In this dream I was down in Cleveland, I think at some school-related function. There were a lot of people and it was very festive. Then something happened but I can't remember what, and we started hearing reports that there was a fire raging in another part of the city. Multiple fires, actually, and spreading. I joined some people with these very weird hoses with very complicated nozzles. We started wetting down everything, to prevent the fire from getting to the building we were in. I found a setting on mine that sprayed water out very far, and I was wetting down a lot of stuff when suddenly the water pressure dropped off and my hose was just a trickle.

The others' hoses were doing the same thing. We immediately thought something was up--that it had intentionally been turned off and there was something sinister going on. We decided to leave. We split up to get back to where our cars were. Mine was in a parking garage in the same building. I got nearly to my car and then remembered my mom was there, and called her cell phone. I told her where I was and she started heading to meet me.

I saw her headed toward the glass doors that led into the garage, but some security guy started to turn her away. He was going to make her take some other entrance because she didn't have a school id or some sort of pass or something. I ran up to the door and held it open and told her to ignore him and come in and yelled at the security guy that she was with me. Just as we got to the car I remembered that my friend's kids were in the childcare area, and that my friend was not there to pick them up. The fire would definitely have gotten to the building by the time my friend could get there, so we ran back in to find the girls.

The are where the kids were was labyrinthine. It was labeled in all sorts of strange ways and the kids were "sorted out" in very nonintuitive groups. We didn't know where to find the two sisters. A man who worked there helped us, and led us down some corridors. We got to an unmarked door and he opened it and gestured for us to go in. I had a bad feeling about it. Looking through the door I saw two toilet stalls. It was a bathroom? He said there was another door on the other side. I then noticed the tiny plaque next to the door that referred to a section number and said something about "naughty girls"... so this was some sort of punishment area? Or a ward for troublesome kids? I didn't feel that these girls probably belonged there, and suddenly realized that he intended to lock us in if we went through the door. I had him go first, and open the door on the other side. Then I called through for the girls without going through the door myself.

Then somehow I realized that my own daughter (huh?? Yeah somehow I acquired a daughter in the course of the dream) was in there and was going to call for her too, but I couldn't remember her name (not surprisingly, since she didn't exist until that moment!)

We finally did get out of there with the kids and made it back to the car. We were leaving, racing back to the house to save the cats before the fire reached there. We kept looking back over the city and seeing the multiple huge columns of smoke billowing out of buildings all across the city.

My mom said something about needing to go pick up Sonia, but my dream managed to sort out and then ignore that part, seeing how Sonia has been dead for over a decade.

I woke up then, but seriously considered trying to go back to sleep to see how the story ended. Except I was hungry and had to go to the bathroom, so I just got up.

I had a long series of disconnected dreams last night. In one, a classmate of mine lived next door and her dog kept getting out. In another I was trying to get comfortable in a hammock but was too cold. Nothing especially interesting, and nothing with any real plot.

One of these little vignettes was very disturbing, though. I don't think I was with these people, I was either observing them directly or on tv or something, but two women were eating zebra meat off the bone. I could tell it was zebra because it still had the stripes on it. I wondered how and why they had zebra meat, and then I saw a sort of flashback of the following scene: They're in Africa, on a plane--it's just the two of them and the plane is having trouble and doesn't have enough power to get up to speed and take off, apparently, and so this zebra is pushing it from behind. It's running as fast as it can. Just as the plane is about to take off, it jumps into the cargo hold. The feeling was definitely that this was their zebra, in a mutually agreeable relationship (i.e. they weren't kidnapping the zebra against its will or something). As the plane began to rise, the angle of the floor of the cargo hold increased and the zebra began to lose its footing and slide backward. I watched in horror as it scrambled for purchase against the metal floor before finally tumbling backward out of the still-open door of the cargo hold. I saw the zebra tumbling through the air toward the ground, already quite far away.

That's all there was but it was horrible and left me feeling quite shaken :(

The first part of my dream I don't remember well at all, but it involved a road trip somehow. We were headed to Africa, I think. I was on the phone with someone and they asked me where we were, and I said "it feels lik we should be in about France by now, but since we've only been on the road for about four hours, it's probably Pennsylvania." Don't know how we were going to drive to Africa, especially via France, but hey, it's a dream.

There was a middle part that was very confusing and involved mixing up cell phones with several people, but I don't remember much of it other than the confusion.

