Prelin

Night before last: I dreamed I was in Louisiana for some reason in a place that didn't have a lot of dry land. In the dry spots, there were houses and a few old, rusted campers and vehicles. I had to swim and wade through neck-deep water to reach wherever it was I was going. I got to my destination and turned around to realize that the water I had just come through is full of alligators, and I'm lucky I didn't get eaten. Now I don't know how I'm going to get back.

New dream: Extremely vivid, though I can't recall much of it. I was visiting a distant cousin in Utah (never been there). Her home is next to a beautiful mountain. I stick my head out her back door and am wowed by what I see. There is no yard - just a gentle, treeless slope leading to the base of the mountain, which, although enormous, isn't too high to climb without equipment. It's not high enough to have a snow cap. It's partially covered in grass, and partially raw dirt with a few small rivulets where water has run down. It reminds me of the Scottish Highlands. Higher up, there are some large boulders and rocky ledges, but I see places where someone could hike around them. I tell my cousin that the next time I come visit, I'm going to walk right out her back door and see how high I can hike up there. Right now it's just beginning to snow a little. If I only I could snap a picture of this image in my mind and post it on the dream journal! There was so much vivid detail, and I remember it clearly.

Last night: Slept very fitfully, which helped me to recall lots of dreams and fragments. (Very tired this morning.) In one, I'm with my fiance in an unfamiliar street scene. It's night time in a very suburban environment containing eateries and grocery stores and such. The Rapture is coming at 11:55 p.m., and somehow we know it. We decide that we want to be having dinner when it occurs, but the only place open is something like a Chic-Fil-A. It's full of people expecting to be raptured, and you can't get inside. The drive-through is also full of cars. I tell my finace that I'm going to kill some time (I have no idea where or doing what) while we wait to see if the crowd dies down. I leave him there. We are both expecting to be raptured. Suddenly I'm back from wherever I went, and the crowd is almost completely gone. There are a few empty cars parked at odd angles, and my fiance is still there waiting for me. Did we miss it? I don't know what time it is now.

In a fragment, I'm in a rush to move to St. Louis. (Years ago in real life, I was in a rush to move from St. Louis to Houston after my job at the time unexpectedly transferred me and gave me less than a week to get set up.) My ex is with me for some reason and seems to be helping me move. I have to run, hurry, hurry! Oh my God where's my rent check? I'll need it as soon as I get there! I find it in a drawer, suddenly remembering that I prepared it in advance. I'm relieved that I had the forethought to do that.

In yet another dream, I'm in a home with lots of hardwood that I've never seen before, but it feels familiar in the dream as if I live there. Night time. It's a nice place, and the bright wood is well-varnished. A dream character that I've never met in real life but feels like a close friend in the dream comes in from outside through French doors that match the wood in the rest of the room. We've been somewhere together earlier in the evevning. He's complaining that almost no one showed up. There were 52 people invited, and if only they'd all turned out, it would have been something else. I don't know exactly what the event was, but I think it involved seeing a movie or attending a play. I'm getting ready for bed now, and I walk to the back of what must be the living room. The back half is actually a hospital room, and there's an old man in a hospital bed. Somehow he's my roommate in this fusion of hospital and residential home. He can't walk, and his feet are lost in a dark alcove built over part of the reclining bed that he's lying in. He asks me to help him check his foot. He tells me there's a small rechargeable light mounted on the wall just inside the alcove, and I pick it up to shine it on his foot for him, which he lifts up to see better. Parts of it are black. Other parts are oozing blood. It's about what he expected to see. Suddenly I feel a drop of blood land on my arm, and I'm quietly horrified. I move quickly to wipe it off with a nearby towel and hope that the man doesn't notice, as I'm afraid he'll be offended by this for some reason. I'm uncharacteristically rude with him, as I really don't want to be burdened by needs that would be better attended by the hospital staff.

Last night I dreamed that I accidentally poured the wrong kind of milk over my cereal and caused a chemical reaction that made the milk and cereal expand exponentially. It ruined my parents' new carpet. (I'm 40 years old, so I'm not sure why I was having milk and cereal in my parents' house.)

I had a separate dream - a very vivid one - that I was living about 10 stories up in a residential hi-rise building. I heard some kind of engine noise outside the window, so I went over to see what I was hearing. A very large fighter jet was somehow hovering outside, and as soon as the pilot spotted me looking out the large floor-to-ceiling window, he brought the jet over to track me with his guns. I ran to the next room, and he swerved the jet over to target me through the windows again. I realized that none of the walls in my building were strong enough to stop whatever kind of bullets he was about to shoot at me, so I ran into the interior corridor where at least he couldn't target me visually. Large tracer bullets suddenly started ripping through the walls, and I dove behind the elevator bank, reasoning correctly that the elevator shaft was constructed of concrete and would provide some protection.

