Worst Reunion Ever ~ 2/26/2015

I dreamed I was back at Rice for a big Homecoming reunion. I had agreed to go as my ex-husband's date, but we were driving up separately from San Antonio to meet in Austin and drive over. And maybe we'd want to see a movie in Austin first with my mom and my friend Ruthie. So Ruthie was going to drive, but there was construction on I-35, so we had to go through all these restaurant parking lots to get to a clear section of highway. I was worried we were going to be late, but then I realized I had no idea which movie we were seeing, or what time it would be. So instead I just got dropped off at the hotel where I would spend the night, and then the ex and I would head to the reunion the next day.

When we got to Rice, we immediately separated. He went to go check out the new construction on the football stadium, and I was supposed to meet my college ex-boyfriend in the CAAM building. What I quickly learned about the CAAM building was that it was mostly designed for people who could teleport, which most CAAM students could. It was a huge, multi-level library looking building with staircases that looked like they'd been designed by Escher and Dali that night they got drunk together on mezcal in Juarez. There were twisty spirals that drifted sideways, leaving gaps in the middle without any railing, and the banisters undulated such that sometimes it was too high to reach, and sometimes too low, and to stay balanced as the steps went up on one end, I had to grasp the steps above me.

And then, some times you were supposed to jump down three feet to get to the floor, because if you stayed on the stairs, they took you off over a yawning gulf above the next floor down, instead of having a landing right on the floor you wanted. And some of the landings were broad catwalks over large halls, with no railings and floors that were rounded down at the edges. And of course, I couldn't teleport, so I had to take all these stairs. My friend that I was meeting knew most of the secrets, so I followed him.

We sat in on an intro level class, and there was a video with random shots of hummingbirds flying and calculus formulae and chimps using sticks to fish for termites, and all of this said something profound about computer architecture, but I definitely didn't get it. Then my friend met up with his wife and I couldn't keep up with them, so I went to the lake where a rock concert was going on, and found some of my band friends to hang out with, but they weren't feeling well.

So finally I got on the school bus to go home, and that's when I realized I was no longer wearing clothes. So I was glad that the bus would let me off at my driveway so I could dash up to the house quickly and not many people would see me. Except the bus driver went right past my driveway and came to a stop a half a block down, in front of a Dairy Queen. So I had to get out there, and I figured I'd just run as fast as I could, but as I got down off the bus, I felt horribly achy all over. I could barely stand upright, and couldn't walk faster than a slow shuffle that sometimes turned into a crawl when I fell.  I was still stumbling painfully up the block to my driveway when I woke up.

Talking Dogs and Phantom Coffee ~ 2/25/2015

I dreamed I was one of the witches from Charmed. I was riding around Castroville in my godfather's RV with my mom, and we were stopping to say hello to all the people he knew, and each time they'd ask about my godmother, so he'd have to tell them the news that she'd passed away. Eventually I asked to be let out in the Country Village neighborhood so I could walk my two Chihuahuas. One of them was gray brindled, and the other was light tan. And they could talk. It was really early in the morning, so there weren't many people out yet, so it was okay that they were talking out loud to me, until a guy came out with his Spaniel, and we almost got caught.

So I put the dogs in my van and started driving north, to our house in the Hill Country. I hadn't reached Rio Medina yet, and there was a bend in the road. I could see children playing up ahead, so I slowed down. A bunch of them ran into the road right in front of me, and I honked and braked hard. I looked out and saw one of them lying on the verge, but I couldn't stop right there. I managed to stop the car down the road a bit, pulled off, put it in park, and ran back.

It turned out the little boy lying on the road was fine, and the adults were panicking over a little girl who had fallen down a short cliff up above the road, and had hurt her legs and couldn't get up or down. But they'd already called for help and I couldn't do anything, either, so I decided to continue on my way. I went back to the van, and two of the kids had climbed in my window and were giggling at my ex, who had somehow lost his clothes, and was trying to discretely hide away in the back. I hauled the kids out through the window, and got in to drive my ex back home where he could get some more clothes.

