Tree BnB ~5/29/2019

I dreamed I was visiting Houston, but I couldn’t stay with friends and I couldn’t find an opening anywhere for the whole of my stay. So I booked into an Air BnB for the first night, a hotel for two more nights, then another Air BnB listing. My flight arrived fine, and I got to my first lodging. For an Air BnB, it had very little character. It was a small, square, plain white room. The walls were white, the bed linens were white, there was no art on the walls to relieve the whiteness. I needed a shower, and the bathroom was a tiny cubby off the side of the room, but the water pressure was good and the water was hot. The white bed was piled high with white pillows. Everything was comfortable, even with the noise of the city outside of small, high windows. So I slept well.

I spent the next day working in the Galleria area. I was stressed and tired and I didn’t do anything fun. I worked late and didn’t get back to the hotel until late. The next day I got to do some sight seeing. I found this amazing shrine in the neighborhood near Rice. Hundreds of designs and motifs and figures were carved in golden wood against a deep mahogany back drop. The back wall was carved into a broad, scalloped curve to look like the inside of an enormous tree.

The images were all old, wild, and pagan. There were trees and vines and Green Men. There were nymphs of the woods and water and mountains. There were stags with spreading antlers, fairies wearing mushroom caps and dancing in rings. It was all beautiful, and gleamingly polished, but a little scary, all the same. It had a haunted forest feel, even though we were in the middle of Houston.

I spent my last night at the hotel and left early to check into the Air BnB room I’d be staying in the rest of my visit. I had lock codes to the outside gates and doors and a key box already, in my email, so I just showed up and let myself in.

There was a swimming pool that guests could use, so I decided to change into my swimsuit and have a swim. Just then, two small boys with white-blond hair came running in, laughing and shouting. They jumped up onto the patchwork quilted bed and down on the other side, dashing into an alcove hung with laundry and little flags and colorful streamers. They dashed through and around all this, playing tag or something. They barely noticed me.

I asked them if they lived here, and they stopped long enough to tell me they were Rusty and Devon, and they did live here, and their mom sent them up to find the cat. It occurred to me that I might be too early for check in, and what if previous guests hadn’t left yet??? But the woman of the house came in then and said it was fine. The boys ran out and I could hear them clomping down the stairs.

I asked if I could go swim, and if maybe the kiddos would like to join me, and she said that would be nice. She called down to the boys to put on their swimsuits, and she began to clear up the things hanging in the alcove. She was taking down laundry and winding up streamers as we talked. She told me they had another person staying up on the seventh floor, in the White Room, and more expected later in the week who would be up on the 43rd floor. Her husband would be busy all weekend working in the yard, so she hoped things would be quiet enough.

She had taken down enough of the hangings to reveal a platter of smoke-cured pork loin airing out on a little table, and behind another set of streamers I could see sausages hanging. She said the alcove was a smoking room, and she was glad they’d gotten it aired out in time for my stay. I assured her I didn’t smell smoke at all. She and her husband made hand-crafted, artisanal smoked meats, and I was welcome to try a slice. It would be $2, and I could start a tab. So she sliced off some of the pork loin for me, and I wandered out of my room chewing on it and exploring the house.

I walked down a tower staircase that spiraled against curved walls. The distance between the walls widened slightly as I got nearer and nearer the ground floor. To my left was a doorway leading to the family part of the house. I could see timber beams and a vaulted ceiling, and huge sloping windows looking out onto a green forest. I turned and looked up the stairway and saw it winding up and up within the bole of a tree.

I went outside and saw what looked like an empty but ordinary office building and parking garage behind the tree. There was an elevator going up the side of the garage, and a skyway from the top level to a room built onto the side of the tree. Suddenly I recognized it. I had taken that elevator and skyway to the white room the night I had arrived, but I hadn’t see the tree at all.

I went back into the entrance hall, that was within the huge hollow tree trunk, and I came face to face with the golden wood shrine. It wasn’t just carved to look like it was inside a tree. It was actually carved out of the inside of an absolutely gigantic tree. The whole house had been carved out of the tree, or built from wood removed to hollow the trunk. The tree must have been 30 feet wide at the base and hundreds of feet tall. And since trees grow outward, it was still completely alive, growing slowly all around me. The shrine was added to every year. The walls were stained to look like paneling, alternating cherry red and pale beech and old oak. Everything outside was green and growing. The swimming pool was cupped in a hollow among the tangle of enormous roots.

The sounds of the city had silenced, smothered in the undergrowth of forest that had sprung up. The parking garage and offices were growing over with vines and fern and moss. There were wires high overhead for the people higher up to reach their rooms, but as I strained to see how that worked, they were lost in the canopy of jade and emerald leaves that spread between me and the sky. There were no sounds except the high, soft piping of the birds and the lazy hum of bees. Dragon flies flashed like jewels as they started in and out of sunbeams. I went back in to look for my swimsuit, and then I woke up.

