lucyoncolorado

In which I have a dream within a dream...

I'm sitting in the dining room of my childhood home. Mom is in the kitchen. I ask what's for dinner. She says I'll have to get one of my hens from my coop and bring it to her so she can chop its head off, clean it, and cook it for dinner. I argue that we can eat without killing one of my hens, and anyway it would be really messy to do that.

I try to make an analogy, so we go upstairs to my bedroom. I say, “so you are telling me that if I want a pair of jeans, I have to open this drawer and take R out and you’ll cut his head off and take the jeans off him?”

She says, “yes, that's exactly right." I open the drawer, and R is inside like Flat Stanley, folded up like a towel. I pull him out of the drawer and grab him by the shoulders as if he were a sheet and pop him open in the air where he inflates back to a normal person. He's normal sized R, wearing nothing but my jeans which are too small for him, but he's sleeping.

Then Mom and I are back in the kitchen with R sleeping on the table. I feel violently angry so I get right up in mom's face and scream, “Do it! I dare you to do it! I want to see if you’ll do it!”

She has a big knife in one hand and a giant grape in another. She bites the grape in half and then shoves the other half into my mouth, saying, “This grape tastes just like Smuckers Grape Jelly!”

The grape grows in my mouth until I can’t talk anymore. Mom is still laughing, knife in hand. I can't talk or scream.

All of a sudden, I hear the opening guitar licks of Ziggy Stardust, and I say to my mother, “K's calling- that's the ring tone I've set for her. I’m asleep”.

Everything in the dream pauses like it's a movie. I walk past my frozen mother and sleeping R, and I look out the back door. Our house is now up in the sky- there are only clouds beyond the patio. I step to the edge of the patio and look down to see myself sleeping in my adult bed in my adult house with my cell phone ringing Ziggy Stardust next to me. I try hard to will myself to move and wake up, but I don't move.

So, back up in the dream kitchen, I grab an Alphorn (one of those long Swiss pipe instruments that are curved up at the end) and I stick it out the door of the dream kitchen, across the patio, through the clouds until it stretches down down down into the my adult bedroom where its curved end rests next to my phone, right beside my sleeping body.

“Hello? K?” I shout into Alphorn, and this somehow enables me to answer the phone and we are able to talk. K tells me it is a bad connection and that she can barely hear me, and I explain that this is because I’m answering the phone from inside a dream. Then she explains why she called.

Apparently I had “liked” on Facebook a certain picture of her son EC that was taken over a year ago at her aunt's house. The problem with this is that she had lied to everyone in her family about having visited the aunt, and somehow my liking the picture made it visible and exposed the secret. So she wanted me to log on and comment on the picture something that indicated that I had actually taken EC over to aunt's house that day, not her.

I agree to do this from inside my dream, and I log onto Facebook but I can’t find the picture in question. Then K explains it was on a special Groups page on Facebook, not on one of our profiles, and that the group was a merged page of mine, hers and H’s. We had created this page that night we all three talked on the phone last year because (in dream logic) having a group Facebook page is the only way to have a three-way conversation. In the dream, it doesn’t occur to me that H is dead.

I find the picture of EC, but I can’t make a comment without first entering a password. K tells me that the password is The United States of (her name), and I tell her that's a stupid joke. She answers that she was stoned when she came up with it. I respond that I'm on Benadryl because of my allergies and that this is why I'm probably having such a weird dream.

Suddenly I'm holding that big empty plastic bottle of Benadryl from H’s house, and this scared the shit out of me and woke me up for real.