non-lucid

Three short dreams that I remember, but I'm sure I had an active dreaming night. I did not sleep well and woke up many times feeling like I'd been dreaming.

In which I discuss politics with my step-mother...

I'm in a swimming pool with my step-mother having a political debate. It involves discussion of the relative importance of environmental concerns and economic growth. The discussion is too boring to relate here.


In which my cousin grows an afro...

Cousin C moved to Colorado. I went there to visit. When he answered the door, I saw that he'd decided to grow his hair long, only since his hair is very curly, it grew into a bushy afro.

"You look like Jimi Hendrix," I tell him.

"It keeps my brains warm in these cold winters," he answers.


In which I babysit K's children (one of whom is an elf), reveal that I'm an action star, and get hassled by the man...

K goes on vacation and asks me to look after her kids. G is a two year old boy with a big vocabulary and E is a tiny elf girl. I loaded them up in my car and we headed to my late Grandma B's house in Dallas. Along the way, we stopped to visit a water park with lots of slides and wave pools. I turned the kids loose and started chatting with a man. G came up to ask a question, and this man suddenly snatched us up and threw the two of us in the back of his van where we spent a long stressful time riding around the baffllingly crowded and complicated Dallas freeways. All the while I'm asking him to please let me call the water park people to gather up E since a tiny elf could easily get lost if no one is watching for her.

Eventually we manage to bonk the guy over the head with a lead pipe and gain control of the van because secretly I'm an action movie star. I drove us to the airport where we planned to fly back to the waterpark but naturally we were detained by immigration officials who wanted proof of my citizenship. I begged them to call the waterpark so that an employee would look for E, but they also refused. I was worried that the little elf had gotten distracted by now and flown away.

Hours later, I'd finally convinced the immigration officials that I am a citizen, but the customs people were still harassing us. G asked them if we were being "customized" and everyone thought this was very witty and cute so that they let us go. We hopped back in the van and rushed to the waterpark where I was relieved to find E sleeping in a giant red flower, Thumbelina-like. We plucked her up without disturbing her and the stress dream had a very happy, though psychedelic ending.

Three dreams last night- one long and vivid, one stress dream, and one short funny dream about my dog. Actually, my dog appears in all three dreams.

In which a rich elderly man is frustrated by his unrequited love for Cameron Diaz...

I'm not actually in this first dream. Sometimes I felt the experience from a third-person observer point of view. Sometimes I was the old man and sometimes I was Cameron Diaz. In the morning, my hubby told me that next time I'm Cameron Diaz, I should wake him up.

Cameron Diaz and a friend are on her private island. (She is Cameron Diaz, but in my dream she is not an actress but an heiress.) They are sitting in beach chairs wearing one-piece 50s style swimsuits and broad-rimmed shades. Between them, a black lab sleeps in the sand. The two women are drinking martinis and facing the sea.

Suddenly a yatch appears and an old man, in his late 70s or early 80s, walks up to the sunbathing women. He is wrinkled and balding but in good health. He's dressed in a white Polo sports shirt and white slacks. He and Cameron know one another from some time in the past. She recognizes him but seems neither pleased nor unhappy to see him.

The old man doesn't mince words. All at once, he asks Cameron Diaz to marry him. She smiles, sips her martini, and declines. It's apparent that they've had this conversation before. She tells him that she doesn't love him. He pleads that he can make her happy. They are perfect for each other- they both love the sea. She prefers it from her island, she argues, while he prefers it from his boat. He flirts and smiles nonchalantly, but inside his heart is breaking. He gets back on his yatch and leaves.

Four years later, Cameron Diaz has had her island repossessed. Something horrible has happened- perhaps a war or a major depression- and she is now a laborer on the island that she once enjoyed. She wears a handkerchief to hold her hair back from her sunburned face while she picks peppers, collecting them in the apron of her hand-made farmer's dress. Her hands are rough, and she thinks of Scarlett O'Hara when she goes to visit Rhett in jail after the war.

