Dreams

I have had a lot of weird dreams over the past ... well, mostly forever. The last few years have involved me being in a large liminal space (library, mall, bar-inside-an-airplane, hotel, etc.) and a lot of dreams about packing to go somewhere, usually overseas, but always on an airplane.

I have been on an airplane precisely TWICE in the past 8 years, to and from a getaway last February (2024). It wasn't a great experience, though the people-watching was great. I've turned into my mother in this respect--she loved to eyeball all the people in the airport.

Last night I was packing up to go home for the summer from college. Except I wasn't in a dorm; I was in the bedroom of our previous (nearby) house. And we drove (we meaning Sparky and me). Or rather we were driving. A lot. We had to go over one mountain to get to the town we were staying in (in Colorado), visiting distant (not-real) relatives? My sister and her husband were there; my brother called. [These "relatives" bore a sneaky resemblance to my neighbors across the street...)

Anyway.

To get on to our next stop, as we discussed, we had to go back over the mountain to meet up with another highway, and then go BACK OVER the SAME mountain on a different road to get to ?Denver? or wherever we were off to next. I thought this was ridiculous to have to go over the same mountain TWICE more. There's also a lot of road construction in my dreams.

I am pretty solid on what all of the disparate parts of this means to me, but I am thoroughly sick of all these wide-open spaces and endless walking/moving to and fro in them. Not sure I'm exactly ready for a cave or a dark hole in the ground, but please can I stop having to walk a mile to get across the fiction section of my library to get to the (not-real) space on the other side that looks like a big downtown atrium??

The house is a disaster-zone, I have so many things to sort into boxes, so many possibilities of things to fill my time, so many phone calls I need to make, so many flowers I have to try to keep alive for a reasonable amount of time...

...so I'm going to work instead today, because I already have off tomorrow and Saturday.

Sailor Moon

So in last night's Weird Theater of the Mind, it was costume day. Not Halloween exactly, just sort of a random cosplay day at work. Only not my actual workplace: it was an amalgam of the two long-term places I've worked.

To set things up: I had initially not come in costume, and the dream started out with me asking Techie at work why in the world we'd hired a former blog friend (J) to work as a sort-of IT person in-house. Techie had forgotten that J used to work in the system and is a raging nightmare, not to mention currently works as the director of a university library out east. However, that quickly segued into this dressing up dream. Once I saw people arriving in costume with me in my "street duds" I was easily convinced by several other coworkers (Barnum, Hello Kitty, and Silence-and-Cake) to become this Sailor-Moon-type anime/manga character who had the big anime eyes and absolutely dead white skin. I was somehow convinced to wear a mini-skirt--yellow I think--and carry a staff and a long thin sword. There was either a tail or the dress had a long train in part of the dream. So I was buried in white pancake makeup, and S&C swooped around my face with black eyeliner to make my eyes anime'd up.

Then there was some kind of climbing race, a la Battle of the Network Stars but inside a pool area (no water in the pool, just really high ceilings and diving boards and so forth) that had been set up as a sort of air-maze. I had been fitted with these ridiculous cartoon shoes that were just wood blocks with padding on them. The first part of this competition was climbing a "dragon" made of a long inflated tube. The point was to make contestants look ridiculous trying to climb up in the air and falling off. I walked up to it and stabbed it with my sword to let the air all out, and then walked over the the diving tower and climbed up, with difficulty in by wooden-block shoes, to the top of the maze. It took some time, but eventually I made it and then wound through the maze to the head of the "dragon" and simply slid down as it if were a tall twisty slide. I could hear the commentary guys (yes, we had "sportscasters") raving about how creative and take-no-prisoners I had been to up-end the competition, and everyone was cheering for me. I was super-fierce and non-smiling in my white make-up carrying my sword.

At some point it turned into a big auditorium and then devolved into a choral concert or something, and then I was changing into my original clothes, and the cleaners were putting all the chairs and tables away in the hall while I waited out in the lobby stairwells for someone or other.

So, Dream Interpreters: WTF?

Death of Facebook

Since I've given up Facebook for Lent, because I NEED TO, I've nowhere to post random stuff.

Except here.

Yay, blogs!

