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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.