The yatch appears again, and the same old man from before disembarks. He's wearing a fine blue suit with a top hat and a monocle. He carries a cane. Seeing Cameron Diaz in her poverty clothes doesn't phase him at all. He drops to one knee in the fruit field and offers her a diamond ring. He tells her that he is a billionaire and can buy back the island for her and make her rich and happy if she will only marry him. He says he loves her now just as before.

Cameron Diaz still declines his proposal. She insists that she can't marry him because she doesn't love him. The old man falls down into the dirt, clutching his heart. Cameron calls for help, and she and her laborer friends carry him into a small hut and put him in bed. There, by candle light, she nurses him back to help. When he is recovered enough to talk, the old man tells Cameron Diaz that he has already purchased the island back from the person who took it from her, and now he will gift it to her with no strings attached. He asks Cameron Diaz why she has always refused to marry him, and she explains again that she just doesn't love him. He asks her why, and she says that she is offended because he never shaves his legs. He pulls back the covers and looks down at his legs: they are my legs only they are very hairy and have many bruises.

The old man has my dog Lucy with him, and Lucy plays with Cameron Diaz's black lab. While the old man recovers in bed, he likes to watch Lucy and the black lab playing out his window. One day, he notices that the black lab has large tumors growing on its back. He worries that Lucy will catch a disease from him. He asks a doctor to check the dog out, and the doctor explains that the lab has ringworm. The old man is relieved because Lucy takes ringworm protection monthly.

In which I walk out to get coffee and end up stressed and left alone...

I walk with my dog Lucy to get some coffee from the local cafe. The cafe keeps moving and I have to walk a few miles just to get the coffee. I get two cups and try to walk back home, but I'm tired and I keep spilling the coffee because my dog keeps pulling on the leash. After a few blocks, I stop at a payphone and call my husband to come get me. He agrees. I keep walking alongside the road. I figure I will see him as he comes towards me. But just as he turns onto the street I'm walking on, an 18 wheeler passes between us and blocks his view of me. He does not see me and keeps driving. I wave at him, but he turns the corner and heads in the direction of the cafe. I try to chase after him, but he is too far down the road.

In which my dog falls into a river but I rescue her...

I’m walking my dog Lucy over a bridge. She starts to chase a fly and runs off the bridge and falls towards the rushing river below. There just happens to be a basket bobbing along at the moment that she falls, and Lucy lands in the basket. I run off the bridge and race along the bank of the river as Lucy floats down it. For a moment I’m hysterical with terror that something is going to happen to her. Then I attain a very fleeting lucidity and realize that this is only a dream and that I would not allow anything bad to happen to Lucy in my dream. There will be a solution.

As I run alongside the river, lucidity lost again, Lucy looks at me with desperate eyes. Her paws are on the rim of the basket. I see another bridge up ahead, and I run fast so that I can get there before she does. I make it just in time. I lean over the side of the bridge with my hands reaching towards the water just as Lucy is rushing underneath. I grab the basket and snatch her out of the water.

In which my husband and my fear of time paradox interrupt my date with Tom Waits...

I’m standing on a street corner, well dressed for the fall in knee-high leather boots, a woolen skirt and a sweater with my hair curled pin-up style. I’m waiting for my date to pick me up.

A maroon 1970 Oldsmobile Cutlass with a cream colored canvass retractable roof pulls up beside me. I open the passenger door and look down the long vinyl front seat to the driver who is crouched over the steering wheel like a vulture. He’s wearing black jeans and is turning to look at me from beneath a bowler hat. It’s a young Tom Waits.

“Are you C--?” he asks.

“That’s me,” and I slide in, shutting the door behind me. He’s excited as he drives and says we’re going to a restaurant he knows that is unique. I’m a little star-struck but also confused.

“Don’t you have a wife, Tom?” I ask, thinking of his famously successful marriage to Kathleen Brennan.

