dreams

Dinner

I was having dinner with my daughter in a strange restaurant.  She was sitting with her back to a storefront window.   We were at a table for two, but she and some people at a couple of neighboring tables were having an argument with our waiter.  I was trying to ignore it and pay the check which had come.  It was for $96 and I was going to pay cash.  I had enough in my wallet and and an envelope, but it was taking me a long time to find the right bills.  Meanwhile, my daughter and the others who I guess we were with had started out of the place.  I followed and was walking next to Chris R who was wearing an elaborate trench coat. 

He pointed out a door off to the side and said we could get to Iraq through there.  The door led not to Iraq but to a well lit room with a big swimming pool which is where I went frequently to work out.  The floor around to pool was those institutional tiny white tiles with some black.  There was a big crowd of people around the pool.  A woman I didn't recognize in a group on a slightly higher level accosted me as I walked past.  She told me enthusiastically that she was going to be moving into an office in my building, that Mac-somebody-or-other was moving out.  I was surprised because I hadn't heard that anyone was leaving.

I realized that I didn't have any way to get home.  I thought I would maybe ask Chris for a ride, but going with him would still leave me 20 miles short of getting home.  Then I remembered my daughter of whom I had lost track.  I took out my cell phone to call her.  It was a new cell phone with nice big number keys [unlike my real phone].  They were translucent plastic, red and orange, but the white numbers on them were already worn off in places and I was beginning to wonder whether I would be able to enter her number, when she appeared in person.

She said that of course she would take me home.  She explained that the reason she and the others had been arguing with the waiter was that she had made the comment in the waiter's hearing that her roommate would like a certain 'vacationland' tee shirt that someone was wearing [I'm not sure if it was the waiter, my daughter, or someone else].  The waiter then brought out and tried to sell her and the others a bunch of souvenir shirts that were nothing like the one my daughter had commented on.

The unusual thing about this dream was that I was actually awake for a bit between my daughter finding me in 'Iraq' and her explaining to me the cause the argument with the waiter.  It seems doubly unusual to have the same dream continue after a period of wakefulness and to have a dream hark back to an earlier part.  Normally, dreams seem to make the most extreme transitions of location, cast, and plot without the dreamer feeling anything unusual is transpiring.  I am not sure that I ever remember a dream harking back to an earlier episode in the dream by way of explaining it...

Fish and ships

Two dreams to report -

First dream: there is a row of large yachts, almost cruise ship size lined up at a pier, so tightly they overlap.  They are black with white superstructures.  They are there for the winter, some kind of service.  I have to tell them when they are going to be able to leave.  They last couple aren't going to be happy when I tell them they can't leave until august.  There are a group of young women, whom I seem to know, who get jobs working on these ships.   One of them brings me a beautiful little plate with a small hors d'oeuvre of shrimp and avocado artfully arranged.  She tells me that if you sit still long enough in one place on these ships, someone will bring you food and wine.  Another of the young women becomes the nanny for a toddler who we discover is 'W' [nothing to do with our President] the grandson of the owner of one of the ships.  He is the heir apparent, even though he has an older brother.  We think it is quite a coup the we have power to influence 'W'. 

Second Dream:  rowing to shore in a small yellow fiberglass dinghy.  As we beach the boat I notice a school of odd looking fish right by the shore.  they are brownish with flat lips, kinkd of like catfish, but their eyes must be on the front of their heads because they are all looking up at me with curiosity.  Then I notice another creature in the water.  It has black fur or feathers, with a greenish patina, that might be algae on its coat.  It has penguin like flipper-wings and at first I think it is a penguin.  It is obviously in dire straights.  I lift it out of the water and carry it up on the beach.  I call for a towel or blanket to warm it up in.  I realize it is really not a penguin, but some kind of small furry person.

The Bomb Dream

The worst dream I ever had was my bomb dream.  I'm not sure whether I had this dream just once or many times, but it was so vivid that I remember it clearly, although the dream dates from about the time of the Cuban missile crisis.

I was standing on a perfectly flat plain near the sea shore.  There was nothing at all on the plain except widely spaced small groups of people which I took to be families.  No trees or houses, no bushes, not a blade of grass.  Literally no place to hide.  Overhead was a perfectly clear blue sky.  Every one was looking up.  Directly overhead almost invisibly high in the sky a little silver airplane was slowly circling.  I knew that this plane contained 'the bomb', that it was going to fall, that it was just a matter of when.

This dream wasn't heart-stoppingly terrifying in the way dreams of being chased by some kind of monster or falling off a cliff can be.  It was overwhelmingly fatalistic, perhaps that first realization of the inevitability of death.

Calvin

In last night's dream, I was reading a book about comics.  I came to a page that had a representation of the last Calvin and Hobbes comic by Bill Watterson.  This last comic was mostly typeset with the title "It Could Have Been Worse" and at the bottom third, overlying the type was a head shot of Calvin looking his meanest.  I couldn't read anything but the title, but I understood it to be Bill's explanation of why he would no longer be drawing the strip.

