Back in High School... Sort of... ~ 4/11/2014

We lived in the house I grew up in, which was outside a town that was rice university, Castroville, and lakeside mall all sort of cobbled together. I found a small alligator hiding in a glass-topped curio table in my bedroom, and we found sharks in the muddy water of the tank in the back yard.

I was in high school again, and friends with the kids from the comic Luann, and Luann herself was dating Jeremy from the comic Zits. Jeremy had a helicopter that he could fly, but also had a hired pilot for it, and he used it to take us all to the mall, though they always had to fly us to the book store to keep Jeremy's mother happy.

The bookstore was having a sale on all things renaissance, and had called in a costuming specialist, so we were all going to talk to her about fabrics and patterns. I discovered I had a book of portrait artworks from the time of the Tudors and an enormous wardrobe box of ribbons and trims and lace made in the style of that period. We brought these along, and I told the others that once they knew what they needed, they could take their pick.

In the box I found for myself a silk gauze a-line over dress in medium green, embroidered with willow leaves, meant to go over a darker green dress that the consultant would help me design. There were matching green laces in different widths. It was going to be perfect. There were pink and ivory and blue ribbons in the box, too. We were all set.

As we looked through the paintings in the book, I began to formulate a theory that our current penchant for historical, factual, proportional accuracy in art and literature may have begun with the enlightenment and the rise of rational scientific process, but it really came to the fore with the development of photography, and the idea that a photograph is a truer representation than a painting. Everyone was very interested.

I returned home to find a party of Japanese dignitaries visiting to negotiate my marriage to a nobleman's son. My least favorite aunt had apparently been arranging this in secret, actually writing letters to the boy, supposedly from me. My mother say me next to the head ambassador at dinner, and I told him politely that while it was certainly an honor to have them here, I had known nothing about this until now, and was not interested in marrying into Japanese high society and leaving my home.  The table cloths and dress shirts were blazingly, pristinely white, their hair and dinner jackets were coal black, and candlelight gleamed from the chandelier and tapers on the table, shining on silver and crystal and cuff links. I looked into the strange amber eyes of the ambassador and said all of this calmly and firmly, with courtesy, and without wavering or looking away. He was very impressed, but before he could decide what to do, I woke up.

How the Other Half Lives ~ 4/4/2014

I dreamed that I was walking down the one lane, cul de sac road I grew up on. As I watched, large mansions were built, shopping centers went up, and people appeared.  There was a fried chicken stand over the first hill, so it wasn't all bad. A big storm was coming, and I was waiting anxiously for my mother to come home.

I woke up for a bit, and when I went back to sleep, the street, the malls, the houses, had all turned into a sort of live action Mario game, where we directed our little avatars around a maze towards food and prizes, and that's how we ourselves traveled through the huge indoor mall that had grown up around it.  I kept trying to get to the fried chicken stand, but my character kept running out of energy, and I'd have to start over from a random point.

I woke up for a bit, and when I went back to sleep, I found myself in a part of the mall that was a huge five star hotel with an ENORMOUS brunch buffet, and I was going around with my tray loading up on eggs and ham and fried pork chops and hot chocolate. I took it all back to my family's suite.  We were very rich, and this is where we lived while we were in town.

I woke up for a bit, and when I went back to sleep, I was back out in the country, trying to get to our large country estate.  It was in a little town on the Medina River that somehow had a medieval church. The church was partly falling into ruins, but we still used it.

I woke up for a bit, and when I went back to sleep, I was back exploring our town lodgings.  I was the second daughter of the family, and I lived with my father and his mother and his grandmother.  I was taking care of my great grandmother, who gave me a beautiful pink satin dress.  I went to put it on, then explored our suite of rooms. In my father's library there was a large set of books each telling a ghost story or paranormal legend set in the Castroville and Medina Valley area.  He also had a big empty room that he used as a design and fabrication area for his machine work.  I found my rooms, and my grandmother's.  I went back to the main hall or drawing room that was all yellow with green trim, and had a double staircase that wound up and went behind a wall.  I was curious about what was upstairs, so I went up the right hand side, but the staircase was just for show. The right hand stair went behind the wall to a landing about a foot and a half wide, where it met the left hand stair and went back down.  So I went back down and waited for the party, at which I would apparently meet several suitors.

I woke up for a bit, and when I went back to sleep, an old, grandfatherly man was giving me and some other young girls advice on where to keep a handkerchief given to us by a suitor, depending on where he stood with us.  If we only had friendly feelings, we should keep it in our purse.  If we wanted to encourage him, we should keep it tucked in our sash or sleeve.  Only if he we accepted a proposal of marriage were we to keep it in our bosom.

Then I finally woke up for real.

This Miscellany Brought to You by Benadryl ~4/2/2014

So, my allergy meds are completely changing my sleep cycle.  I know my dreams have been just as zany as ever, only... I can't really remember much.  So here's a brief glance into my past few nights, one snapshot from each dream.  It's the best I can do.

