beautiful, funny, sad & true

I had a fairly stupid dream this morning, which I wouldn’t normally recount here, but for some reason I want to this time.  If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t enjoy reading about peoples’ dreams, this is one of the ones you’re not going to enjoy.  Even if you are the kind of person who enjoys reading about them, you may not enjoy this one, but I should mention that I do have quite a hefty backlog of dreams here on the blog that make for very entertaining reading.   Okay, that’s enough preamble and disclaimer.

* * * * *

I’m sitting in a bean bag chair on the floor of a large chain grocery store in my hometown, just between the foyer and the row of checkout counters.  There are five other people sitting there in beanbags as well, two young guys and two young women on my left, and a young woman on my right.  Despite being in the middle of them, I’m not participating in their conversation.  I’m not even looking in their direction, for the most part, except occasionally the young woman to my right.  I’m naked from the waist down, so I’m trying not to attract anyone’s attention to me.  I have a crumpled hand towel over my lap, but I don’t want to stand up because it wouldn’t provide enough coverage.

So I’m sitting there and listening to the others talk, and I finally decide that I’m not fooling anybody by pretending to be removed from the group and not looking at them, and that I should at least attempt to participate.  The woman on my right and one of the guys are dominating the conversation, so I turn my head back and forth between the two of them, but still I say nothing.  The woman gets a call on her cell phone, and everyone stands up to leave, including me.  By this time, I suddenly have pants on.  I’m the first to walk out the door, and the woman is about three feet behind me, so I can clearly hear her side of the telephone conversation.  We walk to the parking lot, and I look back at her a couple of times, because we’re heading in the same direction.  I look for my little red car and don’t see it anywhere, even though I remember where I’d parked it.

The dream’s location changes, and I’m at my childhood home.  I walk into the kitchen to get a glass of milk.  The well-stocked fridge is in the middle of the room, and there are two milk containers; a nearly empty half gallon carton and a two-thirds full gallon jug with funny little phrases like ‘do not touch this milk’, ‘this means you’, ‘back off’ and ‘seriously. . .stand down’ scrawled all over it in black marker.  I finish off the half gallon by pouring it into a short glass, and then I walk over next to the small rolling cabinet to pet the black-and-white cat that is sitting on the floor.   I pet her head for a second and then stand up to look at something on top of the cabinet, but the cat wants more attention, so she stands on her hind legs and stretches herself up to the edge of the cabinet, which is around three feet high.  I laugh, pet her head and say, “Yes, ma’am. . .guess you weren’t finished yet.”  I pick her up and walk into the living room, where my mom and a couple other people are watching TV.

“You’ll never guess how tall she is,” I say to everyone.  “Over three feet.  Isn’t that amazing?”  I scratch the cat under her chin.  “Yes it IS,” I continue, looking down at her little face.  I notice that my friend LJ is curled up in a blanket on the floor next to the sofa, and I can barely see her face peeking out of it.  I start to say something to my mom, but that’s when I wake up.

* * * * *

See what I mean?  What a waste of good sleep time.  I’d much rather dream about Christine again, and I’m sure you’d like that too.

I’ve had the same person in five different dreams now.  I haven’t posted any of them here because they’re not interesting as far as dream narratives go (especially my dream narratives. . .she’s up against stiff competition!), except for the fact that she’s been in all of them.  The first three were in February and March (I checked in my e-mail and Twitter), and the most recent one was a couple of days ago.

She’s not anyone I know from real life, and she’s not anyone famous either.   She’s pretty in an understated way, fairly petite, with straight, shoulder-length blond hair (not normally my preference, but I’ve certainly made exceptions!) and she has a brown-and-white tabby cat who has also appeared in three of the dreams.  The dreams are romantic, but have never been sexual.  They always feel like they’re more about the connection that exists between us.  In one of them, we were sitting next to the window in her house, quietly talking and enjoying the sunshine, with the cat draped across both of our laps, purring.   In the most recent one, we were walking in a grassy lot outside of town, near some sort of cluster of buildings, and trying to figure out how to get back to the highway where my car was parked, so that we could get back.  Suddenly she stopped walking and turned to look at me.  “I think I’m in love with you,” she said.  I was pleasantly surprised by this news, and I hugged her and told her I loved her too.  “And I’ve always known it.”   I love the random, awkwardly worded things that come flying out of my mouth in dreams.   For the record, my all-time favorite dream quote is “Gah! What’d you do that for, you penis hole?!“ but there are plenty of other classics.  Almost every single one of my dreams involves weird dialogue of some sort.

So.  Moving on.

One dream involving The Girl was an extremely short one in which she appeared just long enough to say, “My name’s Christine, by the way.”  That was it; the entire dream.  A friend told me the other day that what her name means (“follower of Christ”) is much more important than her physical characteristics.  I told a different friend about that, and her response was [I’m condensing a few of her responses into one, actually], “I sure hope there is some meaning behind her name beyond that.  If not, what a disappointment. Maybe you passed her on the street one day.  Just because you don’t recognize her doesn’t mean you’ve never seen her.  . .just a thought. Her face could just be ‘filler’.  It seems she made a point to tell you her name.”

Very interesting.  RockShowGirl is convinced that this person is my ideal partner.  I don’t know that such a thing really exists, but it is a really nice thought.  I do know that the way to meet an ‘ideal partner’ is to always be the best and most honest version of myself that I can be, and that will attract the kind of people – either romantic, platonic, musical, or anything – that I want to spend time with.

Le Sigh.

Every night I look forward to dreaming, and I even find myself wanting to sleep much more than usual in order to see what happens next in our saga, but I’m guessing that sleeping twenty hours a day may not be the most conducive way of finding and kindling a relationship.  Just a hunch.

