Shocked

I was in a room that was underlit enough so I couldn't see the walls.  The guy across from me was a hard blonde with eastern european or russian sharp looks.  Without warning he launched himself at me and I was startled.  He knocked me to the floor and flipped me over on my face.  I couldn't see what he used to puncture my spine through the back of my neck.  It opened a hole out of which I slipped and, with this removed perspective, watched a milky smoke swirl follow me out.  From outside my prone body I felt panicked that the smoky substance would drift away.  This fear shocked me into that suspended state where I was only half dreaming so I quickly thought the smoke into a diamond-shaped glowing lightness that shimmered and disappeared.  The fear was neutalized and I woke with a feeling of peace.    

No gas, no food

I am one hundred percent sure that this anxiety dream was caused by Atlanta's gas crisis and the fact that my car is down to the red line. I dreamed that my family wanted to have a dinner party and invite a family friend who is going through chemo over. Because there was not enough food we could only invite her and not her parents, husband, or siblings. When they all showed up we all looked nervously at the sparsely covered table. My mom leaped up to try to find more food so not to offend our guests but the cupboards were empty. We all looked at each other with great anxiety and then I woke up.

What The Hell??

Okay, so I dreamed a lot last night, and only remember bits and pieces, and it feels very disjointed. I know it looks long, but it's FUNNY, so here you go:

I had to take four tests for a class. They were all in different languages - I remember that one was obviously Spanish, but one was a word that looked kind of like Valencia but wasn't, and had a ton of those accents over the letter A. Like this: à. The first question was "What does this word mean?" and I answered that it meant "czar," even though the paper had been copied wrong and I couldn't read all of the multiple choice answers. The test was ridiculous and hard. Another question said "Go find a piece of roadkill and make a shopping list/cooking instructions out of it." I got fed up at that point, and complained to the teacher, my friend Lisa, who winked at me and said "Yeah, the test is real hard Reem, go finish it." Her winking, however, made me realize it wasn't a real test and I didn't have to do it.

Then later I was on the second floor of my cousins' house in Buffalo Grove and my friend Matt was there and something bad happened, and all the lights went out, and a third person (I'm not sure who it was) got turned into something else. The lights came back and I ran out of the room before I could see. Matt and I ran downstairs to the living room to tell everybody, and he had seen what the person had been turned into - half gum and half tobacco. "It's probably because I'm chewing gum and he's smoking," I thought to myself. THEN! when I realized I didn't know what had happened, I came to the interwebs and read this very blog, and Matt had posted it as a dream, so I really knew what happened. Yes, I read this dream blog whilst dreaming. NERD.

At another point in my dreams, I was with Shane and Nick ("How the Hell Are Ya" Nick) and we were in the backyard somewhere and there was this dead buffalo or elk or some giant animal laying in the grass. Nick went behind it and was "acting like a caveman," which meant having mud on his face and pounding on the carcass like a drum. As he did, I realized the animal wasn't really dead; it was raising its head and trying to communicate with us - I think it was trying to talk. "It's still alive!" I yelled at Nick, who got scared and grabbed the horn of the animal. The horn broke off in his hand and the animal's facial features disappeared, which made it hard to tell if it was still alive. This reminded me of the peacock dream.

Nipples and New Orleans

I had a dream that Tom had his nipples pierced. In the dream he was changing and took his shirt off and I saw the shiny metal rings and looked at him shocked. He was looking at himself in the mirror and couldn't decide if he wanted to keep them or not. I told I thought it was kind of ridiculous. I was trying to figure out how I didn't know he had them pierced.

When I woke up Tom was actually changing and getting ready for class. For a second I actually thought my dream had really happened and was going to ask him if he had his nipples pierced. I fell back asleep telling him about my dream.

Speaking of Tom, here is a dream he had and e-mailed to me the other day:

My brother and I were driving around Charlotte, and he was getting annoyed with me because I was driving and not doing too good of a job. For whatever reason I was driving from the backseat -- the steering wheel was behind the normal passenger seat and my brother was sitting in front - passenger side. I could barely see and was running red lights and nearly causing accidents all over town. We were getting close to a highway and I decided I shouldn't be driving so I pulled the car over.

When I got out, there was an old African American woman dressed like New Orleans sitting up against a building on the sidewalk. She was looking at me intently and said, "Bring me that blue bicycle." I was puzzled, but I looked back at my brother's car and sure enough my beloved bike was sticking out of the trunk. Apparently we were taking it somewhere. So I brought it to the woman and she began to slowly and carefully decorate it with Mardi Gras beads. Long purple green and yellow beads, it made me really happy.