We got home, and while he was dressing, I watched a Disney special on television that honored all the characters they'd had through the years that were brothers.  Like Rabbit from Winnie the Pooh and the long lost twin brother he found. And Aladdin and his brother. And Robin Hood and his brother. And Mickey and Donald and Goofy all had brothers too, apparently. And, of course, Chip and Dale. It was an interesting special.

All throughout this dream, I kept thinking I was awake, lying in bed, and could smell cinnamon vanilla mocha. Then the smell would go away, and I'd wake a little more and wonder if I was really awake, and where the coffee was, and then I'd go back to sleep, until I finally woke up.

TBTT#9 Three Dreams from Spring 2012

May 16, 2012

I dreamed I went back to school to pick up a BS in Biology, but part way through my second semester, I decided to switch and get my PhD in English lit. Pretty boring, as my dreams go... But if the devil's in the details, the dream was possessed by a drunken demon. I was living in a cute little apartment in New Brunswick, Maryland, because it was right across the border from Auburn, where I was going to school, which was in North Carolina, which makes ZERO sense. I mean, what would I be doing on the East Coast, anyway?

May 14, 2012

I'm currently forgetting an awful lot from my latest dream, BUT... I know it involved a sort of Ice Capades Christmas special featuring His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI singing silent night in English, wearing a Mr. Rogers-esque red and white sweater with snowflake pattern, firmly clutching the hands of two children who were making sure he didn't fall over. Later Princess Kate came on the ice, and everyone started chanting, "All hail Princess Kate!" She was a pretty good skater. The kicker is, all of this was happening in... Hallettsville, Texas. And the KJZT hall bathrooms were a wreck, let me tell you. (By the by, I've never been in a KJZT hall in Hallettsville. Does it even have one?)

April 25, 2012

I dreamed I told my phone to shut up. This morning I found it on silent. Good thing that's not my primary alarm clock!

Immortal Shape-Shifting Dinosaur Vampires ~ 2/14/2015

I dreamed that two powerful vampires were gathering a huge gang of their kind to try to take over a science museum/zoo/hotel complex. It turns out the two of them were dinosaurs once, but they were immortal and shape-shifted down through the long years of evolution to avoid extinction and detection, and now they were vampires, but they wanted to be dinosaurs again, because, who wouldn't? To do this, they needed access to the dinosaur bones in the paleontology wing of the museum.

I was a vampire slayer, but I wasn't a very good one. Spike and I went to the hotel and I staked one vamp myself, while he took care of all the rest. We went back to the house where I lived with a bunch of other slayers. I decided I really needed to take a long hot bath, but people kept coming in and out while I soaked in the tub. A friend of mine came to me for advice. She sat on the other side of the bathroom while I leaned on the side of the tub, staying modestly hidden as she talked.

She told me about how her ex-husband and she had planned to take out a home improvement loan to fix up the house they needed to sell. But he had gone into the bank without her, taken out way too big a loan, and put down the fund she had saved to pay for her elderly mother's retirement care as collateral. Now the fund was being sucked dry, and she didn't know how she'd be able to pay for the care her mother needed.

Then some of the other slayers came in to tell me that one of the girls had run off and killed herself. Then Spike came in to tell me that the two main vampires, whom we thought we had destroyed, were still alive and were at the museum. So I got out of my bathtub and we headed back to the museum.

Along the way we found the highway littered with bodies. Somehow the vampires had cast a spell that killed anyone with a physical or mental disability and made the cars around them disappear. We had to be so careful driving down the freeways that by the time we reached museum, the two vampires had gotten to the bones they needed, and had transformed themselves into a Tyrannosaurus Rex and a Brontosaurus.