The part I remember best was the tornado. It came and tore our house apart, and our neighbors' house. We were in the basement frantically trying to find a safer place. We could see the neighbors walking around in their yard looking at the wreckage of their house. The tornado was still in the neighborhood, just meandering around. I was afraid it would come back so I said to Dan to grab Dominic and let's get in the car and get out of the area.

While we were trying to get that organized, the tornado came back. It was very small at the bottom, only a few feet across. It was coming right at us and so I yelled to run, and I started running. It was following me. Every time I changed direction, it did too. I kept running and after a block or two I came to Lake Erie. I started to run into the water, but realized quickly that I wouldn't make it far. I turned to face the tornado.

It was sort of like a person, and sort of like a tornado. I asked it why it was chasing me. It said that it wasn't making the choice, it was just doing its job. I asked who had made it chase me, and it said "Death." Sort of like in the Discworld novels, Death was a personified character in my dream, but not a nice one like in those books. In fact the person whose job it had just become to be Death was someone who really didn't like me and wanted me dead.

There was some strangeness after that where I was trying to find someone else willing to take over the job of being Death, and thus save my life, but my cat woke me up by playing with the door really loudly at that point.

This dream was in two parts and they were connected but I can't remember how. In one part we were trying to move to a different planet, because the sun or something on this one had gotten really strange. In this dream, the sun orbited the planet, by the way. It started orbiting so fast that a whole day and night would go by as you watched, in the course of about 5 minutes. There was something menacing and sentient about either the planet or the sun, also, and so all of the plans for leaving had to be done very discretely lest it find out and put a stop to it.

The other part of the dream involved a theater production at a school. I believe it was college level but the department was very amateurish. I kept giving them advice on things that hadn't ocurred to them. Like using costumes or having a program. I offered to make the program and they said they'd always sort of made a little list of the cast and put it on an iPod and whoever wanted to see it could come over and look at it. The idea of having a printed program seemed amazingly fancy to them, especially one that had little one-paragraph bios of the cast and crew.

There was also something menacing happening at the school. I was trying to investigate. I went into another room, but I went by swimming underwater, because the entire theater area was about 3 feet deep in water. I found some strange tube things dribbling some unknown liquid into it which I thought was suspicious, but before I could examine it, someone came in, so I had to duck underwater and swim carefully out of the room (which was dark, so it was a little easier to do.) There were various other activities and clues around that I kept finding. One kid was carried off and I think he was dead, but it was covered up and not talked about. I think there was a plot to kill everybody, but I woke up before I could find out for sure what was going on.

Well, considering how much I enjoy juggling, it's about time I had a juggling dream (that I remembered well enough to write down)!

Before that dream I had another dream, though, that involved walking around some city with a small group of people. Among them were Dan's parents. We were walking along a covered sidewalk toward a building--perhaps a restaurant? It looked like the first floor of a big office building. The covered walkway reminded me of a bus station, though.

There was a big semi truck making a very sharp turn, but it was too close to the curb* and I could tell it was going to hit it. Then I saw that the trailer part was probably going to hit the metal roof of the covered sidewalk and I started to walk faster. I sort of pushed Dan's parents a little to make them go faster, and hurried them into the doors of the building. My mind was racing with how to explain my rude behavior--that I was concerned about our safety--when a tearing metal noise made the point for me. The truck didn't just bump or graze the roof of the sidewalk, it hit it and then kept going, bending and tearing it as it went. It bent one of the support poles holding up the roof as well. Then it continued along, scraping the edge of the overhand on the building. Some bits of stuff did fall down into the sidewalk, but the roof structure didn't collapse.

So then the juggling dream! Ok for some reason a lot of the dream took place in what was supposed to be the art building of Cleveland State University where I take classes. It wasn't quite right but it was similar enough. Irena, my sculpture teacher, was talking to several of the students in my sculpture class. It was mostly just social chatting and not any kind of lecture or demonstration. I was practicing something in the corner. Then someone said something about wanting to listen to Jethro Tull, and went and got a disc and put it into the system. I didn't recognize the music, which I found strange because I'm a huge Jethro Tull fan.

I looked at the TV (dunno why there was a TV hooked up to all of this) and it was a video of some strange room with all sorts of weird stuff in it. I pointed it out to someone and she turned to Irena and said "oh this is the music from [some male name]'s show. The fabric one." From this I gathered that a previous student had had an art exhibit that was some sort of installation incorporating a lot of fabric, and somehow a disc of this had gotten mixed in with the music CDs.

