I had this dream earlier this week, just before starting the new job. I'm sitting on a bench next to a good friend of mine and we are talking animatedly, and I feel very close to him. Suddenly I lean over and kiss him. It's a very short, intense kiss before I break it off, in fact not a very pleasant kiss, but incredibly thrilling. The two of us sit there for a moment, both of us shocked, me somewhat embarrassed. I apologize, and he says, that's okay, I understand. The thing of it is that he is actually committed to someone else, and it was very inappropriate for me to kiss him, and we both know it. He starts reassuring me and saying that he understands how I feel. We're sitting close and talking at this point, and suddenly I lean over and kiss him *again*. It's another abrupt and somewhat awkward kiss, but still thrilling. Only this time, when it's over, we're both silent, knowing that I've crossed the line in a pretty much irreparable way.

Give me my sin again?

======================
Analysis:

This is probably wish fulfillment again, although really awkward wish fulfillment.

On a spritual note, I've always had trouble with the idea that a sin that you think about is the equivalent of one committed (Matthew 5:27-28). What if you dream it? Are you responsible for that, too?

The word "sin" is one that I had to mentally translate into something meaningful to me when I converted to Christianity. Initially I could only hear it as "siiiiiiin" a la The Church Lady. Eventually I found a way to make it meaningful to me based on guidance from one of my priests. She said that "to sin" means "to miss the mark" in archery. I now see a sin as something that it's best not to do, that it leads one away from the path of growth and health. So I think that I can safely say that kissing this particular guy would be a sin. I don't believe in mortal sins, and frankly, I don't believe that there actually is a hell other than what can be experienced on this earth, so I guess I'm departing a great deal from scripture, here. Take that for what it's worth.

The other problem with sins is that most of the time you really want to do them anyways.

Meta-blogging moment: I started the two themes of this blog almost two years ago, "Pique" which is basically any post where I rant about something, and "Reverie" which is any post where I do dream self-analysis, since I'm a vivid dreamer. The latter are probably rarely of interest to anyone aside from myself, but I am mostly blogging as a form of self-expression, anyways. Heck, both Pique and Reverie posts are forms of navel-gazing. This is the first post that has both joined together.

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Pique: I had a very difficult emotional day yesterday. There are several historical reasons why 11/1 is always a challenging day. It's the day my parents were married, and the day, 23 years later, that they separated. My Granny and a family dog both died on 10/31. I think these sorts of events have resonance across years.

But aside from historical reasons, three things occurred yesterday for me that have put me in a heightened emotional state, and which triggered a vivid dream.

1) I received in the mail some photographs taken by an old boyfriend (I refer to him as "the former love of my life") from when we were dating almost 15 years ago. He sent a lovely note with them about how the best ones capture my personality and my beauty. I looked at them yesterday morning, and they made me weep. I was so young and naive and unaware. And so thin and, yes, beautiful, but in a strange raw way I can't put my finger on. But what was most sad was how in love with him I was, and how I will never love anyone like that again. Not that I won't love someone, but it won't have that same innocence, that same openness. I'm amazed how he managed to capture all of that on film - the photos were excellent. I felt like he gave me back a piece of my soul.

"One day you're there, and then all of a sudden there's less of you, and you wonder where that part went, if it's living somewhere outside of you. And you keep thinking, maybe you'll get it back. And then you realize, it's just gone." - Peggy Olson, Mad Men

Maybe it finally came back.


2) I have finally decided, after agonizing over it and after discussing it with Mom, to put down my cat Chester. This decision isn't going to be popular with most people I know. Chester is 17 years old and she has renal failure, although I need to get the blood work done to prove this. She drinks huge volumes of water and urinates the same. She has destroyed the hardwood floors in my kitchen over the past two years and made my house reek of cat pee. I have tried everything I can think of to minimize the damage, including spending a lot on puppy pads which I lay down in her favorite peeing areas, but she scratches at them which means they don't cover the area any more and she pees under them. I currently have her gated into the laundry room where she is rapidly destroying the floors in there, and the linoleum is warping, but at least it's not hardwood. She has no life in there, and stays in her kitty bed most of the time. I try to make time to visit with her every day, but she cries now and then out of loneliness. She is also starting to vomit more, not due to hairballs, which could indicate that she's close to total renal failure.

My cats are like my children, and this is an incredibly painful thing to be doing, but I just can't handle this any more. Mom helped me with this and has been very supportive, pointing out that our pets trust us to take care of them during life and also in deciding when it's time for them to die. Very few house cats die natural deaths in their sleep.

Mom also pointed out that, now that I have decided this is what needs to happen, I should take a good friend with me when I have her put down. Someone who can be supportive of my decision and is willing to drive me home since I probably won't be able to handle that myself. I'm going to be a wreck. But -- please forgive me, those friends of mine who read this blog -- I can't think of anyone. I know that I have friends who would be willing to help me, but I can't think of anyone that I would be comfortable trusting with what will likely be me in hysterics. I guess I have problems A) asking for help and B) allowing anyone to see me like that. This should be one of those things where someone immediately leaps into your mind - your best friend, your boyfriend, your husband, something. I don't have those things. I have very old friends like tmc, who I'm sure would be willing to go, but I feel like he has enough stuff going on in his own life to deal with my crap, too. Plus, he doesn't drive. ;)

The fact that I don't have that sort of automatically qualifying relationship is my fault. I have only myself to blame for my inability to open up.


