Things I dreamed about during a Friday afternoon nap

--> I missed a chiropractor appointment by 37 minutes

--> The governor of Montana is gay and also extremely hot

--> I was dreaming in the dream and was being haunted in *that* dream by my dead grandma who looked not like my grandma but like the ghost in the opening scene of Ghostbusters (the library)

--> There was a 53 car pileup in Burnsville last night

--> The towel hook fell off of the outside of my shower and my dad had to come down and take apart the entire shower and expose my incredibly bad paint job

--> My mom hated her birthday gift

What "colors" do to dreams

Two days ago I mentioned colors, those ugly anxious emotions that bear the names of various colors.

Let me tell you want going through "colors" do to your dreams.

I took a nap today...last night I went out with Molly and then later we met up with her two roommates Ruth and Blaine. We got back to their place and settled in at about 2:30am, then I woke up to drive home at about 5:15am. I went back to sleep, of course, but obviously a nap was in order. While napping, I had the following dream. Before you begin...it's long and detailed and a full-on nightmare. I don't know exactly what it means, but I have some ideas. Some strong ideas. But if any of you out there are good at dream interpretation, please comment and tell me what you think is up.

Shoes and snakes.

I looked out my patio door and saw a coral snake approaching the door. I then realized that both the glass and screen doors were open. I ran to the door and a bunny came through the patio door and I threw a shoe out the door to stop the snake. The snake caught it in its mouth (I felt it’s mouth brush my fingers) and it began to eat my shoe. I was mad because I knew I’d never get the shoe back. I went after the rabbit in my house—grey—and then for my camera. I went back to look at the snake, which was arched up in the air trying to swallow my shoe. I looked at a corner of my patio and saw at least two other snakes (yellow striped) coiled up against a HUGE black long snake. There were baby ducks being devoured by the yellow striped snakes. Then I *really* needed my camera. I found it, but couldn’t get it to focus. I then saw a dog, I think a basset hound, coming toward the snakes. The coral snake had finished my shoe and went after the dog. I ran outside to try to stop it, and when I got out there I saw that the dog I saw was actually laying over another dog that was badly hurt, its eyes had been eaten out by the snake. The second dog looked like my neighbor’s dog and my first instinct was to run to their patio door and knock for help, but the urge to get my camera was too strong. I thought maybe I should run around to the front of the house, grab my camera, and ten get the neighbors. I ran back into my house and went upstairs to photograph the snakes from my upstairs window.

I opened the door to my loft (my actual loft is open) and noticed something was wrong because there was a very tiny window that didn’t open. The room was very tiny and I thought “this isn’t right, this isn’t my house. The loft and the second bedroom match up and both look outside.” So I turned to go into my second bedroom. It was pink, and had my childhood bed in it along with furniture that wasn’t my childhood furniture but I recognized it as that. My mom was in there cleaning my room, and it was spotless. I opened a tiny drawer on top of my dresser (designed for jewelry and stuff) and saw places where q-tips had been, little cotton strands were there…and I turned to look in the closet and it was so neat and clean. I started to cry and said “I have to simplify my life!” As soon as I said that I opened a second closet door and the closet was full of stuff…clothes hanging weirdly and bags all over the floor. I ran back to the loft, thinking I had to be dreaming and not know I’m in a dream (I’ve *never* thought this in a dream) and the loft was normal. I went back to the second bedroom but it was still the same pink childhood bedroom.

I took my camera to photograph the snakes from the loft. But when I looked outside, there was pure carnage below. A cat was on its side throwing up what looked like baby snakes, and there were at least three dogs down on the grass that had been attacked. A little girl was walking toward the fray with a hamster and I tried to scream at her to go away because she was looking at me, but I couldn’t scream through the screen. I looked again at the cat and there was another little girl there now holding the cat and a man behind her telling her “it’s a good idea”…I assumed he was saying the cat should be put down.

Then I woke up.

Sad news on delay

When I was in high school I had the fortune of a very special woman coming into my life: Amy Haugen (now Beecher). She was the youth director at my church, and she let me spend most of my senior year of high school on her couch, in her kitchen, and lounging on her floor. She never sent me away when I showed up on her doorstep unannounced late at night. When I worked at a bible camp during the summer and was absolutely exhausted, she gave me a safe haven in her air conditioned room in the ARC (for visiting youth directors and pastors) so I could nap. She was an unbelievably good friend to me and, I would say, the most important person in my life.

