Wednesday, February 26, 2020

A Whole New Game ~ 2/25/2020

I dreamed that I only needed a few more credits to get a history degree, so I went back to college. I ended up registered for a history class about the history of bowling and a math class focused on crossword puzzles. After only remembering to attend one class my first week, I went to the campus store to see if they had wall calendars so I could write down my schedule and remember better.

I ended up only finding the campus store departments that sold athletics gear and memorabilia and canoes, but I couldn’t find books and stationary. I was running late for work so I has to leave. I worked at a bar run by the guy who played Sam Merlott in the True Blood series, but his real name was Bill Stewart. He was a great boss. His birthday was coming up, so we were all planning a party.

I was supposed to organize some party games, so I decided to invent a bowling/crossword puzzle mash up. The idea was, you bowled a ball across the floor to the wall where either a bunch of pins were lined up or some skee-ball holes were installed. If you knocked over a pin or sank a hole, then you could try to guess either the down answer or one of the across answers arranged on the wall above that pin or hole. I planned to create a puzzle with clues all relating to my boss.

I had everything mostly set up, the drinks and snacks were ready, and guests were starting to arrive, when Robert Downey, Jr. walked in. We learned it was his birthday, too, so I started to rewrite the clues to the crossword to include him. I was very pleased that one of my answers was “Bran Stark” because to the original clue, “Fantasy character with the same initials” as my boss, I could try to work in a Tony Stark reference as well. But then I woke up.

Tuesday, February 11, 2020

A Mostly Victorian Adventure ~ 2/11/2020

I dreamed I lived in a historic American city, in about the 1920s, and my life was a sort of mashup between Middlemarch and Gone with the Wind. I was a cross between Scarlet O’Hara and Rosamund Vincy, and my Dr. Lydgate/Ashleigh love interest had a medical practice on 9th Flu Street and was engaged to my older, uglier sister.

The doctor’s name was Neville Clair, and I knew he preferred me, but he was a very upright, principled, honorable man, full of high ideals. To make my sister angry, I would call him her Angel Clair, after the Thomas Hardy character. He would turn red when he heard me, but she never got it. She just thought I couldn’t remember his name.

I wandered away from my mother while she had me out shopping for a bridesmaid dress to wear at my sister’s wedding. I made my way through a luxurious hotel and scandalized everyone by entering the colored areas. But on the other side of the hotel was the 9th Flu Street office, and I was determined to win the doctor away from my sister.

When I found the doctor, I tried to start flirting, but he hurried me out of the shop to find my mother and sister so he could take us all on some outing. We were all walking along a lake when I saw two puppies treading water a ways from the bank. They were too little to swim well, and weren’t making any progress toward the shore. I jumped in to save them, and the doctor jumped in after me, and we brought them in to safety, and I decided to keep them.

As the doctor was driving us home, I got him to promise to marry me instead. Then I asked him why the city had a 1st Flu Street, a 3rd, 5th, 9th, and 10th Flu Streets, and whether it had anything to do with a series of flu epidemics in the 19th century. He said that was exactly it, that each street marked the limit to which that numbered epidemic had spread. Then I woke up.