3) I was stood up by my date last night. This is just a final nail in the coffin for this situation, but it still hurt.


==============================

Reverie: I am in the top floor room of a brownstone in New York City, and Carrie Bradshaw, the lead character from Sex and the City, is there. She's actually the character, not Sarah Jessica Parker, the actress. Carrie is going through her results of a personality test. She's telling me that she took the test at an official testing site of some sort, and it's the MBTI (of which I am so fond). Except it's not, because there are the usual I/E, J/P, T/F variables, but the N/S variable is replaced with Q/something. Carrie has scored a Q in this area, and we're trying to figure out what it means. Then our discussion becomes a montage, as though it were part of a SatC episode, and in particular, I am Miranda. We're discussing what it means to be an F, and how we think Samantha is a T, and we're laughing and sharing our insights with each other.

Suddenly we cut to a scene where I am in bed with Steve, Miranda's husband from the show, and we're cuddling and talking about my conversation with Carrie, and how I felt really close to her. Steve is appreciating the story and seems very happy for me that I had a good time with my best friend.

The end.

===========================

Analysis: I think that this is almost certainly complete wish fulfillment, especially with what went on earlier in the day.

In this dream, I'm doing something fairly dangerous which involves a flying boat which is going rapidly over the water as though to take off. There are these wing-like projections on the starboard side, one a bit fore and one a bit aft. *Dirk is on the fore one hanging onto the wing and almost water skiing with his feet on the water. He is facing aft, and looking at me - I am doing the same thing on the aft wing, and he is instructing me on how to do this. There are some folks on the plane who are monitoring us, perhaps grading us.

Suddenly *Dirk says to "look out!" and raises his feet above the water, attempting to climb more onto the wing-like thing, which is hard to do while the plane is going at this pace. Then I see what he's warning me about - there's a tiger shark just below the surface. The shark slips back so that it's directly under me, and seems to be about to break the surface. I pull my legs up out of the water, but I'm afraid I won't be able to hold onto this position, and I may slip and be eaten by the shark.

The End.

=================================

Analysis:

I found this link to be very useful in interpreting this dream. I'm in an already high-stress and high-danger situation with *Dirk, combined with the additional stress of outside judgment from people. Then the shark appears, and the likelihood of failure and destruction is much greater. This is my subconscious saying that I am currently involved in a situation that is too emotionally risky. The question is how to get out of the situation now that I am in it.

I'm in downtown Durham near Brightleaf Square with a bunch of friends. We're trying to find someplace to eat. There's a new place in downtown proper called "Ransom" that one of us, *Dirk, knows how to get to. He insists that he knows the quickest route to get there, but I disagree with him and say we should go a different direction. It becomes a contest to see who is right, and who can get there first. I take off running in the direction I think is right and *Dirk sees this and takes off running, too. (The other friends start lagging behind, so somehow they end up getting into their vehicles to follow us.)

I get to the first corner very much ahead, and *Dirk seems a little miffed at this. I then consistently beat him - it turns out that I'm a must faster runner than he is. [This is entirely shocking to me as I have never been a fast runner irl.] Finally we get to the building where the restaurant is, but I'm not sure where it is within the building, so I let him catch up and tell him he has to show me where the restaurant is. So since he's a little ticked off at this point, he runs into the building, in the parking garage area of it. So I think to myself, "Oh yeah?" And then I quite handily take off and fly, and zoom at a rapid pace to where he is.

*Dirk looks at me with total astonishment and says, "Wow, are you a superhero or something?" I reply, "Yes, and this is my super power."

The End.

==================
Analysis:

I know that this is directly related to some stuff happening in my life right now that I'm not really capable of blogging about at the moment, or maybe ever. Let's just say that this is probably hormone-related.

I do have a lot of flight dreams, to the point that it's sort of in my dream arsenal for dealing with any situations that arise. And it's almost always fun.

I am curious to know why the restaurant was named "Ransom". I tried looking up anagrams for it, but didn't get anything that was a real obvious hit. I'll have to see what comes to mind later.

This is only the second dream I've had that focuses on downtown Durham, the other one being the scary clown nightmare. Durham was much prettier and friendlier of a place in this one.

I decided to let someone else do the dream interpretation for me this time. (Click the Dream Interpretation tag further down the page.) Seems like it's basically a sex dream, but with some anxiety involved.

I haven't posted much recently because there hasn't been much to post about, and I haven't been feeling terribly creative. Sometimes there seems to be a fallow period between moments of inspiration for me.

Well, this morning made up for that in spades. I was allowing myself to lounge around in bed a bit even though I'd already pretty much woken up, when suddenly my subconscious gave to me an entire new novel within the span of maybe 20 minutes.

I got up and wrote for a couple of hours, and then continued to play with this idea and broaden it and fill in details and characters and scenes while I cleaned house. I was trying not to get too carried away with it, since this is what tends to happen with my writing ideas - I get all charged up about them and my brain carries the ideas along a very rapid path but I never slow myself down enough to get them on paper properly and the ideas get lost in the execution.