Grappling Hook

Only a snippet of this dream poked thru the memory veil:

I was walking a dusty trail in The West.  Coming towards me was a wagon and a giant man walking alongside the horses.  He must have been 12 feet tall and well-muscled.  Without thinking my hand went to my gun, but he just looked down at me and smiled as he pulled back his duster to reveal the full-sized shotgun he had in his hip holster.  So I gave up on confrontation in my mind and he seemed to recognize this and dropped his coat back over his gun.  

Then, so quickly I am not able to see his movements, he whips out a grappling hook and swings it around his head a few times and launches it backwards without even looking and grapples the face off the driver.  This is not disgusting in any way as his face simply 'pops' off.  The giant laughs and I feel relieved.  Then I think "I'm not sure a grappling hook works like that,"  recognizing this as a true statement wakes me.

Cupcakes and Mom

I dreamed that I woke up in a room with a glass ceiling covered in snow and cupcakes. The cupcakes were chocolate with pink frosting and because they were face down on the glass, I could make out the tiny heart-shaped candies that decorated them. I felt the weight and warmth of the sage green quilt over my body and thought about how finally nothing hurt.

"Good Morning!" my mother smiled from the doorway. Not wanting to move from the coziness and comfort I asked her to get me a cupcake. She went outside the little room which now appeared to be the greenhouse that my grandmother used to grow tomatoes in, and propped up a ladder against the glass. As she climbed up and reached for the cupcake snow fell down around the places she touched.

When she handed me the cupcake I saw that some of the hearts were missing. I looked up and saw that they remained on the glass in the spot where the cupcake used to be.

Celebrity Dreams

I have been having a lot of guest stars in my dreams lately. I've also been having a hard time remembering all of them because they all seem to be super long and detailed.

Last night I dreamed about Lyle Lovett. He was at this huge beach side house that was all white. Everything inside was white. He was inviting people over to talk about a new book he was writing called "Sex, Lies and Money." One of the people he invited over was Brooke Shields and she was dressed in all black. A lot of other stuff happened in this dream, but I can't remember any of it.

I had a dream a couple days ago that I was at an outdoor presidential debate. Except the people debating were Barack Obama and George W. Bush. The even was on a closed off street. Bush and Obama were seated at long tables across from each other. The tables were decorated red, white and blue and they had big microphones. There was a huge crowd behind both men. I don't remember much of the debate, but there was a part where Bush was attacking Obama for being too liberal. Obama responded by saying Bush was too "Masonry" to which the crowd ooohed like that was a huge insult. In the dream I appeared to know what that meant and it has something to do with religion? Like Freemasons? Or like building structures? Weird. I really wish I remembered more of the debate.

There was another one with Mariah Carey and Ani Difranco but I cannot remember any of it! Damn, it had to be good.

(continuing foodsperiment)

I was on the top of some decently high building where there was an unknown man with a shotgun.  He shot me in the stomach before we even had an exchange or I could do anything.  It was impactful but not painful.  I reeled and wove to the edge of the building and he kept shooting at me, but missed each time.  But each shot hit an innocent bystander on the ground.  

I jumped off the building and landed safely on the ground.  There was a bystander lying bleeding much worse than me and his ladyfriend was screaming that it shold have been me that was hurt so bad, as if it were my fault.  I felt very sorry for her his predicament, but the shotgunner was up there somewhere so I had to keep going.

Grunting along under the stomach-wound, I had to hold my guts in.  But when my hand covered my abdomen it was fine and I realized I was dreaming...

[I ate a bowl of chicken enchiladas right before bed last night]

Beach walk

[I must second Sara's excitment on recalling the dreams as I have been drinking my dreams away for months.  Being invited to this blog brought me to not drink last night, and I even ate chips and salsa at 3am to try and induce wild dreams (as hot food in my sleeping stomach riles the psyche); also it must have been five years since I became near-lucid in a dream like this. Synchronously intriguing.  Enough about me, onto the dream:]

I find myself walking down a beach i've never been on before.  There are thin, long barrier islands running along the beach not too far out, but there are still giant waves crashing.  The islands are covered with overgrown jungle.  This thick greenness is over-colored with the sunset's burnt oranges, but they are not colors that I have ever seen in the waking world and their brightnesses are in odd patterns and rows of light -- but there are no clouds in the sky.  These perplexities and the waves crashing onto the shore when the islands should be stopping them give me pause.  I feel a slight jolt of consciousness but it slips away. I fall back into the dream.

