Last night, I had something I’ve never had before (WAIT FOR IT. . .); a dream within a dream.  In fact, it could be said that I had multiple dreams within a dream.  It was a very strange night indeed.

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I’m walking in an airport to meet CollegeGirlfriend and her fiancee, as well as my Cincinnati friend DoctorLove and her fiancee.  They’re all arriving on the same flight, so we agreed that it would be fun to hang out together for a while.  The plane lands, and the four of them walk past the security gates.  We exchange hugs and handshakes and introductions, and then we walk down the middle of the airport concourse, talking about the various shops and restaurants as we pass them.  Somehow, CollegeGF and I get separated from the group, and we find ourselves walking through a very nice restaurant that overlooks the main runways.  The curtains are pulled back, and the sunlight is streaming through the enormous windows.  Everyone is sitting in groups of three and four, talking animatedly and watching the planes out the window.  It’s a lovely scene, and we both comment on it.  I tell her she should see the nicer restaurant upstairs, so we decide to walk up and take a look, but when we reach the top of the stairs, the heavy curtains are drawn, and the scene is very dark and gloomy.  The customers upstairs are gloomy too, especially juxtaposed with the festive scene happening downstairs.  We both have the urge to get out of there as quickly as possible, and we see a stairway going down at the far end of the restaurant, so we walk toward it at top speed.  Her top speed is faster than mine, however, so she leaves me behind and I have to say her name rather loudly and tell her to wait.  “I’m trying to keep up, here,” I tell her.  She stops and waits for me, and we descend the stairway together.  When we reach the bottom, we find the rest of our group waiting for us, so we walk over and join them.  The five of us walk outside the airport, and DoctorLove points out a stairway along the side of one of the buildings.  She tells the group that the stairway leads to a really great bar that she and I have been to a few times, and that it would fun to stop in there.   I agree, and tell the group that it’s a really fun place to watch planes, and that the food and wine there is particularly excellent.  The rest of the group comes to the concensus that there’s no time like the present, so we decide to head over there.

The dream’s location and time changes, and I’m parking my car outside the front door of a hospital.  It’s fairly late at night, and I’m going to visit Mom, who is still very depressed after Stepdad’s death.  I go into the hospital and ask the receptionist for my mom’s room number.  She tells me, and I take the elevator up to the appropriate floor.  I see Mom’s room, and notice that the door is open, but the lights are low.  Her bedside lamp is turned on at its lowest setting.  I walk into the room and notice that an estranged friend from thirty years ago (I’ll call her AmwayJudy) is standing in the room, so I say, “Oh. . .hey.”  I turn toward Mom and AmwayJudy gets the unspoken message that she’s not welcome there anymore.  I sit on the side of Mom’s bed, and ask how she is.  She starts to cry and I put my hand on her shoulder.  I stay until she finally manages to fall asleep, and then I go outside to get some fresh air.  I see three cats standing a short distance away from the building, so I walk over to make their acquaintance.

“Hello, little friends,” I say, reaching out to pet them.

As soon as I reach down, one of them grows to a height of about four feet, stands vertically on her hind legs, and puts one of her ‘arms’ around my back.  She speaks to me.  “My name is Nesspaw,” she tells me.  “What are you doing here?”

I laugh to myself at her name, which is a homophone of the French phrase n’est ce-pas, which means something like “Isn’t it?” or “Isn’t that so?”  I also realize that she and the other two are sirens, and that I need to get away from them.  “Ohhh, that’s right. . .Nesspaw!  We’ve met before, actually.”  I extricate myself from her clutches, and walk quickly in my original direction.

“I remember you now,” she says, starting to walk behind me clumsily, obviously unaccustomed to being vertical.  “What brings you to the hospital?”

“I’m here to meet my mom and brother,” I tell her.  “I have to go now, unfortunately.  See you later!”

I walk back through the darkness toward the entrance to the hospital, when Brother pushes the door open and walks down the steps to greet me.  We walk toward the hospital’s large side lawn, where a kind of conference is happening, with various public speakers and booths, all dealing with the subject of depression and death.  One speaker in particular is talking about a Death Council (which is related to a news story I was listening to on NPR when I went back to sleep) and a Depression Council, so I mention to Brother that we should make a point of attending this guy’s actual seminar when it occurs.  I see a little stone gazebo at the edge of the lawn and walk over to investigate it.  When I get close, I notice that there is some loose dirt underneath it, with some plastic toy animals scattered in the dirt.  I pick one of them up, and I get sucked into the dirt.  This is how the dream-within-a-dream section comes about.