I find that my writing has serious flaws which stymie me in the end. In particular, believable dialogue is something that I have real trouble with. How to show instead of telling. How to keep things simple enough to speak to a general audience and complex enough to be interesting. I think that even the best novelists have trouble with these things at times, and I am really uneducated in writing. I took one adult ed course which I ended up dropping because it was all about doing group meditative exercises and writing off the cuff from objects that were supposed to inspire us. It was way too touchy-feely for me. Plus, inspiration is not usually my issue - technique is.

So, at best this could become decent pulp fiction reading, and at worst it's a hobby that might absorb some of my attention for a while. It is nice to get a energetic missive directly from my subconscious. It feel important.

I had a long and vivid dream last night which I don't have time to post about right now. The most important part, which I wanted to get written down before tonight's Battlestar Galactica episode, is that the final Cylon was revealed to me.

I sound like Deanna.

Anyways, in my dream, the final Cylon is Bill Adama. In fact, he's sort of the Cylon God. I'm not sure how he could be both, but that's what it said.

We'll see how accurate my subconscious is.

Addendum: Maybe this confusion about Cylon/God is similar to confusion about man/God a la Jesus Christ. How can one be both at the same time? I know, maybe Bill Adama is crucified and then resurrects without a resurrection ship! That would be a Cylon miracle!

One of my issues with BSG since the beginning has actually been how the Cylons use a lot of Christian phraseology even though they're evil (e.g., "God is love" and other stuff straight from John.) I hope that doesn't continue to be the case. The Cylons have been portrayed as less evil over time, though. And it's not like all (or even most) Christians are saints.

I reread my last two posts, and wonder if the nose-knife dream was some weird premonition that I was about to break my nose. Especially with the choice between the nose and the hand, and I nearly broke my finger as well. Eek!

This is part of a much longer dream. It's the first time I've woken up in a fearful, sweaty panic since, well, the last time I was murdered in a dream.

I'm out at Joe & Jo's (now defunct Durham bar, although there's no drinking going on inside - the clientele are eating Lean Cuisine microwave dinners for some reason.) I'm supposed to drive my friend tmc home, as he doesn't have a car, and he's somewhere in Durham nearby. I call him to see where he is and he says he doesn't know, like he's lost. I tell him I'll strike out toward where I think he is and see if I run into him.

I start out on foot towards the other area of restaurants downtown, and get lost myself. (The whole of this version of Durham is a strange, dark, grid-like maze.) Then I see tmc - he's in the doorway of a building ahead of me. He looks strange, like he's sneaking around. I call out to him, but he shushes me and comes toward me and says, "We have to get out of here." I then notice that just inside the building he was standing in front of is a guy with a knife, robbing some other guy.

tmc and I scurry away as quickly as we can, but we hear someone coming after us. We go down a dark set of steps into a building, down maybe three flights, when the stairwell dead-ends into a wall. We hang out there for a bit, hoping that we have successfully eluded our pursuer. Hearing nothing, we decide to carefully creep out of the stairwell and make back to my car. As we come out of the stairwell, however, we are leapt upon by a gang of hoodlums.

The leader of the gang is the guy I saw earlier with the knife, but he also has a green spiked mohawk and is wearing clown make-up. They have with them the guy that was being robbed earlier. The hoods tell him that, to make his choice easier, they're going to offer it to me, first. (I'm not sure what happens to tmc - I can't see him anymore.)

So they pin me down, and the clown hood says, "You have a choice to make. I'm going to cut you once, with the knife in my hand or tied to my nose. You have five seconds to make your choice." He demonstrates both knife positions, though how the knife actually attaches to his nose is not clear. He starts counting down from 5, and so I quickly think - which one am I most likely to get hurt worse from? Which is easier to avoid? As he gets down to 5, I shout, "The nose! The nose!" He grins evilly, and the hoods howl with appreciation.

It occurs to me after I've made the choice that what he's really going to do is head-butt me, which would make a much more powerful attack. I can't really avoid it, as I am pinned down. I see his head, and the knife/nose, coming towards me and know that I'm going to die. Then I wake up all panicky.

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Analysis:

There's no coincidence here that I have this dream after my first visit to the home that Grandma and Grandpa are currently in. Grandma is in a dorm-like room in the assisted living facility, and Grandpa is in the nursing area of the same facility, a couple of buildings over.

I got lost trying to find them in this place, and the maze-like, dark corridors were where the grid-like maze of Durham was probably inspired. Also, there was some very creepy art on the walls, including a picture of two clowns that looks a lot like this (courtesy of Google images):



So tmc is my oldest friend in the area, and I guess that puts me and him into the role of my Grandparents, who are essentially the oldest friendship that I know of. We're lost in this confusing place and tmc can't drive, much like Grandma is the one who is capable of being rational and making sense of things - she's now in the driver's seat in that relationship. They were trying to elude capture, but they have been caught, and now I (Grandma) have to choose how to die. The obvious, unstated choice, would be *not* to die, but that's not on the list of options. So I'm being held against my will, forced to make unpleasant decisions, and death is imminent.

Unfortunately, that seems to be Grandma's point of view on her new living situation. Also, it's a sad indicator to me about what eventually happens in our lives. Eventually, control, or any illusion that we had control to start with, is taken away from us.