She got married to Jason and though I liked him very much, I felt like I was losing a big sister...and I was. Our paths split--she went into married life and I went deeper into college and my own world. I went to visit them in the summer of 1999 in Colorado, and that's the last time I've seen them.

Amy and Jason have two children--Noah and Jess. This morning I woke up having dreamed about Amy. Random dream, we flew to France together, but what wasn't random was the incredible urge I felt to contact her. To reconnect. For whatever reason, I googled them rather than just shooting off an email. I met shocking news: Jess, their daughter, died last summer from complications due to epilepsy. I knew that she struggled with this illness, but I guess I just assumed that because the email updates stopped coming that Jess's seizures were under control and she was happily enjoying being a 4 year old kid. She died on June 18th, 2007.

In honor of her memory and to raise money for seizure related disorders such as Epilepsy and Tuberous Sclerosis, Jason is doing 'Journey for Jess,' where he will travel to 31 national parks taking pictures and collecting donations for their local chapters of the Epilepsy Foundation and TS Alliance.

Please consider donating to this extremely worthy cause. What Amy, Jason, and Noah have gone through is something that no one should have to. Taking this loss and turning it into a positive impact on others is exactly the type of thing that Amy and Jason would do. They are a kind, generous, caring couple. Donate whatever you can to help Jason and to help their family heal.

The anatomy dream...

So, the anatomy dream was not nearly as pleasant as the mortician dream. Apparently it's a good thing that I'm going into mortuary science and not looking to be a coroner. The dream was a result of my new anatomy book that shows photographs of dissected cats, sheep, and fetal pigs. I showed it to my parents yesterday at Christmas #2. The dream goes like this:

I'm younger than I am now, but I have my current brain. So, I'm still under parental rule but I'm old enough to know that I should be able to do what I want. I'm sitting at our dining room table in the house I grew up in eating a chicken breast, but it's not a chicken breast at all; it's a horizontal cut of a dissected cat. I'm pulling out intestine, brain, kidney, etc. and setting it aside while my mom is yelling at me "you know you're going to eat all that--that's the good stuff!" I'm trying to explain that it's BRAIN, and showed her the anatomy book, but she's not at the table anymore. Seems my dad is outside our house chasing Gatsby around with the biggest meat cleaver I've ever seen. More of a sword, actually.

Then I woke up.

So, apparently I'm going to have a slightly more squeamish time with anatomy than I thought. I told my mom that it's entirely likely I would end up dissecting a cat or a pig or, at the very least, a frog...but she began to pale so I stopped.

The last family members were informed of Operation: DBH earlier today, my aunt and my cousin. Well, that's a lie--I still have one more family member that will need to know, my cousin Christopher, but I'm sure my aunt will tell him. The reaction was as expected...a mix of "how could you do that" with "why would you want to do that". Nothing unusual.

"Last night I dreamed I killed you."

Words every teacher longs to hear.

A student told me this morning that he dreamed last night that he killed me. I asked how. He said he hit me in the forehead with a hammer (the chisel end).

I'm having a hard time choosing a word/emotion for how I feel about this. On one hand, it's a dream. It wasn't a threat, and honestly, if he said that he'd killed me with a gun in his dream I'd have been more nervous. On the other hand, why would he tell me that? If I had a dream where I really actually killed someone, I don't think I would tell anyone. I don't know.

I was the least shocked of anyone that heard him say it--another teacher and several other students heard him--and I guess I really didn't react. Well...I reacted by asking probing questions. The conversation went something like this:

Him: "Last night I dreamed I killed you."

Me: "Oh yeah? How'd you do it?"

Him: "I hit you in the forehead with a hammer."

Another student: "Which end?"

Him: "The chisel end."

Me: "Did it stick in my head or could you pull it out easily?"

This last question threw him a bit--he didn't expect me to ask it, surely, and I think I handled it the right way by unnerving him rather than showing him that he had unnerved me. That's the best emotion word--"unnerved." I'm not scared or worried or offended....just.....unnerved.