“Not yet,” he answers. “It’s only 1978.” Ah, of course. I’ve time-traveled again. This must mean that I’m dreaming. I gain lucidity for a moment, but then I get lost in the implications of time-paradoxes. I start to worry that if I alter the course of historical events so that Tom and Kathleen don’t marry, then I could wake up to a world without Swordfishtrombones and Mule Variations. Dinner with Tom Waits isn’t worth that risk.

Just as I’m about to protest, he parks the car and we get out to walk around a field of giant tulips. Butterflies fly around above our heads and then swoop down to circle us. The tulips are easily eight feet tall, and Tom Waits explains that the flowers grow so high here because the sun is closer to the earth at this spot. I look up in the sky and see that the sun is a massively huge yellow and orange swirl. Its spiraling rays seem to touch the ground. We start walking along a path towards a tower in the distance that is a mosaic of pieces of colorful glass bottles, marbles and bicycle rims. Its windows are stained glass like a cathedral.

“That’s the restaurant,” Tom tells me. He starts to tell me the history of the tulip park, how it was discovered and how the restaurant owners grow all their own food here. He’s very excited about all this and keeps stopping along the path to point at something or wave his arms around, caught up in his narrative. I’m delighted.

But then my husband suddenly appears. He is surprised to see me here. I introduce him to Tom Waits. Both men are polite to one another but obviously it is awkward. My husband looks at me, puzzled and a little hurt. I feel guilty, but my immediate concern is how to save face. After some platitudes, my husband says he’ll be on his way. Tom politely asks if he’d like to join us for dinner, and my husband accepts.

We continue our stroll towards the restaurant as a trio, but it is obvious that Tom Waits is feeling awkward and confused. The moment is ruined. I feel deeply embarrassed. I ask Tom to excuse us for a minute and I step aside with my husband. I consider the problem. I want to complete the date, but I also want to protect my happy marriage. Trying to think of a solution, I realize again that I’m dreaming. Armed with this lucidity, I tell me husband to leave. He looks sad, but I explain that I will not feel guilty about it because it is only a dream. My husband turns around to walk down the path away from us. I continue on with Tom Waits, but I’m not having fun anymore and the lucidity is lost once again.

Tom and I walk in awkward silence for a little while, and I realize that he is only being polite now. He no longer has any real interest in taking me to the restaurant. Also, I’m worried that I’ve damaged my marriage. So I tell Tom that it was not meant to be- too many time paradoxes and spouses to carry on. He agrees, relieved that he doesn’t have to go through the charade of taking me to the restaurant. And I run down the path after my husband.

In which I'm an epic bad guy...

The first was some sort of epic fantasy type dream. I can't remember much about it except that it involved battles and tricksters. I got the feeling that I was the bad guy.

In which I'm too ethical to snoop...
The second was that I opened by email only to find that my account had been swapped with my husband's cousin HC. At first I was alarmed that someone else must have my account. Then I realized that there was nothing personal or important in my email anyway. So I decided to snoop around in HC's email account. After about a minute of this, I started to feel guilty and logged out. I called him up and told him about it. This was a very boring dream, but I thought that maybe the emotions in it might be linked to the first. In the first dream, I was some sort of bad guy. In the second dream, I first got alarmed when I thought someone else might be reading my emails then realized I don't have anything to hide. I start to snoop and then correct myself like a good girlscout. So I just wondered if the two were related, emotionally anyway.

In which my father and I are in a jail cell with some thugs and my high school boyfriend...

My father and I were arrested. Apparently we'd done something stupid and illegal while drunk, but this took place before the dream plot started so I never knew what it was. The dream starts with us sitting in a holding cell. It's a wide cell like in old Western movies. There are iron bars on one side with a brick wall exactly opposite. The two short sides connecting the bars to the brick wall each have a small wooden bench. We are drunkards, snoozing on the benches. The bars slide open with a loud noise and we wake up, hung-over. We ask the cop if he is going to let us out, but he ignores us as he pushes in three other men. One is a chubby guy with curly hair. One is short and lanky. The third one, I can't see. The chubby guy sits down on the bench next to me, the lanky guy sits next to him and the third guy sits in a shadowed corner on the bench by my dad.

