Dreams

I had some really unsettling dreams and nightmares last night. The only one I can remember right now involved a bar or club of some sort, that seemed sort of old-fashioned in its layout, almost like an old-time saloon or brothel with a mirror-backed bar and a set of stairs leading to a balcony where bedrooms were. The atmosphere was bronzed like late afternoon sun; everything in the bar was a shade of brown or bronze or metallic tan, including the people. It was beautiful with a hazy sheen, the people had glistening brown skin and beautiful voices. A fat woman wearing metallic bronze leather pants put her hand down her pants and began to touch herself and make these sensual faces, and everyone started watching her. She was wrapped in a metallic bronze cord that almost seemed like it was a part of her body. I was kind of floating up in the air, just a presence observing the action. And the colors reminded me of ice cream, chocolate and vanilla ice cream with swirls of chocolate fudge. The ice cream became real; I was eating a bowl of ice cream and gazing at the colors. Every time I took a bite, I would see another glimpse of a scene from the bar.

i’m remembering my dreams better lately. i wonder why that is? last night a couple dozen tiny bluebirds attached themselves to my face and i couldn’t get them off, and i started panicking. there was also a toddler who was screaming “bumble! bumble” and following bumblebees around the backyard. at one point i had to help bring in some wet wood from the backyard for a fire, so i put on my “wellies” — rubber boots except they looked like bowling shoes made of rubber. the wood gatherers didn’t really need my help but i wanted an excuse to wear my rubber boots.

i giggled myself out of a sound sleep a couple of mornings ago… isn’t that weird, when you wake yourself up by laughing?… and shook doc sleeping next to me and said “cecil b. de muffin.” i surely do wish i could remember the context of a dream in which i’d laugh myself awake thinking that.

i was at a home depot type place, and this started out as the type of dream where i was there but sort of a noninteractive observer to the action, like i was floating invisibly alongside everyone else but just watching what went on. anyway, i was “observing” this mentally challenged employee, that the managers were mistreating and overworking. they told him that for his next task he needed to go upstairs and get a pair of boots and a hard hat. at this home depot, you weren’t allowed to own your own hat and boots; you got a rental fee taken out of your paycheck every time you needed to use them. he had to go upstairs to this room that had rows and rows of boots and hats kind of like how a bowling alley has rows and rows of shoes. he started up this really narrow dark wooden staircase that would take him all the way to the 4th floor without any landings. we were having trouble balancing on the narrow rickety stairs, and then partway up, the handrailing came off at the top and was just attached at the bottom of the stairs. we were still holding onto it and it was swinging around wildly. next thing i knew, we were at the top of the stairs, and the dream changed. there was a hollow football made of silver beads on wires, with little colored gems stuck in every so often, and a “collar” on one end made of much more flexible wires and beads, and it was called a “chalice”. lori used a rope catapult to toss this thing from the ground up onto the 4th floor balcony of our house, wrapped in a green khaki backpack. it was a our house but very different […]

i had a horrible dream a while back. i was in the backyard of my parents’ house in plano, before the pool was built. i found a baby food jar in the grass in the backyard — it was doc’s. inside it he kept some water and three tiny, 1/4″ long, fuzzy yellow baby ducks, that were his pets. they were tiny but would grow larger over time. i found the jar and it had been in the grass in the backyard, in the sun, for several days. when i found them and picked up the jar, the ducks turned immediately into black goo and disintegrated in the water. i was mortified that he’d forgotten about them. if i was going to interpret this dream, i would say that i was working through my own fear of forgetting to care for something that’s been put in my charge, and having it die. who knows why, in my dream, i projected it onto doc.

last night i dreamed about going to the doctor with my mom, who seemed much smaller than she actually is… much more frail and older. the doctor building was on the 2nd floor of a nice office building with a parking lot out front, and nice landscaping. she was cold sitting in the waiting room so i told her i would go out to the car and get her jacket. i took a wrong turn somehow and ended up having walked an entire block down the street to the bottom of a hill. two scruffy men in white lab coats were standing at the corner with a wheelbarrow, collecting orange trumpet-shaped flowers from a lush vine that was growing on a telephone pole. they told me that they were from the doctor’s office, and that the flowers from this vine had wonderful medicinal properties, and that this telephone pole on the corner was the only place in the world that the vine grew, so they had to walk down the hill and harvest more every couple of days. i was fascinated with the guys collecting the flowers but then remembered that i was taking a very long time to get my mom’s jacket, so i had to hurry back and get it for her. just now i looked up “medicinal trumpet flowers” on google, and didn’t come up with much of anything. lots of plant websites, nothing that looked terribly interesting. so i entered the same words into googlism.com, and something on that site is broken and giving me an error. so much for interesting results.