Somewhere in all of this someone made a soup to share and I was asking about the ingredients to find out if it was vegetarian so I would know if I could eat it. It sounded fine until she said "sea shells." This was very odd to me as an ingredient to be eaten... and I wasn't sure how it would qualify vegetarian-wise. I asked how they got the seashells. I said that if they were collected off the beach it would be ok, but if they were a byproduct of the shellfish industry, I wouldn't eat it.

I went back to what I was doing, which was juggling something. The setting changed a bit because now several people were juggling things, and it became clear that we were practicing for some sort of juggling show that was to be performed later that day. I called over a guy who was working on something and said that we should go over our passing routine, which we had apparently just put together the day before and not practiced since. So we started to practice this 6 ball passing pattern (which is weird since I always pass clubs, not balls) but then I got called away.

There was some rope thing with two things attached at the ends and I had to find two people to do whatever it was that it was for. I had to meet them at my car for some reason, and I gave them each an end and told them where to go to find out what they were supposed to do. Then I went back to the guy I was passing with, but he was involved with something else and didn't want to practice. He was doing something with three balls, and I said "This is a 6 ball pattern! Three for each person! Watch out, balls incoming!" and tried to toss him one but it didn't work and suddenly I was distracted by something else anyway.

I'm not sure what it was. I was holding a 4" x 6" index card with seven raisins glued to it. One of them had come off and all of them had gotten a little squishy. There was concern that (whatever it was that they were for) it wasn't going to work now.

Then someone announced that one of the acts wasn't going to make it because they'd been stopped at the airport in some Eastern European country.

Next a group of people in a room nearby started calling out for someone to come help them. They said that they couldn't do their routine, which apparently involved juggling Cornish game hens (like you would buy at a grocery store) but they "wouldn't stay dead!" according to the guy. I could see he had several in his hands and one of them kept wiggling its little featherless stumpy wings and legs. Someone asked where they'd gotten them, and someone else said "they're from Finland."



*this is one of those times when I know what my brain was drawing from: yesterday driving home from school, I saw a large truck make a u-turn in the road, and the front wheel went over the curb. Other things that influenced this dream include the discussion I overheard today in sculpture about the music that was going to be played at the opening of the student art show in March, the recently started practice of playing music during class, and the fact that after sitting around bored one day with time to kill, I now keep three juggling beanbags in my bag with my school stuff.

This was a very strange dream, and I don't remember it all that well. I will try to piece it together from my notes:

There was a lady in the yard using a hose to spray water and melt the snow off of her lawn. Dunno why. Also, my car had a strange "feature" in that it would start backing up automatically when you got in, and you had to quickly turn the key and start it and put it into drive to make it stop going backwards.

Then I was in class but I had all of the wrong stuff: I had a bunch of tools (hammer, screwdriver, etc) in a bag and a strange wooden box with wooden animals and small books in it. This instead of my art supplies and my other school stuff.

Then there was the weird fuse thing. The windows were open and there were candles in the window. There was a fuse near them that led off somewhere. I was afraid the fuse would light and so I blew out the candles, but blowing them out made the fuse light (not because the flame touched it, just the fact of the candles going out made the fuse spontaneously light).

Three dogs jumped in through the window.

I ran outside to escape the explosion, but the fuse didn't make something explode, instead it turned on some weird hose. I saw the guy who opened the window (which in my mind was what ultimately was responsible for the fuse lighting) and I punched him.

Last night I woke up twice to jot down notes about my dreams. My first one, I didn't do a good enough job "telling myself the story" as I wrote the notes, so I don't really remember what all of them mean, which is sad because when I wrote it down I remember thinking it was a really cool dream. The notes start out:
Camping wok/grill [don't remember what that was about]
9-foot corn snake [I do remember the snake, but nothing about it]
Publix sucks [no idea on that one]
About the only part I do remember is that there was a chicken restaurant (like KFC or something) and the owner fired some guy, so since he was leaving and couldn't get in trouble for it, the guy started giving out free soft-serve ice cream to everyone. The flavors were chocolate fudge, nacho cheese, and chicken.

The second time I woke up from a dream I took better notes, and I told myself the dream in words and so I remember it better.
In the dream, I woke up and saw a girl by my window (saw her silhouette). There was something ominous about her. I asked who was there but got no answer. She moved a little and I threw something at her. I got up to walk over and figure out who she was and what she was doing, but when I got to where she had been all there was was a 2-foot-high stack of white squares (about 9 inches wide). I knocked it over and they fell, and seemed kind of like giant Saltines. I heard the girl's voice say that "around here they make you sorry that you--" but I don't remember what it was that you did that "they" made you feel sorry about.