This is the third of three dreams I had this morning.  The first one was “The Oriental Chicken” and the second one was “A Drowned Friend.”

* * * * *

“The Back Porch”

I had just moved into a new house, and I was excited for my girlfriend to see it.  I invited her in and walked her through the entire place, showing her the various rooms.  It was a small house, but clean and cozy, and I was proud of it.  I showed her the back yard, with its sunny wooden porch next to the house, and a huge leafy tree for shade in the afternoon.   She kissed me as we stood on the steps, then we turned and walked back inside to stand in the dining room, arms around each others’ waists.

“Oh wait,” I said.  “There’s something else I want to show you.”

She smiled mischievously.  “What’s that?”

I gave her a smile and whispered dramatically, “The back porch!”

She laughed and hugged me.  “We saw that already.  But I certainly wouldn’t want to try and diminish your happiness.”  She hugged me even tighter.  We stood hugging that way for a long time, and that’s when I woke up, with my arms in the same position over my chest as they’d been on her back just moments before.

As I woke up, it felt as if she and her embrace had both turned to sand, and the hugging sensation got gradually fainter and fainter.  That has to be one of the lonelinest ways to wake up that I’ve ever experienced.

This is the second of three dreams I had last night.  The first one was “The Oriental Chicken,” and the third one was “The Back Porch.”

* * * * *

“A Drowned Friend“

I was on a bus tour with a handful of friends.  The bus was taking us along the entire coast of Massachusetts, at which point we would turn inland and head through the middle of Maine to a medium-sized city in Canada.  The coast was beautiful.  The highway paralleled the edge of the water, and there were abandoned beach houses in the water just offshore, in varying degrees of dilapidation.  Each house would have warranted hundreds of pictures, and I kept wishing that we could stop to explore a bit.  I told my friends about how I grew up in Massachusetts, and that my family used to spend our vacations in houses ‘just like those before the water rose’, and that there are still a few that are open to the public.

I was sitting in the window seat, and the person sitting to my left was an older woman who I didn’t know.  She could see that she was sitting between me and a few of my friends, so she gave up her seat and moved to one that was a few rows back.  My friend LJ took her place next to me.  She asked if I had bought a bike passport.  I told her that I hadn’t, and she said she said, “Yeah, I didn’t either, but since we’re with the tour group, we should be fine.  We’ll have no trouble getting into Canada.”

We looked out the window at the retreating waterfront, and as the road turned inland it widened into a freeway.  After a while, we crossed over a long blue bridge and saw a green sign proclaiming, “WELCOME TO CANADA.”  After a short distance, the bus driver pulled to the side of the road and parked next to the shore of a small lake.  There were low trees around the edge of the lake, with hanging branches that dipped large leaves into the water, and the brackish water had algae and sludgy lily pads floating on top of it.  The bus driver pulled a small silver metal boat out from the bus’s storage compartment and carried it to the shore.  He invited a few of us to get in, and I was the only volunteer.   We pushed off from the shore, and the boat pitched a little, which filled the bottom of the boat with water.  We quickly bailed out the water, and rowed toward the middle of the lake.

Just then we heard a scream from the shore, and then a splash, and LJ was nowhere to be seen.  We rowed over near where she had been, but couldn’t hear or see anything.  I saw some bubbles coming to the surface of the lake, so I pointed and yelled, “Look, bubbles!  There!  No, there!“  I followed the trail of bubbles with my finger for my boatmate, who pulled out a large wooden rod with a hook on the end.  He pushed it down into the water and a hand surfaced.  “Good job!”  I yelled.  “Keep coming!”  I reached in to help him, and yelled LJ’s name, with no response.  We saw then that the hand was no longer connected to an arm, and it was in fact trapped in some sort of vegetation that went below the water.  The two of us kept lifting the rod, until the grille of an old pickup truck came to the surface, with a piece of LJ’s dark blue shirt sticking out.  Tears came to my eyes as we let go of the rod, and the grill, shirt and disembodied hand sunk below the water again.

This morning I had three dreams in a row, all of which left me feeling either sad, or creeped out, or lonely.  It really was quite the morning.  I’ve decided to break up the dreams into three separate blog entries, each under their respective names.  The second one was “A Drowned Friend”, and the third one was “The Back Porch.”

* * * * *

“The Oriental Chicken, or, My Brother’s Not Even Gay”

Mom and I were in my brother’s bedroom, and he was telling both of us in great detail about how he was having an affair with a married man who is the owner of a well-respected recording studio in town.  (Neither my brother nor the real-life man is gay, by the way.)  Mom and I were shocked, not only to find out that he was gay, but also about his unfettered ‘TMI-ness’ about it.  “If he eats any cheese at all, he can’t get it up.”

“Who?” my mom asked.

My brother gestured in the direction of the next room.  “Hunk, in there.  He’s sleeping right now.”  My mom made a face and left the room in disgust.

I couldn’t help laughing as I said to him, “Hunk? You know I know him, and that he does what I do [referring to recording and music production].  He’s not even gay, and neither are you.  How did this happen?”

My brother didn’t say anything.  I sat down on his bed to collect my thoughts, and saw a plain brown cardboard box next to the bed, so I picked it up and opened it.  Inside was another brown cardboard box which said, in large black letters:

“Oriental Chicken” – DILDO

PRIVATE – Please do not use without owner’s permission

I shook my head and closed the box without even looking at the Oriental Chicken.  I didn’t want to know.  I put the box back on the floor, stood up, and walked out of his room so that I could go to my room and play the accordion.  It sounded strange, with lots of air escaping (which makes the sound either go flat or not happen at all), so I stretched it out all the way to inspect the bellows.  They were almost completely worn away.  It was amazing that any sound was coming out at all.