Space Oddyssey ~ 4/18/2019

I dreamed I travelled into space with the team of engineers from my very first job out of college. The others had all been before, but this was my first trip. Dozens of us were seated on benches in a big lobby sort of room, where everything looked like an oil rig, with steel pipe and girders and panels, painted dark blue with bright yellow accents. We were strapped to the benches, and the whole rig lifted off into space.

There were wide glass windows behind some of the panels. The steel slid back as we rose above the earth, and I could see the blue curve of oceans falling away, beneath clouds turned rosy by the sun sliding out over them from behind the planet as we left Earth behind. Stars began to shimmer in the darkness around us. There was the thick belt of the Milky Way, but we turned away from it. Against the darkness now I could see a shaft jutting out from below the window, a long spar of triangular truss work. The far end slid slowly into alignment with a constellation of three bright stars, until the stars gleamed st the apex of each point, and someone leaned over and explained that this meant we were heading right. This was the Delta Path, navigated by this heading.

The rest of my group was in Squad 1, and went up to the cafeteria 15 minutes before me, as I was in Squad 2. They said I could come. Eat in their lunchroom, I just couldn’t go up to the galleys until my squad was called. But that when it was, I needed to go to the back staircase, up onto e floor, then over two halls to the left. I went up when my squad was called, but I couldn’t find my group in any of the dining halls.

I wandered for a bit, until I found a large dark room with only a few people standing around. Three of them were from my group, so I went to join them. They gave me an orange jumpsuit to put on over my blue coveralls, like the ones they all were wearing. I watched nervously as one of my friends stretched out on what looked like an old-fashioned dentist’s chair.

The chair was padded with an orange foam made up of a sort of triangular honeycomb of memory polymer. The operators bound my friend to the chair with a thick sort of ragged cord that looked like it was loosely woven of seaweed. It was a bright greenish yellow, with tufts of frayed fiber sticking out all along its length. Once he was tied down, they used a hose to soak my friend down with a clear, pale blue-purple serum. When he opened his eyes, his stare was blank and glassy. He got up from the chair and left the room. One by one my other coworkers laid down in the chair and got doused and left. Then it was my turn.

I laid down in the chair and tried to relax. They bound the chord around me, and I thought it would feel rough, but it was soft and feathery, though strong. I was reasonably comfortable, lying on the foam, and the air was dry and fresh smelling, in spite of the dank look of the walls and the pools of serum. My orange suit rustled a bit when I moved, but that was the only sound as the serum coated my feet, then my legs, then my torso. As it poured over my face, it didn’t feel wet, or hot or cold, or anything at all. But it seemed to permeate my pores and flow into my eyes and nose, though I could still see and breathe.

Then, there was someone else there, inside me, and myself me went into a little glass box. I could see and hear and feel everything around me, and I knew the thoughts of the other mind within mine, but I had no agency. The other mind was in charge.

As I got up and walked out of the room, I learned that this was a specialist that was needed for the work we were doing in space, and that this was the only way to get their expertise to the work site. None of it was permanent, nor meant to be sinister. And really, knowing the mind within my own, I could see the truth of it, and felt very safe.

The technician I was hosting explained it all, and began to tell me about the movie that was in the making that would tell the story of the work we were doing and how it would be accomplished. They’d gotten some big name stars. Mark Ruffalo was going to be playing the role of the green feather rope! And then I woke up.

TBTT#41 Kitten Anxiety ~ 7/19/2018

I dreamed that there were dozens of kittens lost in the woods around my house. The momma cat couldn’t find them, but I caught sight of them, and started to bring them in to her to so they could eat.

At first there were kittens that looked about 8 weeks old, and would probably have been fine on their own, but I wasn’t sure they were weaned, and figured they probably weren’t great at hunting, so I brought them in. Then I heard more mewing when I went out to get something from my car, and there were even smaller kittens, about four of them. I brought them in for momma cat, hoping she had enough milk.

It was halloween, and I was still trying to figure out what to be, but then a huge thunderstorm started, so I figured I wasn’t going out trick-or-treating anyway, so it didn’t matter. But I started having a worried feeling, and couldn’t get it out of my head that there really should be more kittens. I went out, and sure enough, there were six huddled under a truck, hiding from the rain. They were only about 4 weeks old, it looked like. One by one I brought them in and snugged them down with the others.

A trick-or-treater actually came by, and when I went to give him candy, he thanked me, then held up a tiny, tiny kitten, all belly and skinny legs, eyes still closed, no more than 4 inches long, and its fur was bright blue. He said there were more, but he couldn’t get to them.