We've never been in jail before so we aren't sure how to talk to new cell mates. I ask what they are in for. They explain that they've beaten someone up and leer at us menacingly. I'm not afraid of them as we are in a jail cell and there are police officers all around. They give us the details of how they jumped a guy and beat and kicked him until he spat blood, broke his ribs and his teeth fell out. They think it is funny. This makes me feel really sad, down deep in my gut- the way I feel when I hear about serial killers or people who torture animals. It's sort of a sick hopelessness. I decide to ignore them and think about something else just to avoid how horrible I feel when I think about their victim. To distract myself, I start looking at the cops who are processing some more people- standing them in front of the camera for the mugshot and taking their fingerprints. I think to myself that I must've been really drunk when I got arrested because I can't remember any of that. With a shock, I notice that one of the new people the police are processing is my ex-boyfriend from high school- a guy I have not seen or thought about for years. We make eye-contact: me behind the bars and him standing for his mugshot. I look away fast and try to pretend that I didn't see him.

Meanwhile my father is telling the violent trio about how if they don't just shut up right now, he will beat each of them until their teeth fall out. They laugh at him and he laughs too, but his laugh is so crazy that it makes them get quiet. Then he stands up and in a maniacal way starts to act out and describe exactly how he will beat them up if they persist in talking about their victim. My father is not a violent guy and I've never seen him fight anyone, so I was really surprised to see this. He told them, "First I'll attack you, Big Curly Man" and then he explained how he'd jump the guy so fast that he wouldn't know what was coming and he'd be kicking in his skull by the time his friends tried to intervene. Then he'd impale the "Creepy Guy" with a piece of pipe he'd found in the cell and squish the "Little Fellow" with his free fist. By the time he'd finished acting this out, all the while shouting and laughing hysterically, the trio were silent. Nobody knew what to think of the display.

The cops pulled open the bars a second time and pushed in my high school boyfriend along with another guy who I didn't get a good look at. My high school boyfriend is a loser and an odd-looking guy, but I have a soft spot for him even though he is a creep. It might be pity. He looked terrible- dirty and haggard with rough skin and wild hair. He obviously hadn't shaved in days. I glanced at my father to see that he did recognize him. At first, my ex just pretended that he didn't recognize me, and I thought that was nice of him. He was giving me the opportunity to ignore him. But I decided to be mature and civil, so I stuck out my hand and shook his and told him that it was really weird to see him here. He agreed and lit a cigarette. I thought that it was really bad for him that he is still smoking since he has asthma, but I didn't say that. He looked sickly and coughed. I have asthma too so I asked him not to light up in the cell. It was a small space and if he smoked, it would make it difficult for me to breathe. Besides, I was pretty sure it was against the rules. He complied and put out his cigarette, but the member of the trio in the corner lit one up almost immediately afterwards as a sign of juvenille defiance. I rolled my eyes and went to stand by the bars to breathe the fresh air. I was going to let it go, but my dad stood up and walked towards him, snatched the cigarette out of his mouth and then stomped it out with his boot. The shadow guy said nothing.

Then the police came over to say that my husband had bailed us out. Things get fuzzy after this. We left the cell and had some discussion about what we had done in our drunken state the night before. We'd have to appear in court. I can't remember this part, but I remember feeling like it was something really stupid and dangerous though not harmful to anyone. My father went home, and my husband and I went to my mom's house. She was having some sort of party and asked us to help her curl the ribbons on the balloons using scissors. We sat on high stools at a tall round table that was full of craft supplies in a room that looked like a school workroom with lots of cabinets. There were a lot of people there, but I couldn't identify any of them. We worked at the ribbon curling and I told the story of what I did while drunk and how I got arrested. People were amused but also disapproved. I can't remember the rest very well- there was more after that but I don't remember it.