More:

Ok, now I have this song going through my head:



Dee Snyder is one scary clown. And the mind is a funny thing.

This has been a particularly bizarre and stressful month, and it's been showing up in my dreams a lot of late. Here's one that I think I can remember most of.

I'm living in the house that I lived in during high school. [This house is the one that most prevalently shows up in my dreams.] I am actually taking college courses in the dream. So, too, is my friend *Foster, who is staying in my house. He's using my bedroom and I am sleeping on the couch in the living room. [This is something that happened pretty frequently when we had a guest, since we didn't have a spare bedroom until towards the end of my family's stay in that house.]

We are both taking classes at this unspecified college, even though we are our current age and already have degrees. We have one class in common, which is something along the lines of ecosystem and endangered species studies combined with mathematical theory. I have stayed home from school with a cold and am lying on the couch when he comes in to tell me what I missed in class that day. He holds up this plastic shape which is a three-dimensional representation of the mathematical patterns associated with species population trends when becoming endangered. It looked something like a crop circle but three dimensional, sort of like a tube with that shape to it. He said it was called a "morpheus plane". CORRECTION: It actually looked a lot more like a Mandlebrot set than a crop circle, but again, tubular.

*Foster goes back to another room and comes back looking stern. He hands me something and says, "Did you write this?" I look at it, and it does seem to be in my handwriting. It's a mean letter mocking *Foster for taking college courses at his age, and it calls him "Dr. *Foster" in what seems to be an insulting way. The note is signed with three figures that are sort of like heiroglyphics. One of them is a penguin shape, the other two are other animals that I don't recall properly.

I wonder to myself if I could have been sleep-walking and wrote it, but I tell *Foster that it wasn't my doing. I get up at this point and start dismantling the bed that I'm sleeping on. My mother will be home soon and I think that *Foster should leave before she gets there. He helps me disassemble the bed and I start throwing the sheets down the stairs to the basement where the laundry room is.

We move into the kitchen where I start trying to make tea, and Britney Spears walks in. She pulls down *Foster's notebook from the top of the refrigerator, and starts rifling through it. She finds two more notes written in the same hand and with the same signature. They're insulting and deranged-sounding and seem to be threatening *Foster. Britney starts yelling at me and accusing me of being a bad person, but I don't have any recollection of having written any such notes. I am horrified at the thought that I've killed off my friendship with *Foster.

The end.

Analysis:

Not sure what to make of this one yet, since it's fresh. There are clearly some things in here about my mother's visit which is happening soon and the feeling that I need to clean up for her (which is true - I have to spend this weekend cleaning my filthy hovel.)

The fact that this s occurring in the house I went to high school in seems significant. I like to joke sometimes that I was raised in an atheist convent - my parents had very high standards for my conduct. The fact that I need to hide that *Foster has been staying there means that I am feeling guilty about it - letting him stay in my room is not something a good girl would do.

We have a good, companionable relationship until the first note is discovered. Some subversive part of me is trying to destroy this relationship.

The endangered species part combined with the animal heiroglyphics seem to indicate that there is some larger pattern which makes the death of this relationship inevitable. This is simply the way things die off.

I think that *Foster doesn't represent the person he is in my life so much as a concept - he probably represents my work life more than anything else. He also represents my desire to learn more, to continue to learn and progress as an adult, and enjoy what I do. That's being hampered by this subversive malice which is happening - an irrational voice which mocks such efforts. Some part of me is undermining my better self.

Why in the hell is Britney Spears in this dream?? I've never liked her, and she's not really my idea of an attractive person. I consider her to be loud, course, and vulgar. I suppose she's allowed to do and be all of the things I wasn't allowed to. She has no problem speaking exactly what's on her mind, and she clearly hates me. I guess she represents some form of success and power. Which seems odd since she's clearly not at all a success these days - perhaps I'm aware of this contradiction in the dream.

I'll have to think on this some more.

More:

Being a good little classical studies student in college, I should have recognized "morpheus" as the god of dreams in Greek mythos. Considering it's about endangered species, I'm surprised it wasn't his brother Phobetor, who is responsible for animal imagery in dreams, whereas Morpheus is responsible for human imagery in dreams, according to Ovid.

Of course, the "morpheus plane" object is some sort of phallic symbol, if a strange one. Hmm. Funny how after that appeared, things started to go sour.

I've gone back and analyzed the poetry dream. I was intending to do a lot more analysis of these dreams in the entries, and I haven't. That's not because I haven't analyzed them for myself or gotten a lot out of them, but because a lot of them have to do with my employment situation and it's not something I can really talk about. Maybe down the road I can.

I had another remarkable dream last night. I'm in what looks like a high school building, but it's actually a college, and it's the first day of a new semester. I have in my hand what turns out to be my grades from the previous semester. I've failed two classes, and made an A and a B+ in the other two. For some reason this doesn't bug me all that much. I'm working full time and also (apparently) going to class full time, and I think to myself that it's not a big deal to have failed the classes, that I was too busy and didn't have time for them, and that it was, at the most, a waste of my money. [I think this is the first time I've ever had one of those school phobia dreams when it simply did not get to me.]

