone. And then I woke up.

Keep Calm and Pass the Salt ~ 3/11/2015

I dreamed I through a Valentine's day party. It was in the hidden attic of a mysterious old home. An evil spirit began possessing my guests. Their eyes would go filmy gray and they'd try to hurt someone. The only way to drive out the ghost was to either render the host unconscious so the ghost would get bored and find someone else, or to put salt in the host's mouth, which the ghost couldn't tolerate.

No one liked the salt idea, but then one of my friends attacked me while possessed, and in the process of trying to hold her off of me and render her unconscious, I felt something snap and I think I choked her to death on accident. So we all sat around eating salt while we tried to figure out something more permanent. When it struck midnight, the spirit disappeared.

The next year on Valentine's Day we gathered again in a park. It turned out the spirit had followed us, so again with the salt. I was pretty sure it was sticking with me, so I started carrying around bottles of saline solution. I'd use them to spray the perimeter of whatever room I was staying in so the ghost couldn't follow me. I'd done the whole garage, and felt pretty secure, until I realized my mom had been befuddled by, but prompt to clean up, the white lines of salt that had dried in front of the doors.

My family home was in the French Quarter and it was so big that it fronted on St. Philip, but my bedroom overlooked the next street over, which was, of course, St. Louis.  A house on St. Louis St. caught fire, and I could see the flames from my bedroom window.  A firefighting aircraft that looked like a jet fighter plane landed and they hooked hoses up to it and started pumping water. But then my mom called me and asked if I could take my little sister and stay with someone Uptown for the night, just to be safe.

So I went to get my car, but I got lost somehow, because instead of Ursulines and Governor Nichols, the next streets up were Robert and Euphonium and I couldn't remember where I'd parked my car.The streets were filled with injured people and flaming debris. I finally got it back and got home and my sister was packing and I was trying to decide which friend Uptown to call first when I woke up.

More Weird Geography ~ 3/10/2015

I dreamed that New Orleans had a reasonably sized Chinatown centered at Canal and Dauphine, and an equivalent Japanese ethnic center around Canal and Basin. On the edges of these they'd build a Chinese courtesan house and a Geisha tea house, respectively, in competition with each other. The tea house had a Wild West theme, and was actually a front for the Japanese mafia. I was trying to drive home by turning left at the courtesan house, but I kept getting detoured to go by the tea house instead, so I got out of my car to walk.

I found myself Uptown somehow, looking down a steep hill at an enormous park. Thick jade green grass sprang up in the shade of huge old oak trees, and almost the entire park was covered by an elaborate, brightly colored jungle gym. I needed to cross down into the valley and up the equally steep banks on the other side, and the quickest way to do this was by a path that led through the jungle gym. So, to the confusion of two little boys playing by themselves to my left, I stepped down onto the path and climbed my way across.

The path let out into a long science lab, set up in a long landing over a basketball arena. I was very confused about where I was at this point, and I asked a lab tech working at a bench to my left which university this was. He said it was Loyola. But I could see the buildings of the CBD when I looked out the sky lights, so that didn't seem right. But he said no, this was the Lower Garden campus, not the Uptown campus. Only I could still also see Tulane buildings out the window. But it didn't really matter, because since I could see the CBD, I knew my way home.

I wound my way past the basketball stadium into a wide hall that looked like a really fancy corporate office building lobby, except for the ornately carved gothic cathedral entrance in one corner. I could hear mass being said inside. I met up with my friend Tanya, and we went out the doors, only to find that instead of streets and buildings, the campus let out on this side right onto the banks of the Mississippi.

Here they had built elevated walkways and arcades out of stone, and these seemed to hover ghostly in the thick wreathes of mist that rose from the river. There were little flat boats with poles, and it all seemed very medieval English. We wandered transfixed up the covered walkways, staring down into the dark water beneath. We wound our way back to the main foyer, past little shops and coffee houses.

When we got back to the lobby, they had set up an absolutely free lunch buffet. We grabbed plates and piled them high with cookies, hot dogs, and carved turkey and ham. We went back a few times. Tanya started telling me about a book she wanted to write, loosely based on her relationship with her mother. She described a moving and climactic ending scene to the first part, where the mother in the story, an avid ice hockey player, is in the middle of a big game when the river ice cracks beneath her, and she's being pulled under by the current. Her daughter rushes out onto the ice to grab her hand, but the scene ended on a cliffhanger, and I didn't know if the mother was pulled to safety or not, and then I wondered how much of that was real, and if Tanya had lost her mother to a skating accident, but I didn't like to ask.

Since we were finished eating, we decided to head out. When we left the lobby this time, we found ourselves on the San Antonio River Walk, at the corner of St. Ann and St. Philip Streets. I could look down from the top of the stairs and see the river and the stone bridges over it. I called my mom to find out if she could drive us home, since it was getting close to time for her to get off of work. She said sure, but we'd have to give her a half hour or so. I asked how we should get to her parking garage from where we were. She said we could start off either way, as long as we were heading towards down town, so we began to walk up St. Philip while she thought of how to direct us.

We had to walk through a maze of parking garages that wanted to charge us just to walk in, but we managed to avoid that, and finally Mom told us just to wait where we were, which was a bus stop just off of I-10, and she'd come get us from there. Then I woke up.

Suffer the Little Children to Come unto Me ~ 3/9/2015

I dreamed my college band was playing a homecoming game at my high school football stadium. I rushed over to join them as an alum of both schools. I got to the stands and was handed a packet of music. I got my horn out, but before I could get my lyre and flip folder together, the drum major called Mortal Kombat. No problem, I have that one memorized. So I put my horn together, stood up with the rest of my section, took a deep breath, and blasted out the opening bars.