Not sure if this was a separate dream, or if the one I was having shifted, but suddenly I was in a hotel lobby looking for the elevator. The decor was very red - red carpet, elegant fixtures, roses on the tables, etc. I got into the elevator and it was way too small for my comfort. I hate extremely confined spaces. There almost wasn't enough room to turn around, and the ceiling was too low to even put your arms all the way up. I was very nervous that the elevator would get stuck, but it didn't. I got off on an upper floor for some reason, but it was just an L-shaped corridor with lots of locked doors, so I got back into the elevator to go back down. I walked outside the hotel, and suddenly I was a disembodied observer. A murder had occurred in the parking lot. For some reason, a transgendered person had just murdered a man by shooting him in the crotch, and a fashionable middle-aged blond woman was standing nearby. The transgendered woman was telling her to go before the police arrived, but she refused to leave because there was evidence tying her to the scene and she didn't want to seem guilty by fleeing. The middle-aged woman had nothing to do with the murder, but somehow the tip of her red high-heel was lodged in the man's chest.

A separate dream involved a vending machine in a bleak concrete hallway. I got the impression that it was attached to a parking garage. The machine dispensed snacks, drinks and instant STD test results. I was with a small group of people - I think we were out clubbing. I bought a can of coke with ice in it from the machine. The top was removable so you could drink it faster. (When I woke up later, I realized I was really thirsty in real life.) One of the dream characters I was with decided to buy an STD test, and she learned that she had crabs. The machine didn't dispense her change, and we had to call building maintenance to come open it up. I bought a snack from a second machine around the corner, and upon opening it, I realized that it was actually cat treats. I left them on a nearby table, and as I walked away, I realized that someone was probably going to come along and mistake them for dinner mints. I'd never do something so cruel in real life, but in the dream, I got a kick out of the thought.

I dreamed that I was at work (not quite where I actually work or what I actually do), and an employee of mine was waiting after work for someone to pick her up. She looked a lot like "Precious" from the movie, but not quite as large. I casually asked her why she didn't just take the bus home, and she said she couldn't afford the fare. So I offered her a ride.

Unfortunately, I took a left turn on a major street instead of a right and got lost. Mistakenly thinking that I had a protected turn signal that I didn't actually have, I ended up turning through oncoming traffic and nearly having a wreck. The employee told me that since I turned wrong, she didn't know how to get to her apartment from this way. I took the next left turn I could find so as not to go too far in the wrong direction, and I found myself driving through a horribly poor section of the city that doesn't actually exist in real life. There were no lane markings painted on the streets, and there were no curbs. Everything was covered in dust, and you could scarcely tell where the street ended and the sidewalk began. The detail here was amazing (I use that word a lot to describe dreams, but I often find the detail of them amazing). The buildings were all multi-story concrete construction with balconies, and I commented out loud, "This looks just like Mexico." I could see some familair signs for Burger King and McDonalds sticking up in the distance, and I figured that if we continued toward them, the employee would suddenly realize "I know where we are now!"

I asked "Precious" to put her address into her GPS so we could get directions, but when she pulled out a flip phone, I realized she didn't have a GPS application. I asked her what the address was, and she replied, "423 Ed Vaughn Rd." I've never heard of such a street name. I pulled out my iPhone and dictated the street address to Siri, but she kept giving me directions to other streets that sounded nothing like what I was trying to say. "Give me directions to 423 Ed Vaughn Rd." "Getting directions to 423 Elizabeth Rd." I nearly had several more wrecks while trying to program Siri. Finally, I came to another traffic light and stopped in the left turn lane, which had a red light. I typed in "423 Ed Vaughn Rd" and nothing came up. I asked the employee if she was sure that was her address, and she said, "That's not how you spell it." She pulled out her flip phone and typed it as a text message so I could read it: "423 Ed Vin Rd."

For some reason, I decided now that it would be easier to find her apartment if I abandoned the car. I made my turn and then pulled over. We began to walk down the sidewalk, staring at my map application, and then my mother woke me up with a knock on my bedroom door.

I googled "Ed Vin" to see if it meant anything (it was a French pronunciation in my dream, which was why I confused it with "Ed Vaughn." I didn't find anything at all other than a few Facebook profiles under that name.