I walk into a classroom, and it turns out the professor is one that I recognize and like. Her name is written on the board: Ann Mottes. [I wonder if I've ever met someone with that name before?] She looks almost exactly like Emma Thompson from the HBO Movie "Wit", and I remember her as being tough but fair.

I sit in the back of the room, and realize that I haven't registered for this class yet or gotten the required texts. The professor calls on me by name and asks me to turn to page 156 in the Reader and read aloud. I tell her that I'm sorry but I have not purchased the text yet - that I am "unprepared". She says that's fine and asks another student to lend me the book.

I turn to page 156, but it doesn't have much text on it - there's a single line at the top, and the rest of the page is covered with a picture. The book is fairly old and the photos are a bit dingy, so I read the line at the top. The professor indicates that I should turn the page and keep going, and the subsequent pages are similar.

The text seems to be angry, and says the word "injustice" a few times. Then it becomes more halting, more despondent sounding. Then finally the text abruptly trickles away to nothing, and the final page just has a photo. The professor seems to be waiting for me to comment on the poem, so I flip back to hte beginning and pay more attention to the pictures.

Suddenly, the pictures are very vivid, almost like you expect them to move. The pictures are mainly of nature scenes featuring, occasionally, a young girl. They aren't posed pictures, and sometimes the girl is facing away from the viewer or you only see a bit of her hair and a small portion of her cheek. She's sitting in some long, vividly green grasses in one photo. In another, she's sitting on a park bench surrounded by tall blooming bushes - this shot is probably the most lush one, almost like you can feel the sunshine and smell the flowers. Later on, there's a picture of the girl when she's grown up. She has a plain but wholesome face, and she's smiling very joyfully.

That's when I realize that this poem is about her death, and that she was the poet's daughter. The poem expresses his anger, his distress, and his longing, and in the end he is beyond the capacity of speech. I wake up weeping, which is something I have almost never done before.

Analysis:

I think it's no coincidence that I had this dream shortly before my 37th birthday. Some part of me is mourning the girl I once was, and also mourning the fact that I have never had children. I haven't had them in part due to circumstances that I consider "injust", but also because I have been "unprepared" to have them. And I am very deeply saddened by this fact. Part of me is recognizing that my opportunity to have children is most likely gone.

Also, the Emma Thompson character in Wit was a spinster, and she died alone, so I'm sure that's a factor. Ending up that way is something that I fear, to an extent, but it's also something that I seem to have pretty much chosen.

There are also the grades - I've failed two courses (marriage and children?) And although I'm not that upset about it, it seems like a waste.

I've had a bunch of dreams lately which I haven't posted, but this one seemed worthwhile. It was very short but disturbing.

There was some sort of horrible windstorm happening, and one of my trees in the backyard snapped in two, as I could see from the kitchen window. I went outside to investigate and saw that there were a number of other trees down. I went around the side of the house to the front yard to investigate another downed tree when I saw this flickering happening. There was a power line down over the entire house, and it was pulsating with blue sparks. I thought I needed to go into the house to somehow troubleshoot what was happening or grab a phone to call the power company to shut the power down before it burned the house down. I managed to get into the house to the foyer area. Inside was a Christmas tree with a plastic Santa figurine as a tree topper. The tree was flickering on and off in time with the power surges. The tree looked like an antique of some kind, with very old ornaments that I didn't recognize. Also, there was a maybbe two-foot-tall fence blocking the tree off from the rest of the living area. I could see a line of blue sparks going from the Christmas tree down the middle of the house. I realized I couldn't get any further into the house without risking being electrocuted.

That's it. I'm feeling pretty boggled about this one. I'll try to analyze it more later, if I can.

The first day of the eduCause Shibboleth CAMP (and introductory seminar) went well.  It was completely exhausting, but in a totally different way from the JavaOne conference.  I wasn't busy absorbing tons of technical material, but in this case coming up with new ideas for how to approach our Shibboleth environment and potentially use it to solve some of our internal Identity Management issues as well.  Later in the afternoon, it was a fairly rude awakening to realize that we are really not very far along in our path to use Web SSO as fully as it should be used.  They had us go through a worksheet and say what we had and had not already done in our environment, and, well, there were a lot of NOs on that worksheet.  Finally, we had a 2.5 hour dinner (which was excellent, and the first time I've had steak since I started cheating on my pesce-veggie diet [on which I lost 10 pounds, so I better get back on it]) in which we discussed the issues we have with Grouper and its performance and user interface, and how several universities and the Internet2 group are going to collaborate to get things changed.  It was the biggest example of inter-institutional politics I have been part of to date, and at one point during the conversation I thought that it was going to fall flat on its face and dissipate.  But it looks like it will move forward, although time will tell the truth of that.

Anyways, I got back to the hotel room at about 8:30 PST, tooled around for a short while, and then crashed hard asleep.  After which I had a series of dreams which involved me riding on a bus that was being driven by my dad and had Nick Rhodes and John Taylor of Duran Duran as co-passengers.  [I don't even want to talk about the Freudian implications of that one.]  That dream was fairly involved, but suddenly I found myself in a dream where I was sitting in a room surrounded by a bunch of female friends.  I realized suddenly that they were here to visit with me because I had found out I was pregnant.  They were there to loan me their maternity clothes and such. I felt very confused and angry at myself for having gotten pregnant in the first place, realizing I must have done something foolish about birth control.  I felt that being a single mother was going to be a huge burden, and that I wasn't sure I could afford to have a child, either.  Then I started to wonder who the father was.  I knew immediately who it must be, but I couldn't think of when we had had sex.  But somehow I still knew it was his.   I pictured telling him about it and knew that he would be very displeased.  Then I woke up.