Seinfeld-inspired

I'm happy to be invited onto this mysterious and wonderful blog as a guest-dreamer.  I had a dream the other night that was a more intense version of the usual exam-anxiety dream, a hold-over in most of us from school days.  In this dream, I had an entire project - not just an exam or paper - due at the end of semester, which was the next day.  I raced around trying to figure out what the project was, and where I was supposed to deliver it.  I  rooted around in the campus bookstore  for the course's textbook, but  I  had no idea what the course was, so  I didn't have a prayer of finding it.   
Finally, I ran across a teacher I'd had in real-life grad school over twenty years ago.  I told him about my dilemma, and said if he'd tell me what the course was about, I could write an essay.  Would that do?
"An essay!" he roared, as if it was the most absurd, paltry thing he'd ever heard of. 
Intense shame, guilt, and anxiety woke me up, and I realized again that the only good of these dreams is the relief, on waking, that we're no longer in school.
It was only on talking over this dream a few days later with W., my host on this blog, that I realized I'd watched a Seinfeld episode the evening before this dream, where George Costanza is given a "big project" by his boss, but George gets shut out of the men's room where his boss describes the project.  When the boss emerges, George is afraid to own up to not hearing a word and asking his boss to repeat it, so he has to run around trying to eavesdrop on different departments to find out what the "big project" is, and what he's supposed to be doing. 
George's anxiety resonated so strongly with me, that it brought on this dream.  And that's why I've related it here, as an example of my experience of dreams being triggered by something in my waking life the evening or day before I have them.  I bring my own details to the dream, like the teacher from my past, but the central idea of the dream - the anxiety over not being prepared for final course requirements - comes from some identifiable trigger in waking life the day before the dream.         

Van Missing

I only remember the last part of a long involved dream.  I had been helping with the music for some event.  I was leaving.  I had a banjo slung over my back and was carrying another guitar.  I had left all the amplifiers and other stuff because I had to climb a long steel ladder on some kind of bulkhead to get away.  When I got to the top I started looking for my van, a full sized bright red one, but I realized I didn't know where it was.  It had been used by some transport people to help bring things to the event.  I reached the parking lot.  Lots of big trucks were pulling away, but I couldn't see the van.  I berated one of the dispatchers, but got no help.  I realized I would have to walk through miles of parking lots looking for the van - and I didn't know whether I would find it and whether the keys would be with it if I did...
[I don't own (or play) a banjo or a red van, although my company did have such a van many years ago...]

Benches

One of the things I find fascinating about dreams is how much great detail I see in some item while some events are vague and unformed.

Last night I dreamed about a couple of outdoor benches.  They were old fashioned park bench style with black enamel cast iron frames and varnished blond wood slats - probably oak.  ML and I took one to a lady who, with her husband, specialized in refurbishing these kinds of things.  She wanted a lot of money to do the work.  I didn't care about the money for itself but I was concerned about being overcharged.  She had me sign several checks in advance.  There were three or four of them in specific amounts between 1500 and 2500.  I remember one in particular was for 2248.  I assumed these were dollars.  The checks themselves were pink with darker red printing, mad out in blue ink.

I told the lady that these benches would be easier to do than she thought, but in looking at them more closely I noticed that some of the iron frames that held the slats in place between the legs were missing and would have to be replaced with wood.  I was wondering whether they replacement pieces could be steam bent or would need to be laminated, or whether they could just be thin pieces of wood bent ant held by the slats.

In passing, I noticed that the some of fasteners that held the bench together had unusual heads - they were Philips headed, but instead of the usual crossed slots on the axis of the screw, there were two crossed slots off set from the axis.  I remember thinking that this seemed a good idea since if one cross got buggered up the other one would still work.  I was wondering if all the torque applied to the screwdriver would get transmitted to the crew since the slots were off axis.

This observation only took up a very small percentage of the apparent time in the dream and didn't seem particularly an important part, but the detail of the screws was extremely vivid.  I find it curious, the differences in detail focus from one part of the dream to another.  I suppose in waking life we have these differences in focus all the time that go un-noted.  This is probably because in waking life we have more definite priorities that guide our attention, whereas in dreams we are much more passive observers and a wide range of experiences have more or less  the same emotional weight. 

Hotel

I had a summer job at a big hotel, but I had had to leave for a few days.  I was trying to talk my woman supervisor into taking me back.  I was confident she would, but she needed to be stoked a little first.  I started talking in Ebonics, I guess thinking that would make me seem more deferential and easy going.

Shop

I was grinding and polishing some kind of crude heavy steel tool, like a cold chisel.  I commented to someone that I like acquiring metal working tools even though I rarely got a chance to use them.  Then I had to cut up some wooden slats to reinforce the inside of a duffel bag to make it a suitcase.
TH was there.  People were looking for him.  There was someone looking for him with very bad teeth - white, but twisted and caved in.  It turned out they were looking for a different TH.  Some young woman was taking hits from a whippet.  I assumed it was nitrous oxide.

The Big C

I dreamed I had been diagnosed with cancer of some non-specific type.  I had no symptoms.  I was in a large hospital or treatment center.  I went to check in on the 23rd floor, room 2302, which was where someone I knew who had been treated here before me [my father?] had gone, but I was told that my place was in room numbers -8803 and -6702 which I took to be deep underground.  I was worried that perhaps this meant I wasn't going to get the best treatment.

Later I had a scatological dream, in which let me simply say I embarrassed myself in front of a couple of strangers, but awoke to avoid the full force of the embarrassment...