So I went out into the rain, and sure enough, there was an orange tiny kitten and a calico tiny kitten too. I brought them in, and was really confused about how many kittens one cat could possibly have, but we had a few adult female cats, so I asked my aunt to see if any of the others looked like they might have given birth. Thankfully she found one that had some milk, so the teeny tiny kittens started to feed.

Then a friend of mine came in and held out what at first I thought were some stones from the driveway. But they were kittens, born very premature, only about an inch and a half long, and a translucent ivory color. I couldn’t see how they could be alive, but they were still moving. I was trying to figure out what to do with them, and then I woke up.

My Teeth Were Purple ~ 3/7/2019

I dreamed I traveled in time with Claire Beauchamp on her second trip. But instead of Scotland, she’d gone back to North America just at the beginning of its colonization. She was going back to find the Native American she’d been married to. Somehow, her modern day husband Frank found us and cane with us.

We tried several times to leave Frank with the English settlers, but he finally caught up with us on the evening before a boar hunt. The hunt had been planned to supply a feast to celebrate Claire’s return. The people we had joined were willing to take Frank in, too, because they didn’t have any proscriptions against partnerships among more than two people.

Frank was considering this option, which was good, because he’d been pretty violently angry when he found us. But he’d never even considered he might be able to keep Claire in his life without dragging her back to the future with him. He was taking the night to consider, and if he joined the hunt, it would mean his acceptance of the offer to become part of the group.

Claire and I were put up in a hotel, because she was being kept separate from it all until an agreement was reached, and I was just kind of assigned to her, since they didn’t know what else to do with me. In the middle of the night, I was startled awake by a hideous, squealing screech. The boar had launched a preemptive attack against the camp.

As we were scrambling around in the darkness, an even worse sound rang out. Men began to scream in terror and agony. But by the time we got to a window, everything had gone silent. Claire was sure that she had heard both her men screaming, but we couldn’t get out, and we had to wait until dawn to find out what had happened.

One thing that had happened when the sun rose was that time had shifted back to modernity. There was a huge tapped off area in the field beside the hotel, and in the middle lay a brown hillock covered with wild, rough brown bristles. It was the boar. It was HUGE. And it had gores Claire’s native husband, then Frank as well, when he leapt in to try and help the other man. The people decided this made him one of them, and they were busy getting him cared for. Claire rushes to help.

I wandered off and ended up at a shopping mall. It was one of those places that’s kind of shops clustered around a hotel and convention center, and there was an environmental and gender equality convention going on. I ran into some friends from New Orleans who were there to give a talk about bird populations. They got me in for some of the talks, which was really interesting.

Slowly I began to realize that all of the talks were kind of being judged. There was a panel that was evaluating what they learned to decide if it might inform policy change. They were all old and middle-aged white men. And they all obviously had money. The chairman was wearing a late Victorian suit, with pin striped trousers, a slate gray waistcoat, shining boots, and a beaver hat perched on one knee with his gloves. He had a round, pasty white face, with a sharp chin, small dark eyes, and a mop of iron gray curls. He had a silver watch and chain.

I was wondering who he was and what he might accomplish by hosting and evaluating these talks, when I felt something kind of weird in my mouth. I pushed my tongue against one of my molars, and it broke off. I could feel the jagged edges still planted in my gum, and the raw little bump of tissue within them. I spat out the crown of my tooth, and... it was a golden brown on the outside and purple inside. It looked like a chunk of amethyst, but it crumbled like sugar in my fingers. I showed it to my friend, and we were all just aghast. But it didn’t really hurt, so I hoped it would be fine.

Then I woke up. And I checked all my teeth!

Strange Anatomy ~ 3/3/2019

I dreamed I was going on a band trip, and went to change my clothes. I pulled down my jeans, and the lower bit of my stomach sagged down over my thighs like a flabby brisket. It was mildly repulsive, but I figured it was just loose skin, since I’d started losing weight.

I was walking down the street to get to the band bus when I realized I should use the bathroom, so I stopped into a hotel nearby. My mom was staying there, and I had a room key, so I went into her room. Mom wasn’t there, but I figured she wouldn’t mind. I popped into the bathroom, but when I went to put my jeans back on, the lower paunch of my stomach had dropped down to around my ankles.

 I stared down at the flappy, jiggly band of flesh, with my belly button at the end sort of pointed up at me. I tried to haul it back into my jeans so I could get on with my trip. As the skin and fat and muscle  passed through my hands, I could feel a loop of sort of round tubing inside.

I realized with horror that my intestines had herniated through my abdominal muscles, and a length of them was pushing the skin out into this elongated belly flap. I relaxed my stomach as much as I could and tried to feed and poke my intestines back into my gut where they belonged. I got most of them back in, except I could feel a small, hard, balloony little knob of them on my left side that wouldn’t fit.