Taken with the other two dreams below, there is an obvious emotional link between them all. In all the dreams, I've done something wrong. In this one, I broke a law. In the boring one, I did something unethical. In the mostly forgotten one, I'm a bad guy in a battle.

Hi. I think I'm in the right place. This is my first dream journal post. I'm excited to keep a log of my dreams and to look at yours! If I'm in the wrong place, please let me know!

In which I seek the help of a Korean snake oil doctor to heal my husband's beetle-infested head wound...

I’m sitting in the living room waiting for my husband to get out of the shower. He walks in, wet with the towel still around his waist. A large clump of hair has fallen out of the left side of his head, leaving a huge bald spot above his ear. He is not bothered by it and explains that it is just male pattern baldness. At first I try to be polite and supportive, but internally I’m struggling with the fleeting nature of youth. I’m only 32, not old enough to have a balding husband! I start to really regret ever taking advantage of having a young and good-looking husband, and I feel like it is all downhill from here.

My husband tells me that I’m being shallow and immature. He points out that there are plenty of attractive bald me. He mentions Captain Piccard and Amir Khan- even David Beckham is balding. I agree, but I tell him that he looks ridiculous with only one big bald spot in an otherwise thick head of black hair. We decide that the best thing to do is just shave it all off; nothing looks worse than a comb-over.

I grab the shears and get ready to make peace with aging, but when I move closer to his head, I see that actually there is a large gash deep in his skin, revealing parts of his skull, and full of marble-sized translucent beetles. He can tell by the look on my face that I’m disturbed, that something is terribly wrong. I won’t let him look in the mirror and instead insist that we rush right away to the ER.

We hurry out the door only to realize that we are living down on of Seoul’s confusing and crowded back alleys. None of the signs are in English and before long we are lost. Eventually we make our way to a main road where we are forced to hail a cab. A golf cart responds, and we hop in the back and make our hopelessly slow way through the city traffic to a hospital.

The clinic is on the outskirts of town in a Japanese style house with a large garden in front full of snakes from all over the world. There are dangerous coral snakes, cottonmouths, slithering rat snakes, giant yellow Burmese pythons, coiled rattlers, colorful boas dropping from trees and herds of tiny garden snakes wiggling between, over and under all the others. Bright blue and orange fluffy cats mingle with the snakes in the yard, sometimes leaping straight up into the air with their backs arched, hackles raised, tails poofed and toes pointed like the typical black Halloween cat on a fence post. The golf cart cabbie explains that the snakes are for the doctor’s snake oil and the cats are to guard the clinic and keep the snakes outside. He drives up into the yard, dodging the cats, with the wheels of the golf cart thumping and thudding on the snakes beneath the tires.

Two volunteer nurses rush outside and help us in. They take one look at the beetles infesting my husband’s head wound and explain that these are contagious pests like lice. We rush my husband off into his own private and isolated room where he must wait for the doctor, and then they warn me to wash my hands and burn my clothes.

I’m walking back down the hall towards the washroom when I notice a young man hiding in a dark corner holding a bobby pin. I ask him what he’s doing, and he explains that he is going to become a master burglar, thief and outlaw. He looks like he is about 14 years old with blonde hair and blue eyes. He reminds me of Leonardo DiCaprio on “Growing Pains“. I ask him why he doesn’t go to school or work towards a more hopeful future, and he explains that he wants people to sing songs about him, like Ned Kelly. I start to question his knowledge of folklore and his romantic misunderstanding of poverty related crime, but I decide it is not worth it. I go to the washroom and scrub my hands. When I come out, I see him at the end of the hall trying to pick the lock on my husband’s door. I punch him hard in the stomach and consider turning him into the police, but he looks so young and clueless that I feel sorry for him and instead let him go out the back door of the clinic. I even warn him about the yellow python.

Back in my husband’s hospital room, I pull up a chair by the door and sit and wait for the doctor. The dream then disintegrates into a discussion about the Krebb’s Cycle which I’m studying in real life.