My first "mortician dream"*

*Note: It goes without saying that I am the only person who cares about this dream, but I'll tell it anyway. I find it interesting that this was not a nightmare--at no point was I spooked in even the least way, which leads me to believe that I am going into the right profession.

Last night I dreamed I was working (well, interning, sort of unofficially) for Mark the Funeral Director. I happened to be at the funeral home and they were busy so someone asked me to step in and help with the small stuff. I went back into the embalming room and was surprised to see a living man, dressed in a suit, laying in a casket. I never got around to asking why he was there but it made sense in my head that this was part of his pre-planning.

Then, I spent quite a bit of time being concerned about my gloves and about having a warm diet coke. I kept going to the fridge and opening cans, but they were all warm. And I had to get new gloves after every new can. Mark came up to me and asked me how I was enjoying my day so far and that I looked good in my "uniform" (scrubs). I said that the clothes were super comfortable. He led me to a closet where everyone who worked in the funeral home had nice clothes hanging--he said that they all kept nice clothes there in case they got called out.

Then, of course, we got a call. We went to a home where someone had died during the night. I went with Mark and I remember thinking that this would be my first dead body that I'd see "fresh" (which isn't true--I saw my grandma before Mark came to take her away when she died a few years ago). We walked up seven or eight flights of stairs, and I kept thinking "how are we going to get a body down these stairs?" and when we got to the room I was expecting it to be the elderly woman, but she was sitting up and talking. It was her husband in the next bed. The smell was, as hard as it is for me to describe, exactly what the smell of death is. It's intangible, hard to pick up, and completely incomparable to anything else. The elderly woman asked me to go downstairs with her and leave Mark with the body, so I did, and while walking down the stairs I woke up.

Music, crushes, dreams and nightmares (a.k.a. "too much information.")

Kind of a hodgepog of thoughts today, things that have been swirling in my head all week but since I was struck down by the plague/hanta virus I was unable to gather the energy and motivation to write.

I've decided that part of the reason why my work days are a struggle is because of my lack of media. I've been bringing my ipod in and tuning out the world during the brief times during the day I'm alone, and it's amazing what a good five minute music reprieve can do for my mood. It shouldn't surprise me; music has always been a huge thing for me, influencing my moods for the positive or letting me wallow in the negative if I felt like it. Jodi is so vocal about her musical working environment I really should have realized it earlier, but I'm glad I finally figured it out.

I have a new crush. This is monumental, not just because crushes are damn fun, but because the excitement of a new crush is the fastest way to mending a broken heart. My new crush is a writer, breathtakingly handsome, and just quiet and shy enough that when he talks to me and looks me in the eye I feel like we have stolen each other for the time being. His writing is incredible, some of the best I've read in a long time, and talking to him reminds me that when my ex gave me a rough equivalent of "it's not you, it's me," he was right.

This does not stop me from dreaming about the ex, though. Last night I dreamed that we went out in a group for the first time since we ended the friendship part of our relationship. He had long hair, and was supremely good looking. It was awkward, though, and I was also with another ex and several mutual friends that were trying to make things as un-awkward as possible. We ate pizza and drank beer.

My nightmare....well, it was scary, but not in the adreneline scary, scary in the sense that I don't know where it came from. Jodi and I are huge believers in the fact that no one cares about a dream more than the dreamer, but I'm going to write about this anyway. Not in full detail, though, because I still fear that my students will stumble on this at some point and call me out.

In my nightmare I was raped by the Candyman. The Candyman of horror movies, with the bees coming out of his mouth. He abducted me and my friend Erica and he tied a bag over my head and put me in his bathroom while he went and dealt with Erica. I looked for a way to escape but I didn't dare. He came in and I managed to convince him that I would willingly have sex with him if he was gentle. He was huge, and it hurt a lot, and he had open sores all over his penis. When he finished, it flowed out of him for several minutes, wouldn't stop, and then my parents showed up at the house and Erica and I weren't allowed to say that we had been raped. I then met Ex and others for pizza and beer and it drifted into my other dream.

The scary part is that I went through the whole rape, and like I said I left out details. I have no idea where that came from. The nearest I can figure is that my mind and my emotions are so screwed up right now that I'm going to the extreme of possibility because I have nowhere else to go. Bizarre....and yeah, too much information. Sorry.