Three nights ago I dreamed that I was visiting Mrs. Schultze, a neighbor lady near where I grew up. She had decided to become a confectioner and open a candy shop, and her kitchen counters were covered with trays and trays of candies in all colors of the rainbow.  They were kind of like soft taffies with crunchy sugar coatings, cherry, orange, lemon, apple, blueberry, grape, vanilla, chocolate, butterscotch. They were beautiful and delicious.

Two nights ago I dreamed that I was driving my white pickup truck down I-10 and my check engine light kept flickering on and off, and there was a strange metallic scraping noise.  But I was pretty sure I knew what it was.  I pulled off to the side, popped the hood, and sure enough, this extruded sheet of metal that covered the engine had slid out of place.  All I had to do was slide the front tabs back into the slots behind the grill, screw in a few screws, and it would be fixed.  That's when I realized I was stopped on the Atchafalaya Basin bridge, and there was no shoulder, so I was blocking a lane, and I'd turned my lights off.  I scrambled to turn the emergency lights on, because I could see a car coming, and just as I pushed the button, I woke up.

Last night I dreamed I was on a boat.  It was a big paddle wheel steamboat cruise ship on the Mississippi, and I was sort of a fly on the wall as two middle-aged housewives were putting on fancy lingerie and party dresses and talking about their latest cougar conquests, because it was THAT kind of singles cruise. I decided this was not the place for me, so I got off the boat in New Orleans, and went to walk over the bridge to the West Bank. Only the passenger section of the bridge was just a set of bare iron girders arching over the river.  Foot traffic was heavy, though I can't for the life of me figure out how we all stayed balanced.  Something distracted me, though, and I turned too fast and started to fall... and woke up.

TBTT #2 Three Disturbing Nights ~ January 24-26, 2012

Three nights in a row of very bad sleep and very strange dreams. Two shorter accounts bookend one of the weirdest dreams I've ever had. By now you know that's saying something!

January 24, 2012

Wow. You know what's not restful? Dreaming that you rent a room in a big, run down suburban house, and you overhear the neighbor across the street tell the owner that he saw a man in the upstairs window, and the owner says, yeah, there's a guy squatting up there, it's cool. And then in your dream you wake up at night to see the shadow of a guy through the windows by your door (yes, big, interior, floor to ceiling glass windows with the blinds half open) and he's just standing out there staring at you. Yeah, that's not restful.

January 25, 2012

The saga of unrest continues. I woke up this morning from a dream where I was leading a combination of my high school band and my college band through a field rehearsal because all the band directors were out. We were rehearsing for the first time at a new performance venue that was so out in the middle of nowhere that we had a cable car tram to bring people from the parking lot. There were these two red-headed boys who were on the phone the whole time because their mom was in the hospital dying, and I kept telling them to leave and go be with her, but every time I turned around they were still there. I was trying to get the band to play Start Me Up, and they were really sucking. Then I realized only 15 of them were playing, and when I looked for the others, I saw a pair of HUGE FREAKIN' CAVE HYENAS stalking through their ranks. The hyenas had mesmerized the band, who all dropped down to all fours and began to stalk in unison. I shouted to get their attention, and the lead hyena turned its head slowly and looked up at me with glowing golden eyes... And then my alarm went off and I nearly fell out of bed I jumped so high. I was shaking and drenched in a cold sweat. I'm still kinda jittery.

January 26, 2012

Sorry guys, don't remember much about the dream this morning. I know it involved meeting Marilyn Monroe in a bar that had once been a barn, and later trying to clean up the same barn after having been abandoned for years, at which point it was haunted by the ghosts of two little girls whose mother's boyfriend had killed them, run off with her, and later killed her at a gas station.

There you have it. Something in the moonshine THAT week!

Can't Sleep, Must Escape ~ 3/19/2014

I dreamed there was an enormous, greasy, yellow-faced Italian man who had kidnapped a woman I knew.  He dressed in the finest Victorian fashions and spoke with immense charm, chivalry, and courtesy, but he was evil evil evil.  Now I think of it, I think he was one of the villains from Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White.  He and his wife, who was obsessively in love with him, were holding this woman, but she was pregnant, and finally they had to bring her to a hospital to have her baby.  I worked at the hospital, and made a plan to help my friend. It was hard, because the wife was also pregnant, and came into the hospital, too, to keep an eye on their prisoner.

Finally the babies were born, and we were able to focus on her plan.  Instead of sending them home together, like the wife insisted, I got a doctor to say my friend had to stay for longer.  We secretly put her on a train to take her across country, but the man came to stop us.  He ran at me, and I stabbed him over and over with a pencil, and got away.  We held a sort of ritual that would keep him from getting well, but he lingered. I finally went into his room to finish him off, but found his wife there strangling him.  So I let her.