I had a weird dream this morning. Drew (from NYS) and Sparky had, unbeknownst to me, decided to host a small D&D gathering here. OK, fine, but I didn't find out till the day people were coming, so commenced cleaning. Turns out the living room was still carpeted (not) and arranged with the couch under the front window (not) and (enter the bizarre) there were pine needles everywhere despite not having had a real Christmas tree in our house ever (IRL). Also the wall by the front door was covered, literally covered, in tiny swarming bugs, the corner that goes up against the coat closet and half-bath had signs of major water damage we'd covered in paint and duct tape, and we had an extra couch in the front hallway. All I had was a broom to sweep. It was just awful. I collected enough stuff to roll into an area rug (not) for Sparky to empty into the trash--out of spite, I also put his shoes in the rug because they were in my way sweeping and I had had to keep yelling upstairs to ask him questions to which the answers were not very forthcoming.

(This was the center masterpiece. There was also a bit about grocery shopping and running into Melissa and her daughter O. which was not overly weird, except the store and the manner in which we were shopping and unloading in the parking lot. The parking lot itself was fenced, which is weird for sure. On the other end of this main dream, I seem to recall my niece Katherine, her husband Alan and the two kids, something about a ladder and being on vacation, and a full diaper. I have no idea what that part ties into things IRL; none whatsoever.)

Anyway: context for the main dream:

• I swept around and under the sofa in the living room yesterday because there were/are lots of crumbs in the vicinity. That's pretty much where I live and do everything these days. The floor isn't carpet, but I need to sweep again because I dropped peanuts on the floor last night.
• Trying to get Sparky to respond to any kind of communication is irritating. He's very wrapped up in his own stuff--normal--and forgets me. Not unheard of, and I'm not upset about that. It's just frustrating. So as long as I keep my passive-aggressive behavior to dreams, his shoes are probably safe with me.
• It does occur to me, though, that I'm annoyed about shoes for Beast, so this probably plays into it. I bought him new shoes at the request of the staff at his facility last week. When I saw him on Wednesday, he had his old shoes on. Maybe I should bring them home? 
• D&D? Not a clue, though Sparky at least plays. I'm sure Drew has played. Why was D here though? So weird. I'm pretty sure I've conflated him with my bro-in-law who is arriving tomorrow for a weekend visit, and who is unlikely as hell to play D&D nowadays!
• However, I did watch some Twitch footage of Sparky's channel yesterday which was him doing walk-throughs of a couple of video games. So D&D = video games? Clearly my subconscious thinks these are both luxuries that need to be set aside when Important Things need doing for Mom.
• I don't really get the pine needles at all. I used to hate cleaning up after the tree in January though, and I'm obviously concerned about the general state of cleanliness in the house. It's actually fine; I'm just obsessing.
• The leak? That's because one of my coworkers just found out that her roof is leaking, and pouring water through her walls due to an ice dam. My roof is fine.
• I'm sure the bugs are representing all the ridiculous things I need to deal with in my life. Or my quiet fear that I have unseen bugs/vermin hanging around. It took till December to get all the mice out, so there's a little hangover from that for sure. We've never had mice in the house like last year.

The shopping frame makes sense. I need to hit the store, but there's no reason to involve Melissa or O. in the trip. Nor do I need to shop at the store from my childhood, magically transported to the middle of a fenced yard!

I've no clue what's going on with the other frame. I miss seeing those guys, though.

A Countess

You know how normally dreams have some basis in events or activities of recent vintage, or some tie to what's going on in life? Not this one!

I don't remember the beginning too well, except that we were in a large, fancy older-but-nice hotel lobby. It was huge, and then there was an elevator up to one of the floors. In fact, there is something vaguely hospital-like about the lobby and elevator situation: on the floor where I ended up there was a large reception area with big windows and the rooms were to the left behind double doors. In fact, after passing through those double doors there was another large space--cafe? sitting area? coffee bar? and THEN the corridor to the rooms. And that corridor was not a straight shot. It went a ways, turned right, then left right away, and then...whatever. Like a Very Large house had been broken up to become a hotel. Which, in fact, turned out to be the case.