I’m now a woman, who’s some sort of secret government agent.  My work partner (a man) and I are swimming in the ocean, wearing SCUBA gear and looking for an alien craft that was reported to have landed just off the coast of someplace tropical.  The water is warm and clear and beautiful, as is the perfect weather.  Suddenly another alien craft appears overhead, flying low and out of control.  As it passes over us, we notice that it has a sort of invisible energy field (even though it’s invisible, we can see the water and spray being disturbed by the field, which is how we know it’s there) surrounding it, which will allow the craft to safely land in water and allow the crew to survive, even if it the craft is destroyed in a crash.  We don’t wish to be seen by the craft, so we swim down to an underwater house where a friend of ours, a fellow government operative, lives.

As we get closer to the house, we notice that it looks like any other house, but it just happens to exist on the ocean floor.  There is an SUV parked in the garage with a small white trailer (called a Ewe-2, with a very funny little sheep logo on it) attached.  We swim to the front porch and find that we’re able to stand and breathe normally despite being submerged, so we knock on the door, which our friend opens and lets us inside, greeting us warmly.

Our friend is housing a boy who has special powers of some sort, and I attempt to talk to him.  He makes a strange sound in response to my queries, and our friend tells me that the boy is unable to speak, but that he can communicate in writing, as long as it’s in Spanish.  I make a quick mental shift and try to dredge up the tiny amount of Spanish I used to know back in my high school days.  I motion to the boy for a pen, and then some paper, which it takes us both quite a bit of difficulty to find.  Eventually, however, he scrounges up a large pink ball-point pen, and I find some pink sticky notes to write on, and we start the process, which is when the dream-within-a-dream ends, and the location changes back to the hospital.

I’m sitting in the hospital’s waiting room, which looks like it was designed and furnished back in the 1980’s, with lots of teal-colored fake leather sofas and stylized flower prints hanging on the wall.  My two stepsisters are in the room too, sitting on a sofa next to the one I’m reclining on.  They both tell me that they’ve just woken from an amazing dream in which they were in a house at the bottom of the ocean.  We compare notes on our dreams, and we decide that we must have been having the same dream, although a few of the details about the boy are different.  “That makes sense,” I tell them, “because your perspectives and mine are different, so we’d naturally interpret things differently in our dreams.”

Now the dream’s location changes yet again, and Brother and I and about fifteen or twenty friends are staying at a beach house.   A few of us have stayed there before, and we’re explaining to the others that despite the fact that the house is currently sitting on wet dirt, it will actually float when the tide comes in.  I point at the waves and tell those who’ve never been there before that “the tide’s coming in now, and it comes from that direction.”  The waves come rolling in, and the house begins to float and bob a little from side to side.  Those of us who’ve experienced the floating house are cheering and running toward the windows, while the ones who haven’t are huddling toward the middle of the room, surveying the situation nervously.  The house floats toward some small piers with individual boats tied to them, so when the house floats near one, Brother, his ChineseFriend and I climb out the window onto one of the piers and into three of the tiny boats.

We each grab an oar as they float by, and the three of us have a blast as we paddle around the bay.  In this part of the dream, we are younger versions of ourselves.  I’m ten or eleven, and my brother and his ChineseFriend are four years younger.  We see some reeds poking up from the water near the shore, and it looks like they have been trimmed into paths of rapids and tunnels, which we row over to explore.  ChineseFriend gets separated from us, and a guy named Scott who grew up on our street joins us.  We find the rapids, and let our boats be thrust down the middle of the three paths we come to.  It carries us through a tunnel along a wooden ‘trough’ track, which curves through the grassland to the shore, where it deposits us on dry land at the end of the ride.  We shake ourselves off and exclaim what an amazing whirlwind that was.  There are two younger kids who arrived a couple minutes before we did, and we can hear their voices echoing back to us as they climb up one of the side chutes next to the wooden track.

We attempt to climb back through the same hole that the kids climbed into, but we seem to have grown back into our adult bodies, so Brother and NeighborScott and I can’t fit into the small chute anymore.  My head won’t even fit through the chute, that’s how small it is.  We look at each other and wonder what our plan should be for getting back to the bay.  A snippet of the younger kids’ conversation floats down the chute from above.  The kids are maybe eight years old, but one of them says to the other something very strange.  “Y’know, when you’re playing a cello, if you get a dog to lick the bow, that’s really sexy.”  My brother and I crack up laughing, and I turn to NeighborScott, who also plays the cello (at least in the dream), and say, “Did you hear that?  That’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard.”   He claims not to have heard it, so Brother tells him.  We all have a good laugh, and that’s when I wake up, for real, from all this craziness.