I had to leave town after that, to get away from the wife who now wanted to be my best friend and constant companion.  I ended up in the town I grew up in, sitting in on band practices.  I started working on a design for a t-shirt.  The graphic on the front was a picture of a sort of Mr. Potato Head type of sock monkey, where you could pin extra features on, which in my dream was a common toy.  This was captioned, "If you think Obama is the worst thing that's ever happened to this country..." and the back had a list of awful things like the Great Depression, Slavery, and other awful things America had been through, including some sort of plague.

One day, I was listening to a few friends of mine practicing a flute trio, and one of them was trying out a new bass flute, when we learned the woman was coming.  They joined up with me to help me stay away from her, and we began traveling again. We decided wherever we stopped that night, we would have a home-cooked meal of spaghetti, so we went to a grocery store and bought three heirloom tomatoes the size of soccer balls for the sauce.  We met up with the band again, because it was traveling by bus to a performance in a different state, and they could drop us off at a house one of my friends said would be safe.

The band bus stopped in the town where we were going to stay to go to a restaurant and get dinner.  My friends decided to eat with the band, leaving me with the tomatoes at our safe house.  I didn't want the tomatoes to go bad, so I stayed to make the sauce, even though I don't actually like tomato sauce.

The house we were going to stay in was a big old home with four rental units branching off of a communal living space.  It was an absolute wreck.  Leaky roof, damp walls, bookshelves and rags and blankets and tables and dirty clothes everywhere, and all the doors were slatted shutters.  The kitchen smoked up as soon as I started cooking, and we had to open all the windows so the fire alarms wouldn't go off, because it was about 3am and I didn't want to wake up any of the other tenants.

I finally gave up on cooking or eating because I was too tired, and went to lay down on my mat on the floor of the room I was supposed to sleep in.  But I couldn't get to sleep because someone was playing an old, out of tune piano in the common space.  Louis Armstrong showed up and said it sounded great, and kept me awake talking about it after that. And I couldn't sleep, and I couldn't sleep, and then I woke up.

Dad Dreams ~ 3/17/2014

Last night I dreamed I kept trying to find a way to hang my father's portrait so it wouldn't fall down, but it kept falling. The night before I dreamed I kept trying to get a pencil sharpened so I could write down some fading calculations Dad had written on the garage wall for a design project I needed to finish for him, but every pencil I tried, the tip kept breaking off no matter how many times I sharpened it. I went through hundreds of pencils and a number of sharpeners before I woke up.

Spanning Time and Space ~ 3/11/2014

I was a girl living in a house on the seaside. It was my birthday and a storm was rolling in. The waves rose up dark jade and lapis blue in the moonlight, and their crests became white horses. It was some how a sort of magic I had, latent but powerful. I remembered it for years, through all sorts of loss, until I was a young woman. Again I was at the seaside on my birthday, and the waves began to rise, and an older man saw the horses begin to form, and came to find me. It was my father, whom I'd been separated from years before, and we were a family again.

I left the sea and went back home to Walmart to buy a winter coat.  Some of the coats were wool and some were fleece, some were canvas, cotton, puffy silk, and some were even rabbit fur, but they were all white or very pale cobweb gray. I bought a puffy white silky one, and headed to a clearing in the snow-cloaked woods. There, in a small cave, I met Ayla, the Cro Magnon girl from Clan of the Cave Bear. I brought Ayla back into town, bought her a puffy white coat like mine, let her live in the spare room of my house, and got her a job at Costco, where I was a sort of staffing manager. We frequently went back to the woods to the clearing by the cave, then back to the house in town, which was three stories with the bedrooms on the third floor. It had a side door and stair, so you could come home and go straight upstairs without anyone noticing you. I particularly liked this because Ayla often had friends over. It was fine, they were nice, but I've always liked my space.

There was sort of a marauders map of the Costco, so I could keep track of Ayla in the store, along with the other employees, and make sure there was a good distribution of helpful staff throughout the store. The only thing I ever bought there was large amounts of vanilla yogurt. But all the labels were white and sky blue, so it was always hard to find the brand and flavor I wanted. Ayla, with her keen eye for detail, was always my choice to help me find the one I was looking for.

Another storm began to blow in, and we went back to the clearing. Everything was midnight blue shadows and silver moonlight streaking through the fluttering patches of cloud above. We found Mulder and Scully, part of the forensic team from Bones, and part of the crew from Firefly waiting in the clearing for us. Apparently there was an imminent attack expected from space, but massing above us was a fleet made up of every spacecraft from every sci-fi movie or television show ever made, along with all the craft ever designed by all the space programs on Earth, and captain Malcolm Reynolds could control them all remotely from Serenity, which had landed in the clearing, and would soon take off  to protect the Earth.  Mal wanted to know if we wanted to go with him.

So me and a prehistoric teenager went up in a space ship to inspect a fleet of mismatched, hyper-futuristic craft including a Firefly, the Enterprise, a LOT of TIE fighters, some star destroyers, the space shuttle, birds of prey, and countless others, under the command of one super-attractive captain, so we could help save the world. And then I woke up.