We began arguing with the dinosaurs, reminding them how much the world had changed since their kind had lived. We pointed out to the Brontosaurus that plants were completely different now, and there were no woods or wetlands nearby for her to graze. What exactly did she think she was going to eat, being a dinosaur in our times? And what exactly did she think her carnivorous partner was going to want to eat first, when she was the only other natural prey he had around? We succeeded in turning them against each other, and were about to defeat them when I woke up.

Go Rice Owls! ~ 1/30/2015

I dreamed that Rice Owls men's football had made it to a bowl game, and I was going with the MOB. I was also one of six women chosen to perform in the pre-game extravaganza.  Rice would be playing Texas Tech University in Inverniola, and the theme of the pre-game show was "Six Flags Over Texas". I would be dressed to represent the Mexican flag, in an embroidered white peasant blouse and a broad red skirt trimmed with bright multi-colored ribbons.

The other five women and I were floated down into the arena in a huge, six-sided floating lantern sort of contraption. Each side was hung with banners signifying each of the six flags. The banners split down the middle like curtains, and the lower ends tapered into points. The lantern drifted down slowly along guy wires, then hovered above the stadium. As we each clutched the gap in the banners to hold them shut around the lantern, the whole thing began to spin, and the bottoms of the banners flared out. I saw video of it later; it looked really cool.

We sank toward our target on the field. There was a little depression in the ground for each of us to catch our feet in, which would anchor the lantern. I ended up being the key point, and we almost didn't land on center because my legs and feet were only just barely long enough to catch and hold in my anchor point. But we landed all right, and within our time limits, and then we all danced out onto the field.

Rice won the bowl game, but it was close. This meant we advanced to a playoff game, but this year something amazing happened. It was the first year that female teams were allowed into the same bowl and playoff system, and, through some really improbably statistical fluke, the Rice men's team ended up going to the Aloha Bowl in Hawai'i, to play against the Rice women's team!

I didn't get to go to that game, and I didn't have the right cable channel to watch at home. So I found a big Dave and Busters sort of complex that also had a fitness center with lots of televisions. We got them to change one of the TVs to the game and we watched as... THE RICE WOMEN WON!!!  And then I woke up.

Epic Fantasy and Lattes ~ 2/4/2015

I was an ancient Egyptian brought through time, exploring the relics of my culture, lost and buried in a post-apocalyptic world almost devoid of human population. There were a number of us, scattered across the region. Two of my close friends were with me as I climbed down into a cavern to find a broad stone hall with painted statues of the pharaoh looming huge above us, on either side of a small canal that still carried clean water into the temple.

One of my friends was chosen as our leader, and given the power to turn into a bird. Back outside, the sun was setting red in an amber sky. A small flock of birds flew across the sky overhead, black silhouettes of four or five raptors, two small falcons, a hawk, a large eagle, and something huge with a ridiculously long tail that I realized was a peacock.

I followed them down into the valley, and found my friend in our lodging. There were a number of men and women hanging around, trying to ingratiate themselves with her, hoping to become her partner. The scene slowly evolved into a superhero musical, where Superman's goal was to save my friend's life to get into her good graces, but my friend wasn't in any danger, and wonder woman and a unicorn and some people dressed like Cirque de Soleil parrots were acting as his conscience and upbraiding him for even thinking of trying to put her into danger just so he could pull her out.

My friend turned Superman down and we all went to Starbucks.  Since we'd been at the museum to see the musical, we got pinstripe cups that we could get one free refill in. There were also samples of a soft, buttery cheese in an orange rind, coated with what looked like sugar crystals, so we tried some of that. It was weird. Then I woke up.

Kittens, Kids, World Travel, and Vampires ~ 1/29/2015

I dreamed that I was walking home from college classes, and I passed through a particular subdivision every day. Today, outside the first house on the right, there was a mother cat and a bunch of newly weaned kittens playing. Across the street was a somewhat older kitten, bony and thin. He was mostly white, but had a black and brown tabby pattern in blotches across his face and back. He came up to me and I picked him up and went up to the door of the house and knocked.