This is the first time I have ever, in my life, dreamed I was pregnant (that I can recall, that is.)  It was not a happy feeling.  I felt confused and trapped and in some way like I had done something shameful.  And yet, for some reason, I was quietly pleased about it.  Hrm.  I'll have to think about that.

I haven't analyzed several of the past few dreams I've had, but I'm planning to get back to them when I get some spare time and give some more analytic details about what they mean.  So please bear with me. :)

To continue the current spate of vivid dreams, I had two last night which seemed important.

In the first, I'm on a beach with a bunch of people my age, taking a hike around some dunes and interesting sand formations.  I think it's the N.C. coast somewhere.  My Mom is tagging along with us for some reason.  We are heading back to the hotel where Mom is staying when we encounter an interesting sand formation near the stairs to head back up off the beach to the hotels.  The sand formation is a tall packed dune with a hollowed out section underneath so that it forms a sort of arch or cleft.  Inside the cleft are a bunch of feral kittens of different colors - mostly different forms of calico.  As we're rounding the dune to go up the stairs, Mom and I spy an orange male kitten.  (Not sure how I knew it was male.)  Since Mom has recently lost Scootie, she wanted to see the kitten and pet it, so I scooped it up and gave it to her.  I could tell she was thinking about keeping him.  She said "He's a bit old," because these kittens were probably something like 12 to 16 weeks instead of 8 like Scooter was when we got him.  [Notably, the kitten is pure orange tabby, not orange and white like Scooter was.]   But Mom decides to keep the kitten, and has a very happy look on her face.  At that point, the kitten squirms enough that Mom loses hold of him and he escapes.  I call back down the line of hikers for someone to catch the kitten, and someone does and hands him back to Mom, who wraps him in a towel.  I know that she'll bring him to her hotel and eventually home, and that he'll be a good kitten for her.

The second one is a lot longer and stranger.  I'm going to leave out some sections which don't seem relevant.  Basically.  I'm on a trip with both of my parents and a guy I've never seen before.  We're on what ends up being a house boat.  My parents are divorced, and this other guy is someone who is a sort of friend of Mom's.  He's only three or four years older than me, and is fairly good looking.  So we're on this house boat which is tied up to a dock, and we're just waking up in the morning.  The plan is to get out of our PJs and get dressed, go up the dock to a car there, and explore the town.  Then we'll move onto the next town.  Again I have the feeling that we're in NC, but somewhere on one of the rivers.  We're planning to go see Edenton at some point.

So I wake up and start getting dressed, and it's taking me an inordinately long period of time to get ready.  Everyone else is waiting on me.  [Don't you hate those dreams where you can't find stuff, or the stuff you find isn't right, or something?  Anyways....]  I'm still wandering around in my underwear (which for some reason isn't embarrassing to me in this dream) when I spy a vanity type thing which is a display of all sorts of interesting jewelry.  So I start trying that on.  First I play with the rings, and I find one very nice clear opal sort of thing which fits nicely.  There are huge bejeweled dragonfly rings, and large pieces of branchy coral rings in white and aqua colors, and all sorts of bizarre things which don't really match with each other.  I move on to the necklaces and earrings which are these enormous, somewhat gaudy  things with all kinds of beads and bone and fantastic dangly bits.  I'm looking for something that will match my  nice opal ring, but everything seems to wild and doesn't match.  Then Mom wanders over and asks me what I'm doing with her jewelry.  I didn't know it was hers, but I say that I'm just going to borrow it.  She seems into this, and starts looking for a necklace for me.

The guy who is with her comes over and starts talking to Mom while we're looking.  He's telling her all sorts of highly complimentary and flirtatious stuff - he's really coming onto her hard.  There's something about the way he's talking to her that I think is slimy, like he's trying very hard to convince her to like him without necessarily revealing very much of who he is.  Mom is seeming hesitant, like she's not sure she likes this guy, but the flattering comments are winning her over.  I decide that I do not like this guy, and don't want to be around him at all, and wish that Mom would see through him.

Mom finds me a necklace that matches perfectly with the ring - it's a nice long chain of alternating quartz and rose quartz beads, with a clear quartz heart at the bottom.  It's subtle and perfect.  At this point the guy makes a comment along the lines of "The young can get away with anything."

So I still need to find my pants and put them on, and it's taking me forever [much like the telling of this dream...] Mom says, "I'm going to count to 5, and if you're not ready by then, we're leaving without you."   She counts to 5 but I'm still not ready, so she and The Guy head out to the dock.  I know that they're not actually going anywhere but are just going to be out on the dock when I get out there.  But I'm so annoyed with The Guy at this point that I say to Dad, who's still on the boat, "You know what?  You guys should go without me.  I don't like that guy and I don't want to have anything to do with him."