I met the Countess (!) whose home this was. She had also owned the land around the bay outside and the church on the other side. Turns out this place was in a Siberian city in a country that had left Russian federation up near the area where the continent reaches toward Alaska (the whole continent was, however, flipped so that on a map this country was to the upper left of the continent.  And very oddly, it was near Irkutsk, which is in the lower center of Siberia. Anyway, the fog off the bay was quite similar to the fog over the Angara River, so maybe that was why they were "near."

OK, anyway, we were outside in cold pouring rain with friends and their kids and then Sparky and I took a walk along the quay which had several large tankers (liners?) including one that was being christened. It was an American ship, so they were playing our national anthem to which I was singing along. That embarrassed Sparky, of course. There was a small car driving along the quay painted in American flag design except that the roof was the British flag. Then we happened upon a trail of overlarge felted top hats with the same design (American flag, British on top); I picked one up and put it on and it was way huge.

And then Beast woke me up.

I have no idea where all of this came from. It was certainly realistic though, or it seemed so at the time.

Blog Challenge

So today's subject is Somewhere You'd Like to Live or Visit. Nice timing: I cataloged a book today on planning a safari vacation. I went so far as to check flights from here to Botswana. And then I realized that this isn't going to happen anytime in the immediate future. But it's fun to dream, eh?

Strange dreams this morning

I parked my truck on the road that leads to the driveway into our church and walked up said driveway, which was clear and driveable as far as I can remember. Once I crested the hill, I could see Paul & Matt (father & son) carrying poinsettias up from where they were being kept near the retention pond area. This was to keep them out of the weather. The sun was shining and it was a lovely day, and as I walked across the parking lot it dawned on me that I'd forgotten our bag of change for the noisy offering. This was upsetting; I needed to call Beast to remind him. I was also trying to figure out why I hadn't parked in the lot, and reminding myself that I had to get to work right after church. There were only a few cars in the lot but one of them belonged to the S. family who were unloading everyone and walking towards the door all wearing coats and winter-wear. Johnny's hand was all covered by a big (glove? scarf? sleeve of an overlarge coat? all I remember is that it was black) and I couldn't tell if he had it casted or just covered by this bulky thing.

What . The . Heck?

• Poinsettias in May? Which are being stored outside to keep them safe?? 
• There is no retention pond where Paul & Matt were working; the grade is uphill there.
• Parking on the road, which I'm pretty sure might be illegal, and is definitely unsafe not to mention ridiculous?  Plus, that truck hasn't been around for over a year.
• Johnny's hand was slammed in a door a couple of weeks ago and (long-story-short) he ended up in the hospital last weekend when it became infected; however, no cast was involved at any point. 

Tomorrow is noisy offering day, as well as Sunday School teacher appreciation, and I do actually work after church. I would be upset if we forgot to bring change, but the bag I was thinking about--which exists, and is a white paper shopping bag from ...uh, maybe Bath & Body Works?--in the dream only has about 75 pennies in it. Hardly worth worrying about. We'll bring it, along with pockets of dimes and quarters.

Do I know what this means? Well, I suppose I'll get another plant tomorrow at church; it's unlikely to be a poinsettia, however. Maybe something someone dug out of our backlot (lol, doubtful)  by Paul & Matt, who do, in reality, do a LOT of work around church. There are still buried feelings of annoyance about the driveway and road and the subdivision it leads to--THAT is a VERY long story. I miss my truck, I guess; I miss driving a manual tranny. I have been worrying about Johnny all week hoping he's ok. I think I started to wake up in the crossing-the-parking-lot phase which is why it started to become slightly less wackadoodle. Not too excited about work, though given the fact that several of the more irritating staff members won't be there, it's not such a bad thing.

And now? Now, I'm off on a mini road trip.

Dreams

Yeah. I had a couple of doozies this morning, one that I sorta understand and one that is just bizarre.

1. I made a pretty disparaging comment on Twitter yesterday (since deleted) about some big library-related thing that's going around lately. The dream--more a thought, really--was that a friend blocked me from her feed because of what I said; I noticed because I hadn't seen any tweets from her in the afternoon/evening yesterday.
   
   I then lay there half-awake sorting out what to do: check to see if she did block me, write her an apology?, oh-hell-who-cares... It was basically all 5 of Kübler-Ross's stages of grief compressed into about half an hour. Once I got out of bed and checked Twitter, I found several tweets from her. And then it hit me that there's this time-zone thing.... Duh. All that angst for nothing!