I find myself walking again.  I come upon beach chairs where my ex-wife and her best friend are chatting.  The ex- looks up at me and nonchalantly asks if I am here for the wedding celebration.  This question slices the veil completely open this time and I know I am dreaming, which lends me some semblance of control of what I 'say' to 'her,' "I am not going anywhere with you ever again.  We have agreed to let go of one another's life.  You no longer need be here."  This I think towards her figure as gently as I can because I know its not her, and yet she's in here with me.

I surround her in a thick white light -- and am waking from the dream as I do so -- and she glows into a white silhouette and melts/lowers into the ground, leaving in her place a hovering image of Jupiter (the planet) which is collaged together from the same oranges the trees should not have been able to reflect...

Wolf Spiders

I'm excited to write about this dream for two reasons: 1) it's the first dream I've remembered in weeks because I've had to take sleeping pills and can't remember anything and 2) I have visual aids. And boy do I love me some visual aids.

I dreamed that I woke up and my room was filled with "wolf spiders" which really looked like these giant crabs I saw at the Georgia Aquarium earlier this summer:



There were thousands of giant, prehistoric creatures and they rolled around roboticly, clawing their way across my floor, bed. There were so many of them that they ambled across the backs of others. One of them had gotten tangled up in a ball of red yarn but it didn't slow him down.

I thought they were wild looking and I liked watching them but I didn't like that they were on my bed. I keep a water gun next to my bed to shoot my cat when he claws the curtains in the middle of the night and meows incessantly. The water gun is in the shape of an orange dolphin. I decide to shoot the wolf spiders with this gun. They fall, immobilized off the side of the bed when they get hit.

Peacock Beak

I had a dream that I was in somebody's backyard with my siblings and cousins. There was a gigantic peacock walking around like he owned the place. Somebody said that if he put his feathers up, he was "showing off." And indeed, his feathers went up.

Later, I sat across from my cousin Laith and the peacock settled on the table between us. He was giant. He sat down and tilted his head up in the air, pointing his beak straight up. The beak was as thin as a needle. Laith reached over to try and point the head downward and the beak broke off in his hand. As he looked up, horrified, holding the needle-nosed beak, the peacock didn't move. He seemed to freeze in his position and become what looked like a stuffed bird.

ticks

i was in a room that was "my room" (it totally wasn't but in the dream i understood that it was my room). and my exboyfriend was there. the one from high school. and we were sitting on the floor talking. and then i look over and i see tiny tiny bugs crawling all over a blanket that's on the floor.
and i'm like "shit, john. get up. i think the floor is covered in bugs!" and i'm trying to look at them to see what kind of bugs they are. and then i decide to lift up the blanket to see where they are coming from and under the blanket are HUNDREDS of ticks.

Too Much News

I had a dream that I was watching TV, it was CBS evening news. Instead of Katie Couric or whoever it regularly is, it was the local Austin news lady from CBS. I watched for a while and then tried to change the channel. When I changed the channel the picture/show was different, but the sound was still CBS news. I started flipping through all of my channels (I only have like 15) and every channel was the same thing, the picture was correct for the station, but the sound was still the CBS evening news. Friends was on another channel, but the sound was the news! I started getting super annoyed and turned the TV off, but even when it was off you could still hear the news like it was on! I wondered for a while if I could get used to it, if I could stand watching sitcoms with the news as the sound. Annoyed, I just kept flipping through channels. . .

I think this is what happens when you don't have cable and the news is on more than anything else.

Animals and Hitchhiking

Friday night: I dreamed that Sarah and I were on an adventure on some kind of wooden boat/obstacle course. We had to eat at Noodles and Company, and my brother joined us, but instead of buying lunch, he bought a "soccer ball." It was actually a multi-purpose ball; you could play football or hockey or baseball or whatever. It was plain white and about the size of a volleyball, but soft and completely versatile.

Later, Sarah and I were being chased by an elephant. It kept charging at us. We tried to hide behind thick wooden posts but the elephant broke them. The only way out was to hitchhike. But everybody on the road was either on a bicycle or in a little red wagon. Later, I was scared of this barking dog who kept leaping at us. Sarah looked at me, and at the same time we said out loud "Wow, Reem, for somebody who likes animals so much, you sure are afraid of all of them..."