It sounded AWFUL. I couldn't figure it out. I knew the notes. I was playing them right. What was wrong? I lowered my horn and looked down at it, thinking maybe my tuning slide had gotten pushed all the way in.  Nope. My tuning slide was gone. Missing. Not there. So I started hunting around the bleachers for it.

I found it, thankfully, and the band was on the move, getting ready to go down for half time. But then I realized that I didn't have the show music, and I was in jeans, t-shirt, and fedora, and not the three piece suit uniform the rest of the band was in. So I decided I would just sit out half time. I was sitting in the empty stands when I heard a familiar voice greeting me. A super creepy guy I'd gone to high school with was standing there.

I put out my hand to shake his in greeting, but he somehow stepped forward and up on a bleacher, and then my arm was between his legs, with my hand on the other side of him, and he laughed and squeezed his legs together to trap my elbow in his crotch. Super creepy! But then he let me go, and went on chatting and catching up like normal. Some other folks from my high school band showed up to keep me company, and then the football game was over.

My best college friend had left the game right after half time, but her boys had wanted to stay with me, so I had promised to bring them home the next day. So we set out to stay at my house for the night, but as we turned onto FM 471, I saw that it was blocked by a big concrete wall up ahead, so I pulled off to make a three point turn and go back up Victory Lane.

This required for some reason that I pull off onto the shoulder, and I went into the grass a little. At which point, a man with a gun and a bunch of dogs burst from a house nearby, and he started yelling at me about driving on his grass. I tried to explain what I'd done, but he dragged me from the car, leaving my two little buddies terrified in the back seat. I called to them not to worry, to just try to get some rest and I'd be back soon.

The guy dragged me into his house while his dogs circled me warily, sniffing at my legs. I tried to make friends with them, and they didn't really warm to me, but they stopped snarling, at least. I realized one of them must have bitten me, because one of my legs was splattered with blood, and I was bleeding on the kitchen floor. A little boy of about five came creeping toward me with a rag, and helped me mop up. His three-year-old little sister watched warily from the shadows. Then his older brother came in.

I apologized for messing up their kitchen, and they just shook their heads and kept helping me clean up. Then they rushed me outside and into my car, and they got in after me and begged me to take them away to the nearest child welfare place. Since it was too late for any agencies to be open, and I wanted to get us all away before I made any phone calls, I rushed us up to my house.

I got them and my little buddies all tucked into my bed, and went out to sleep on the couch. My dad was there, and I told him the whole story, and he was livid about the man who'd threatened me, and the bruises he'd seen on the man's children. We heard a buzzing sound, and found the oldest boy had brought his cell phone, and his dad was trying to call him. We weren't sure what to do. Then the dad sent a text asking if this Laura Berwick person could be reached on frequency FM 100.4. He was trying to trace me, but we didn't figure he could. I wanted to go to bed, but then I looked out of the living room windows and saw the sky was light, and it was morning.

When the kids woke up, I told them I'd be calling Child Protective Services and taking them there. At that point, my little buddies got scared that THEY were going there, too, but I reassured them that no, I'd be taking them home to their mom and dad right after that. So we all went out to the car and then I woke up.

New York City Is So Weird ~ 3/3/2015

I dreamed a college friend moved to New York City to open a convenience store. It was very successful. I went up to visit him, and was browsing the aisles when I felt like I was in danger. I ran out of the store and into fields of scrubby brush and dried out reeds. I crawled beneath some bushes, but I didn't think they were hiding me very well. But I heard someone coming, so I didn't have time to move.

I was horrified to see that it was my friend who was hunting me. He had a big camera with a long lens that he was using extend his range of vision. I lay perfectly still as the lens swept across me, then came back. I knew he had found me, so I curled up in a ball and shut my eyes and played possum.

Somehow I escaped and found myself on the set of CSI: NY. They were filming an episode about a prep school girl who gets murdered at the spring fair.  She was on the planning committee for the fair, so the first suspects were her fellow committee members. The fair was magic themed, sort of Harry Potter meets My Little Pony. There were huge balloon formations floating around in a bright rainbow of colors. Then the girl stumbled out into the middle of the floor, fell forward, coughed up a small puddle of blood, gave a pitiful little gasp, and died.

I thought it was a great performance, until I realized she was really actually dead. The ghost of one of her classmates appeared to me. She was an unpopular girl that everyone had thought committed suicide. Her face was swollen and purple red, and she said it was because her killers had forced her to drink bleach, and had splashed it on her face.  She indicated that the other girl had died from ingesting bleach, too.

I was really cold, so while I pondered this, I decided to take a hot bath in my mom's big jacuzzi tub. I put some bleach in first, then waded across the tub to drain the bleachy water. The tub seemed to grow to the size of a small swimming pool as I waded, and I began to worry that I'd get bleach burns myself. I made it across, though, got it all drained and rinsed out, and rinsed my hands and legs off well, too.

I filled the tub with hot water, so I could soak up to my neck. But somehow I accidentally knocked the faucet sideways so that half the water went in the tub, and the other half onto the bathroom floor. I didn't realize this until the tub was full and the bathroom completely flooded. I got the water turned off and tried to think what I could do.

I looked around me, and was astounded to see all sorts of people and animals going past. That would be weird enough, but all of them had gull beaks. Their faces elongated forward into a slender beak with a slightly bulbous end. Cardinals, actual gulls, dogs, horses wearing battle armor face guards, even people, all wandering past with their faces stretched into these long beaks. And then I woke up.