Small slices of insanity

On Wednesday night I had nightmares all night. I remember waking up several times and, while I didn't remember any of the dreams specifically, I recalled that they covered a wide variety of subject matter. They kept switching all the time, rather than being just one solid long dream. At lunch with Erica on Thursday I tried to recall any part of the night and I couldn't.

This morning when I was taking a shower a small part of one of the dreams came back to me, and caused a small panic attack. I couldn't breathe, my vision started to get spotty, and my stomach started to hurt like I was going to throw up. But when I calmed down, I couldn't remember the part of the dream that had come back to me.

It happened again less than an hour later. Standing in the kitchen, I looked at my counter at a necklace and some Target coupons, and I remembered part of the dream, which caused another panic. I had to sit down and put my head down on the dining room table, and when it passed I was sweaty and exhausted. Again, I couldn't remember the part of the dream that had inspired the panic. I moved the necklace and the Target coupons to two different locations.

My only thought is that these were true nightmares, the kind that can really fuck with your brain, and my brain is doing its best to protect me from them. The fact that I remember things for a second or two but not long enough to lock it into memory suggests that my brain knows something about them that I don't know.

I'm hoping to make it through the day without losing my mind. I don't understand why this has happened twice this morning already--and it's only 10am. Part of me wants to remember the dreams so that I can tell myself that they were dreams, things impossible to happen. But I've never needed to put my head down on my dining room table and remind myself that I was awake and that everything was okay, that I was not dreaming, before. Apparently these are some high powered dreams.

To dream the impossible dream

So I woke up this morning completely out of breath, like I'd been running, and coming out of the following dream. I wrote it, will maybe look at doing something with it even though I abhor dream writing. Posting it here because Somebody, who shall remain nameless, keeps wanting to read some of my writing but keeps forgetting to ask when I actually have access to my work.



Night Train

When the train goes through, it pulls out the people who aren’t matched up with each other. The red cars take the people wearing red. Etc. It’s the train’s last night, its final round, and we know it’s going to be a devastating trip. Everyone is gathered around and the main problem is the people wearing striped shirts. Stripes can’t pair up with other stripes unless they’re identical. None of them are, although some are close.

I see a woman wearing my color and I know I need to pair up with her, but she won’t go. She wants the train to take her and I know that if it does she’ll die and that it’ll be my fault, that I’ll know I should have tried harder. But the train is coming, I can hear it, and the sound of it is so beautiful, the wind crushing around us. Its path is a circle around us and when it finishes the damage will be assessed and the survivors will walk away.

I can’t find the woman wearing my color, I assume she’s been taken already so I’m standing alone but I’m not afraid. I’m sad and having a hard time breathing because I know it’s the last time the train will ever come through. My breath comes in gasps as I try to absorb everything, the glow of the train and the different colored cars, the sound vibration in my feet, the wind that sucks my insides out, and I begin to cry for the beauty of this train. I watch people being taken, pulled inside by unseen hands.

When the train is full circle on the track it is like being in another world. All of my senses are engaged and my brain is overloaded. I am trying like mad to mentally photograph the beauty and magnanimity of this moment and it is beyond my comprehension how I am the only one that sees the magic of this train and the tragedy that it will never run again.

Summer is drawing to a close

I know, it's only the end of July, but my summer is definitely on its last legs. The trip to Belize has jump started my brain on everything that has to get done in a short amount of time. I'm stressing over my passport, stressing over new classes I might be teaching (last night I dreamed I was teaching all 8 periods and they were ALL new classes that had never been taught before by anyone in our building), and stressing over my writing. All of this stress can only mean that school is upon me.

I've been trying to get into a habit with my writing. Its been working, sort of. But, like the running routine, as soon as school starts in the fall all of my routines jump out the window and they don't look back. Oh well. At least I'll lose some weight when school starts again. It's the NOS (Name of School) Diet: eight hours of standing or walking with no time for lunch, and walking up and down at least one flight of stairs at least twenty times a day. Always trims down about five pounds. Which should be just enough to help me fit back into my kick ass jeans.

Close random post. Thank you, and good morning.