Dad goes out to tell Mom and The Guy that I'm not coming.  Mom comes to me and says "Celeste, you need to make sure that you walk tall and are proud of your decisions."  I say, "Mom, I am walking tall."  She says, "I hope that you will choose to walk tall to the end of the dock and meet us at the car," and then leaves.  I know that I'm going to choose to stay on the boat, and that Mom and I may never be the same.

Fin.

So, what the heck is all this about "walking tall"?  That's an odd phrase, and I'm not sure what it means or why it would pop up in this dream.  I suppose there is definitely some good message to be gained from being proud of your decisions and being able to make them with confidence.  Maybe that's the main message.  But what if those decisions divide you from someone you care about?  Would it have been better to try to stay and make things right?

I said I wouldn't be posting much for awhile, but then, I didn't expect to go into one of my highly-active dreaming periods.  These come and go with me - maybe once every one to three months I'll go into one of these phases.

This is part of a much longer dream which was actually fairly happy, where I was hanging out with a group of friends (plus a couple of celebrities like Elizabeth Perkins and Ben Affleck, of all people) at a mall, and we were in line to see a movie.  For some reason I wandered off from this group and checked into the mall's hotel, and go into the room, turn on the TV, and start flipping around the channels.

I must have fallen asleep because there's this break in the dream where the room is dark but the TV is still on, and I'm under the covers and naked except for my underwear.  I get up to turn off the TV when I realize that the whole back wall of the hotel room is a weird alcove of sorts that looks like it's under construction, and it leads to a hallway behind it.  I start exploring and I see that this hallway is a whole new section of the mall, and it's still under construction but is close to being done.  Then I see that in one of these shop areas there are four teenage boys who have spotted me and are pointing at me and whooping with laughter.  I shout at them to get the hell out of there and go back into my room.  I find a robe and I manage to get it halfway on before one of the boys, the leader, an asian-looking kid, comes into the room and looks at me threateningly. 

I tell him to go away but he's in the room now and his three buddies are following him - a black kid and two white kids.  They are all making fun of me and also asking what I'm doing there.  I stare back at them angrily and manage to grab the phone and press zero.  They are eying me carefully and I tell them they better leave.  The leader makes a kick at me as though to knock the phone out of my hands, but I've got a small table between me and him, so he misses.  I get a man's voice on the other end of the phone and I tell them that I am in the hotel and these kids have come in from the construction area and are threatening me in my room and that I need help.  I look at the phone itself for the room number, which was 354 or something, and the phone also says I'm in the Diamond Hotel.  The guy says he'll send someone up right away and hangs up.

I realize at this point that I should have asked him to stay on the line with me.  I pretend like he is still on the other end of the phone, and say things like "Okay,"  "I will,"  and "Yes."  This ruse isn't working with the boys.  They seem like they want to leave, but they make a move to rob my jewelry that's sitting on the table and some other stuff from around the room.  For some reason it really angers me that they want my jewelry which isn't worth much but means a lot to me, so I try to stop the guy who's trying to make off with it (one of the two white kids.)  He pulls out a silver gun from his jacket and shoots me in the stomach.

I fall on the floor and know that I'm dying, and no longer care what they're stealing.  The dream slowly fades and then I wake up in a sweat.

I seem to be having a lot more dreams lately where I die at the end.  I used to never have this kind of dream.  I wonder what's changed now.

It occurs to me that Ben Affleck was in the dream in part because of the movie Mall Rats.  It's not like I've ever been a fan of his.

I had several weird short dreams last night, most of which are those horrible dreams where you need to go to the bathroom but you can't find a toilet that is both clean and private anywhere. (Am I the only weirdo who has those dreams?) In any case, there was this one short dream which is unlike anything I've ever had before.

I dream in color, which I guess is unusual. But this dream was very, very vividly colorful.

I am standing in the bathroom (hrm, more bathroom stuff) and brushing my teeth as I prepare for work. Then I take some Visine out of the drawer and use it on my eyes, which is something I do pretty much daily due to allergies. When I look back in the mirror, the excess drops that are leaking out of my eyes are this very very vivid ultra-blue color, with a slight hint of aqua. I start wiping at them, and I look at the Visine bottle, but the liquid in there is clear. The blue tears are becoming more profuse, so I think it must be that my eyes have something wrong with them, and that I need to go to the doctor to figure out why I have blue tears. I keep trying to wipe them away, but they get more and more profuse so that there's like a waterfall of blue on my face. Then I realize that it's not coming from my eyes, but from higher up - somewhere near my hairline. I think to myself, well, at least it makes my eyes look bluer [they're already blue, but getting more gray-ish as I get older]. Then the dream ends.

Today, I can think of two things that have to do with blue. First, the background image on my Mac is a sort of aqua-ish blue. Secondly, I went to Frankie's last week with my coworkers as a departmental miniature golf thing, and the water in their waterfalls was dyed this grotesque Drano blue. So there must be something going on with that. Ooh ooh, and it was close to Duke Blue. So it's related to work, my department, and my computer.

I actually think I know what it is, but it's not something I can talk about at this point. I'll update later.

This dream seems largely inspired by my recent viewing of the HBO series "Band of Brothers".  Which I highly recommend.

