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.

Traveling Two-fer ~ 2/26/2014

I dreamed of traveling two nights in a row.

The night before last, dreamed I pulled up to a McDonald's in Bryan, Texas, with my mom, but 6:00am was too early. They didn't open until 6:30am.  We waited for a while, then I wandered in to get breakfast.  I really wanted sausage egg and cheese biscuits, but somehow I ended up with waffles drenched in honey, a cup of coffee that I sweetened with strawberry jam, and several bags (small burlap bags) of chocolate and nougat candies that spilled on the ground, and I scooped them up and put them back in the bags, but I couldn't keep the beetles on the ground from getting mixed in.

I was headed for a cabin in the pine woods in Mississippi, but I'd come to Texas first to meet up with some people.  While I was talking with my mom, I told her about a dream I thought I'd had when I was very small that I'd been at a babysitter's who had a brother or cousin who was a little person.  It seemed odd to me, because I was sure I'd never actually met any little people, but Mom said, no, actually, that had been the case.  We had lived for just a couple of months in a town called Stair Step, Texas, and my babysitter had lived with her brother who was a little person.  I decided I would drive back down to I-10, instead of up to I-20, so I could visit Stair Step, and try to meet this person again. But I woke up before I got there.

Last night I dreamed that I lived in the French Quarter, which was located in London near Soho.  My dad was visiting me and meeting my friends.  One of my friends was a grad student in biology, and I helped him feed his snakes.  The snakes were all small, like garter snakes, but had the loveliest cream and toffee dappled patterns.  We fed them cubes of freeze-dried worms like I used to feed my betas.  My dad met another friend who was doing graphic design, but we had a hard time convincing him that making a cartoon of Beethoven dressed as a hipster with a background that integrated the score from one of Beethoven's symphonies was any sort of real work.

After Dad left, some other friends came to visit.  I took them to a famous cemetery that was a few blocks into the Marigny.  It was a big square-shaped plot of land with a circular moat encircling the most imposing monuments.  Among these was Hugh Hefner's grave, which all my friends wanted to see.  We crossed the moat stream over lovely little stone bridges that leapt gracefully in slender spans from deep gray rocks frosted with emerald green moss.  It was a spot of quiet repose and peace.

Except for the funeral home on one side of the cemetery, which was haunted.  We didn't see any apparitions, but large antique dolls that were dressed in lace and sat on small rocking chairs around the home got up and began to chase us.  As if they weren't creepy enough standing still.

We ran back to my house in the Quarter, hoping to outdistance the ominous spirits.  We got tangled up in an all-female flash mob on the uptown lakeside corner of the enormous Esplanade and Rampart Street roundabout.  The flash mob was wearing fluorescent pink, orange, and yellow sports bras and wrist and ankle bands and black biker shorts, and they were all dancing to "Hot, Hot, Hot".  We got through them, crossed the roundabout (I looked the correct way for traffic at all times), and were on our way back into the Quarter when I woke up.

Sunlight ~ 2/21/2014

I dreamed a world where vampires existed and were out in the open, like in Charlaine Harris' books.  I bought a large house on Royal St. right by the cathedral, that was an old warehouse renovated into an open, airy, three story home for vampires and vagrants to live in.  The vagrants were warned about the vampires, and had to be okay with it, and understand the dangers, and the vampires had to promise not to bite anyone in the house.  The only problem was that one whole wall of the living area was windows facing the sunset, and the wall that caught the sunrise had many large windows, too.  As long as the vampires weren't touched by rays of direct sunlight, they'd be fine, but a single beam of sun could burn, and if it hit the face, could cause the entire body to go up in flames.  Because of the buildings around the home, the only time direct sunlight entered the windows was right at sunrise and sunset, and I made sure there were dark, heavy blankets to wrap up in, and went through several test runs with willing participants to try to find the spots in the large room where the sun wouldn't touch.  I was one of the testers, because I, too, was a vampire.

So we found some spots, and we each laid claim to one, and stashed the blankets around the rooms. Each day a bell would sound to warn us of the coming of the sun, and we'd scamper to our stations, wrapped up, and then the bell would tell us when it was over and we could come out.  But someone kept moving furniture and stealing blankets, or putting holes in them, and we were getting burned and killed day after day. I finally took to building a fort out of blankets and the coffee table, and someone came by as the sun rose and tried to kill me by stealing the blanket hanging over my fort, but fortunately I was also mostly wrapped up in a second blanket, and only got burns on my hands.

That night I went out and bought lots and lots of huge blackout curtains, and hung them in all the windows, but I had to weight them down with lead to make them too heavy for a person to open.  We figured that should do the trick around sunup and sundown, but also let us have the indirect light the rest of the time.

What I remember most, though, was thinking how beautiful each brilliant shaft of gold was, streaming in, glinting, piercing us like daggers.  Terrifying, painful, ruthless, but beautiful.

Dancing Dinosaurs ~ 2/18/2014

I was at a church function in a stone-pillared, gothic-revival style cathedral. It was some sort of fundraiser for the associated catholic elementary school. As our boat skimmed down the stream in a side aisle, I stared bemused at a stage full of Tyrannosaurus rexes dancing to ragtime piano with boaters on their huge heads and canes in their tiny hands. I walked out of the dark cathedral into the late afternoon sun and wandered down curving suburban lanes lined with two story double shotguns. I found myself at a pale blue clapboard house with white trim and a huge fiberglass facade on the upper porch of the Mad magazine kid wearing a gray fedora and a huge, toothy smile.  Basically it was a Marching Owl Band frat house. I spent some time inside helping clean things up and get the rooms ready for furniture to be moved in. When I left, it was dark, and I wandered into a neighborhood of small brick homes, lost and unsure where I was. Suddenly I realized I was being followed, possibly by the dinosaurs, but I'm not sure, and I had to get back where I'd come from, then to the airport as fast as I could. I saw a white horse dappled with black grazing in the tall lush grass of a moonlit field. His bridle was hanging on the wooden fence. I called him over, made friends, put the bridle on, and rode him at a gallop down the streets, taking short cuts through alleyways and jumping small drainage ditches. I made it back to the MOB house and warned them that something was coming, then rode on, over the tracks of a wide rail yard as the sun rose, trying to reach the airport, where I would fly to Europe. But before I got there, I woke up.