A woman opened the door, and I could see that the house was humming with the activity of at least a dozen children and just as many kittens, all of them white with either black and brown tabby, gray tabby, or blue Siamese point markings over it. I asked if the starving kitten was hers, and she said it was one that had been missing, but if I wanted it, I could have it, because the cats and kids were getting to be too much. I asked if I could have one of the younger kittens, too, and she said I could, so I picked out one that was about half white and half silver tabby, with a cap of soft gray stripes between its ears, but a mostly white face.

I set off to carry them the mile between there and home, but about three blocks away, I remembered I had left my backpack. I went back and got it, and set off again, but then the smaller kitten was missing. I went back and found it and the woman gave me a paper sack to carry the kittens in. We poked some holes to better aerate it, folded down the top, and I set off carrying it carefully in my arms. I decided to call the bigger one Bexar and the little one Medina. Bexar was very calm, and never presented a problem, but Medina kept slipping away.

On about the second trip back to the woman's house to see if Medina had made it back there, it was night already, but the yard was ominously bright. When I got close, I saw that an outdoor fireplace that had been lit to keep the chill away for the outdoor cats had caught the lower branches of the small, spindly trees on fire. I shouted to the people in the house as I began to fling water from the bird bath and the cats' water dishes onto the flames.

The woman came out and we put out the fire, I sorted through the kittens to find Medina, and set off for home again. Then I realized that I'd picked the wrong kitten, and went back, and the woman asked me if I could also take two of her children and raise them with me, because she just couldn't manage. I felt so awful for the two kids she was willing to give away to a stranger, so I took them, but I made her sign a paper saying that she agreed I should, and gave me permission and guardianship and all that.

So I handed the sack of kittens to the boy, who was about seven, for him to carry, and I picked up the girl, who wasn't yet two, and we set off. We stopped off in the Ammansville church hall to use the bathroom and get a drink of water. There was a big meeting of some sort going on. Somehow kids and kittens got shuffled away, and I was asked to accompany a young woman on her trip to Russia.

I figured, hey, paid trip to Europe, and she was the daughter of someone pretty important, so I didn't feel like I could refuse, so off we went. We landed in Brussels, and took the crossing there. I'd rented a little red car, and was pretty confident I could drive just fine, since at least it would be on the same side of the road. We passed through customs, changed our money, bought some cheap designer knock off shoes, and set out.

In the next town we met up with some of my friends, which was good, because they were much more organized about where they were going, and knew which roads to take, so we agreed to follow them. The elevated roads were really rickety constructions of steel supports and wooden boards, and it really looked like we were driving on old train trestles. It was pretty terrifying, but apparently one of the roads we thought we'd take was basically a roller coaster track, so it was a good thing we'd met up with people who knew I'd never be able to handle it.

We stopped for the night in a tiny town, and had ham and potato tacos at the pub. We started talking about our route, and there was one road I was interested in taking, but it turned out it was basically a horse track that circumnavigated the entire country, and that wasn't really feasible. So we decided to go to Moscow, then cross into Turkey and go see Hagia Sophia.

Then a woman came into the pub, and she had a baby head hanging around her neck and was screaming about vampires. It turned out that Angelus knew that Buffy was part of our group, and had turned the woman's baby into a vampire. The woman had cut off its head, because she had to, but instead of turning to ash, both parts of the body were simply incorruptible, and, if reunited, could reassemble, so she had carried the head into the village to find out what she should do, but she was also half-crazy. She was very clear that the child was a message to someone, and we all knew it was Buffy, and that Angelus would kill again and again if we couldn't get to him.

Some folks in the group kept telling Buffy she needed to take a step back and think about who was doing this, and why. I got frustrated and started shouting that it was more important to figure out when and where if we were going to stop him. I stormed off down a hallway, and then I woke up.