I'm a soldier with an Airborne company, and I've been away from my company for a while for some reason and am just getting back to them.  It's winter time, and the ground is covered with ice and a thin powder of snow.  It's absolutely freezing out.  The air is in a dead calm and smells like snow is coming. 

I'm approaching where the company is camped out - it's a large stone church, but the roof, doors, and windows are gone.  I run into a few of my company mates, and I ask what happened to the church.  They don't answer, and walk away. 

There aren't many soldiers left, and it seems like they've been hit pretty hard in battle.  Also, there's no food, no ability to make a fire, and everyone is suffering from the cold.  I keep insisting on asking what happened to the church, and one guy finally says to me that they don't talk about it, because if they can pretend they have a roof over their head, they don't feel as cold.

The commander comes out, and a large helicopter [again with the helicopters] lands nearby.  He says we have an assignment and we need to make a jump, that everyone has to move out.  He says to me that he has a "surgeon's shirt" that I can put on if I'm cold.  I thank him and start undressing to put this on under my jacket and other clothes.

At this point, narration takes over in the dream - it's me narrating.  The narration is talking about the procedure for gearing up and getting into the helicopter before making a jump.  The real me is going through my pack looking for clothes to put on.  I see in my pack an old quilt that my Granny made [which my mother currently owns] and decide to wrap that around myself under my clothes, but it's too awkward and I have to drop it.  Then I try to put on the surgeon's shirt, which initially looked like a scrub shirt but that turns out to be very difficult to put on, with lots of confusing sections connected with velcro.  Most of the company is in the plane already, and only three or four of us are still preparing.

The narration then starts talking about the need for company members to hurry onto the plane, and that folks who take too long to prepare must be left behind to fend for themselves.  I start to panic at this point and try hurriedly to get the surgeon's shirt on, then my other clothes - and Granny's quilt is still left out of the pack.  There's only one other (female) soldier still trying to get ready - and the helicopter's blades are starting up.  I know I will have to dash to the helicopter and leave most of my stuff behind if I don't want to be left defenseless in the cold.

Then I wake up.

Two helicopter dreams in one week is a bit strange - and the idea of struggling to survive was in both.  There wasn't any actual gunfire in this one, though.  Hrm.

It occurs to me that the helicopter portion is probably directly related to the very loud thunderstorms we've been having overnight this week.  Both nights I had these dreams we were having them.

This is a short bit from a much longer dream that I had a couple of nights ago, the rest of which I no longer remember. 

I'm in the cockpit of a blimp along with Robert Sean Leonard (of "House" and "Dead Poet's Society" fame) And some large, muscular guy with a shaved head and dark stubbly beard.  I'm not sure why, but it's our mission to defend this blimp from being taken over.  Robert Sean Leonard and I are sitting towards  the middle next to each other, and the other guy is sitting at the controls for the blimp.

Suddenly, we see three helicopters coming toward us rapidly.  The pilot dude indicates that they're coming for us, and flips some levers and suddenly we shoot out the front of the blimp - the cockpit has disengaged and turned into a helicopter.  The pilot shouts at us to get down, so we lay down on these strange thin red mattresses in the back, and hold on to some handles imbedded in the helicopter floor.  The door of the helicopter is wide open on the side nearest me.

The pilot begins dogfighting with the other helicopters, and is firing the helicopter's missiles at them.  We have several near misses with the missiles that are getting shot at us.  I am terrified, and with all the dips and swoops the pilot is making, I am having trouble holding on and not rolling out of the open door.

Suddenly, we run out of missiles , and the pilot stands up with one hand on the controls and a machine gun in the other hand, and starts firing the machine gun at a helicopter that is right next to us.  At the same time, the helicopter pitches severely, and I begin to roll toward the open doorway.  But Robert Sean Leonard reaches out an arm and grabs me, and hold me close to him.  We watch the mattress I'd been laying on slide out the door and fall away.  But Robert has me, and he holds me tight to him in a spoon-like fashion.  I am still terrified, but I know that he's not going to let me go no matter what happens.

The End.



I'm not sure what I think about this one, so I'll do some analysis later.

So, this is part of a much longer dream, but it's the part that's stayed with me.

I buy a house, and *Davis and I are walking around it. It's a cute house, a little on the small side. But as we're wandering around it, we find more rooms than I knew about. We wander into the living room, and there's a huge picture window which looks out onto a beach - it turns out I have waterfront property and a lovely view of the ocean. Then we find a room which has a funny door with a shelf on it, like it's a business with a check-out door that opens halfway up to reveal a counter and a register. We open the door in its entirety and go in to find a sheet music store, with some guitars on the walls for sale, and an outside exit. The outside exit opens onto a courtyard with several boutique-like shops, including this one, which has a sign on it - the name of the store, something like "Pyewacket" or some such thing. I start to get ideas about re-opening the store and having that be my main line of work.

Then we wander over to the master bedroom, and discover a door off the bedroom which opens into a nursery. The room is furnished with beautiful antique furniture, metal and painted white, including a carriage and a cradle. While we're looking around, a little boy, maybe three years old, comes in, and *Davis picks him up and kisses him. They look a lot alike, same hair and eyes. And then I realize that this is our son. This makes me very deeply happy. Then I wake up.

This is the first time I've ever had a dream where I was a mother of a child.