2. The other dream was a proper dream, which ended for some reason with the Twitter-block thought. There is no connection that I can see. In a nutshell, I was with the youth group kids (I think?) on a trip and one of them found a purse left in the restroom. We had been riding trains--I know where I got that (I read this right before bed last night thanks to the London Underground blog*)--and were collecting ourselves at the end of the ride. So we looked around for the owner, and eventually I opened the wallet to see whose it was, and it was the wife of the author of another blog I read, which shall remain unidentified because it has nothing whatsoever to do with anything else in this dream. I'll just say it's a blog written by a funny Christian guy whom I have not met IRL. His wife either.
   
   So as soon as I saw her name, I knew I could let her know by checking the blog for contact info. So I went to my growing-up church (in Colorado) where I found our current pastor (not in Colorado) and borrowed his computer to get the contact info, which turned out to be a phone number. [proof that this is a dream, no?] Unfortunately, it was presented as words, like CHURCH INFO, only it was about 5 lines of text long. My cell phone has a QWERTY keyboard, so I had to use a land-line phone to translate all this into numbers before I could call....
   
   So very frustrated by all of this. It went on and on, as these sorts of dreams do, until I woke up with the whole Tweet-block thing.

Short version: life is complicated and frustrating, trying to be helpful can be a huge pain, I like trains, I need to watch what I write in public, and sleeping is not for wimps.
__________

* Just figured out the connection between these two. OK, well, at least that part makes sense now.

Sleep

For the past month, more or less, I have been having quite a lot of strange dreams. Most of them are at least mildly amusing and weird. Some have been pretty unpleasant--not nightmares, but stuff that isn't really fun.

This morning's was about taking FIL in for tests today (true) and arriving to pick him up from his apartment (not accurate) to find MIL there (clearly not true). And she was caaa-RANK-y. Then she fell and banged her knee so while we were at the hospital for FIL's tests I was going to get her knee x-rayed (no, it's FIL's knee that may need x-rays). Also, I had gone in earlier this week and traded in my truck for a VW minivan (not true--and WTF: minivan?? Not. VW?? Do they still make those minivan/minibus things). And MIL was driving.

I'd like to go back to the bizarro dreams that have no bearing on reality.

Uhm...eeeuwww?

VERY strange dream this morning about a colleague in which he ended up by giving me a backrub at his workplace (only, in true dream fashion, it looked NOTHING like any library I've ever been in!). The whole dream was weird because I think I suspected him of some heinous crime so I was there to ask him if I could keep something that was his that had something to do with the crime, without letting on that I knew it had anything to do with a crime. This undoubtedly is from the fact that I've got two mystery books going right now, not to mention all the CSIs and NCISs I've watched over time.

Meanwhile, the room behind the circulation desk was a hospital room in which his roommate was installed, along with another person I never identified. The roommate (ahem) was quite ill but perfectly cheerful. I've only met him twice IRL so from what I could tell, he was behaving normally.

There was also a playground out the back window where kids were busily tearing up the blacktop (I think this came from watching Ice Road Truckers before bed last night...maybe). And it was cold as hell outside, and rainy. Toward the end, the kids were running from way off to my right and sliding on their knees/shins across the wet (icy?) pavement in front of me. This area was very similar to the playground at the daycare where Sparky went for several years, except the paved area is mulch at that place, and there is actual playground equipment scattered around.

There was some kind of Frontierville thing going on with this playground too, but that is exceedingly vague, except the part about having a full-grown, extremely realistic lion suddenly appear. [a lion? in Frontierville? Not!] All my corrals had been completely rearranged so my livestock were free-ranging; I was annoyed at having to rearrange everything again.

Oh the whole thing was so freaky. Dreams are weird. Why in the world am I thinking about this particular guy right now? I'd prefer if he never entered my dreams, as we aren't particularly good friends, though in the dream we apparently were. A lion? Sparky's daycare? WTF?!