I kept one hand holding the knob against my belly, and tried to call my mom with my cellphone in my other hand. I needed my mom to come take me to the hospital. Then I woke up.

TBTT#40 Seriously, Where’s My Car? ~ 7/15/2018

I dreamed I was on a business trip with a friend to meet with an important client. I was staying in this little cabin, and had use of a car that went with it, but I also had my own car.

I had driven to our client dinner, and was running a little late. By the time I got there, the client company CEO and my friend had already started drinking tequila shots. So I was over here trying to maintain a level of professionalism, and the two of them were giggling together like school girls.

I tried to have a serious talk with my friend, but I wasn’t too successful. She stopped giggling for a while, but then, when the snack trays got passed around, she started taking two of each snack where there were only three left, because she knew I would never take the last one. I tried to have another serious talk with her about appropriate behavior, but that’s when I realized I wasn’t wearing any clothes.

Finally the dinner was over, but since everyone else was tipsy, they wouldn’t believe I was fine to drive, so they sent me home in a taxi. The next day I had to drive the car that came with the cabin, and it wasn’t the greatest. 

After work that day I drove to the store to get something for the drive home, and I forgot where I parked, and what my car looked like. The city had one of those loaner car things where you find a car near you and then leave the keys in it when you’re done, so I found a city car in the store lot and started trying to find my car.

While I was on my way to the restaurant we’d dined at, my friend called to ask for a ride to the airport. I took her there, then found the restaurant, only to learn that my car had just been towed. When I went back to get into my city car, someone had taken it. I was still trying to sort out how I’d retrieve the two cars I had running loose in a strange city when I woke up.

An Alternate History of Mary Todd Lincoln ~ 1/16/2019

I dreamed I was researching but also somehow observing the life of Mary Todd. She was a beautiful and intelligent young girl in a wealthy but common family in medieval America. She had smooth golden hair and a placid pale face. Abraham Lincoln was a charismatic and clever but dissipated king in his thirties. Mary was an avid constitutional scholar, but had no desire to be married to a craggy older man who ran with such infamous companions as the irreverent William Shakespeare and the debauched Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

But Lincoln had his heart set on Mary. He pursued her honorably, and her family encouraged her, and boasted about her new constitutional ideas, like Emancipation, which further intrigued Lincoln. He was definitely making headway, especially as he spent less time with Wolf and Will. But in an unwise moment of impatience and frustration, he had a bit of a Thomas Becket moment, and whined to his friends, during one of their now-infrequent carouses, that couldn’t a king just kidnap a wife anymore?

Shakespeare laughed it off, but Mozart had become obsessed with Mary on his own account, and took the question as license to play out his own dark fantasies. He convinced Shakespeare to help him, and they quietly assembled a team of rowdy young nobles to carry out the plot.

But Will got cold feet, after hearing Wolf brag about how he might just act as Abe’s “taster.” So Shakespeare sent a secret message to the Todds, who flew into a frenzy of preparation. They baracaded the house, sent off a young serving girl in a lavish dress on horseback under full escort out the main gates as a decoy, and then Mary, in a plain dress, went with the novice serving the abbess of a nearby convent. They got into the abbess’s pink Cadillac to drive Mary to the safety of the convent.

They were almost to safety, but I was worried they wouldn’t make it, because the nuns would only approach the convent in the car by driving an intricate maze pattern along their rose-lined rosary walk. The pink roses were lovely against the silver gray and pearl pale cobbles of the walk, but the tight turns required low speeds, and it was taking forever.

So I got involved myself, and led a party of village boys down toward the path of the decoy party. As the kidnappers road up, we cheerfully ran out to accost them and impede them, as though we were simply excited to see such a noble hunting party in our village. But Mozart lost patience and turned vicious, whipping the boys out of his way and charging us down.

We scattered, and no one was hurt too badly, and I crept back to the Todds’ house, regretting my actions. I could see through the windows that Lincoln himself had come to sort out the mess. He had himself reached the convent before Mary and the novice, and had brought Mary back home. Because of the notoriety she had gained as knowledge spread of the plot, for some reason this meant she had no choice but to marry Lincoln, and she was becoming reconciled as they grew to know each other better and respect each other’s strengths.

But Mozart was running rampant across the countryside. He caught up with the decoy party and flogged the men nearly to death and raped and beat the poor serving girl who wasn’t Mary. He put out a call for tribute to ostensibly fund a lavish wedding for the king, but was keeping it for himself. Abe and Mary married quietly and began to work together to set things right, but America was tense and on edge with the murmurs of Mozart’s ambitions and plans to steal Mary and the throne. Then I woke up.