Disturbing

Disturbing Dream #1: I'm visiting a blog-friend, a guy I've never met. Sparky is with me. And I'm very aware that Blog-Friend is getting a very wrong impression about my visit and reason for being there, in spite of Sparky's presence. The guy is just a few years younger than me, never married (that I'm aware of) and in the dream he's living in his college frat house. Uhm. [I'm certain he does NOT live in a frat house, in the non-dream world]

Disturbing Dream #2: My boss has cancelled our contract for IT support to save money. Just a little blip of a thought/dream. I hope it doesn't come true.

Disturbing Facebook update: Upon logging on this morning, I found two updates from one of the youth group members:

soooooo, apparently my parents some how found out about what we said yesterday night, and decided "eh, what the hell...since they all know anyways, we might as well step it up a notch or two...or twelve!!!"
not exactly the way i wanted to start my monday morning...and its not even 7 o'clock yet!!!!!

...apparently since i dont know what im talking about, and im a stupid teenager who doesnt know how to deal with life...thats what i deserve...feeling the love in this house.

I'm trying to figure out what they were talking about last night that would cause this sort of reaction from parents (well, her mom is a little wack sometimes), especially since I was on the phone with her mom during the meeting. Did she somehow overhear something while I was on the phone with her??

Dreaming

Sparky and I were at church, except (of course) it wasn't our church: it was in a high rise office building. We were trying to leave, but Sparky couldn't find his letter jacket. We finally found it near a stairwell, so we figured we could walk down (from something like the 33rd floor).

Once we opened the door, it turned out to be and outside ramp (not stairs) heading down. It really looked more like a sidewalk next to a highway, the highway being an observation-deck-kind of thing from which to look out across the city. Sparky headed down, but I needed to rest, so I sat down on the 'curb' and hollering for him to wait.

It was more of a debilitating exhaustion that I was experiencing. No pain, no real tiredness, but rather an inability to want to stand up and get moving again. A few people were wandering around, including what looked like a school class. A couple of them stopped to chat, and while we were talking I realized that I could no longer see Sparky's unusual-colored letter jacket. On the other hand I was looking for an orange jacket not his current one. [Orange is the dominant color at one of the colleges he is looking at possibly attending, which is the same school his dad attended and where he won a letter jacket.] He had rounded a corner and continued down while I sat immobilized.

Eventually and as a result of talking to a couple of the teenagers, I was able to get back on my feet and start following Sparky.

And then the alarm went off.

And yes. I get it. Loud and clear. Thank you, Subconscious.

The subconscious is a wonderful thing

Woke up this morning in the midst of a dream about Dad. He had dark blue eyes in the dream. And big black glasses, which disappeared so I could see his blue eyes as he cried. In reality, Dad had hazel eyes, and glasses. The funny part is that he had made his own souped-up wheelchair/gurney so he could sit up and see people eye-to-eye.

In trying to figure out where he came from--and calling me "Little One" to boot, a phrase he never used--I realized when I woke up that today would have been my sister Ellen's 63rd birthday. And then I remembered that I was talking to her on the phone in my dream.

There was much weirdness surrounding all of this: a Frank Gehry-designed college campus, our co-leader for the youth at church, me stepping in to a stage production hours before it was performed, and me-as-Kirstie-Alley stealing food and carrying it 5 blocks for Co-Leader and Ellen.

So, happy birthday, Ellen, and thanks for the appearance to both you and Dad. I miss you.

Obviously.

Heh

So, I dreamed last night about a friend of a friend, and Martha Stewart.

I have not been aware that I needed to process stuff about either of them, although I think I did see a commercial with Martha in it within the last week. But Leather Dude? I haven't seen him in over a year, though now that I think about it we had a very brief Facebook interaction about two weeks ago.

I woke up in the middle of this dream at about 3 a.m. and my immediate thought was "Whoa! Blog this! TOOO freakin' weird!"

Now all I remember is that those two people were in the dream and that it was a good dream--except for the part Martha was in, which was just annoying. Oh, and that most of the dream took place outside, like maybe at a fair or amusement park.

Why I'm processing this right now makes no sense. I desperately needed to process the crapola from work that's going on. My subconscious makes no sense to me!

Yes, I get the farcicalness of that last statement.

More dreams

Mom was alive again in this one, and in a good mood (though hospitalized). But...one of my relatives' father-in-law was dead. I think I was at his funeral. I don't even remember the dream, it's only that I saw this person's Facebook update this morning.

Weird.