I looked down and there was a white cat who reminded me of my cat Sidel, who died about 15 years ago. I picked the cat up and walked to the closet, which was a large walk-in closet, and checked inside. My cat Ding (who I have now) was in there, as I had expected her to be (though I don't know why). I walked to the other end of the house into my mom's bedroom (because apparently we lived in the same house) but by the time I got there, the cat in my arms was Ding.

I told my mom the story about the girl and the strange pile of cracker-like things, and how the cat had been white but now looked like Ding, even though Ding was in the closet. I put the cat down and it ran off into the kitchen. I followed it and asked it what its name was. It said "Sidel" and I said "no, first off Sidel is dead so you're not her. Second, that's a girl's name." The cat then asked for suggestions on what its name should be.

Then I woke up for real and looked at the window, and the girl really was there! It was just starting to get light out and I could just make out her silhouette against the miniblinds. My heart jumped for a second, and then my brain kicked in and I realized it was just some shelves and a pile of clothes. But it looked exactly like the silhouette in my dream, which makes me think that I had probably sort of woken up and seen it before, then fallen back asleep and dreamed about it.

I took a picture with my phone. Here is what I saw. I drew in what the "girl" might have looked like:


(click to enlarge)

I was at a strip club in Tucson with a few friends and I was totally stunned to see how much had changed. They'd remodeled the place to a ridiculous degree. The floors weren't even flat, and there were half-walls everywhere that when you were sitting down, you could not see over. This meant that from anywhere in the club, sitting down, you could barely see anywhere else in the club. You couldn't really see the stages at all unless you stood up. There was also one small stage that was in the middle of a pool of water for no reason at all.

After a while we decided to go to a different place, and so we went outside. We were going to go by foot or bus or something, I think, but decided to stop at a shoe store on the way. There we a bunch of really strange shoes, including some "Jellies" that had weird shapes (curly toes like elf shoes??) and some knee-high boots made of bright red fake fur. There were a few dresses as well, some of which were pretty cute, but they were unraveling so I didn't buy one.

Then I was somewhere with the members of Pink Floyd, who were friends of mine in the dream. My friend Kathleen was there as well. One of the band members had a pet monkey that we were playing with. I kept trying to take pictures of it when it did something really cute, but the camera had a really long delay between when you pushed the button and when it took the picture and I kept missing things. Then the monkey had these giant bat wings, and I was trying to get a good picture with its wings open. Oddly, I wasn't surprised by the wings, it seemed normal to me at the time.

I was going to Dominic's school except it wasn't his real school, it was sort of set back in the woods. As I was going in there was a weird snake on the ground. It was almost as fat as a tube of toothpaste, so you'd expect it to maybe be a 5' long snake or so, except it was only about a foot long. It looked like it had been chopped off. It also branched out like a tree into a half dozen or more tails. I felt sorry for it but was also rather creeped out by it. I didn't think it was safe where it was so I picked it up, and was going to toss it into the woods. For some reason I took it into the office of the school first.

This was not a happy, friendly snake. It was spazzing out and it must have bitten me at least 15 times. It also got away onto the floor several times. And then Dan was there, too, and it bit him a few times. I think it bit some other people, too. We were all trying to catch it so we could throw it in the woods.

In my dream I was in The Amazing Race, but it wasn't like the real tv show. Instead the race was various teams of up to 4 people, and what you had to do was get to some island somewhere, fix a broken yacht, and then sail to some other location. First team there gets a million dollars. At first I was on a team just by myself. I was trying to get to the harbor where the yachts were. I was looking at a map that had a lot of different roads and train tracks. I was trying to decide if there was a train that would take me most of the way. Then I met a guy who agreed to give me a ride. It was going to take 4 days to get there, and he was just going to drop me off.

I had rather taken to the guy, though. He was nice and he was attractive, and I had kind of hoped he might stay and help me with the rest of the race. So I said (it's amazing what we'll do in dreams that we'd never do in real life...) what if I have sex with you? It isn't as bad as it sounds, since as I said, I'd already been attracted to the guy. But anyway, he agreed and suddenly it was only going to take one day to get there, because he was going to go straight there, whereas before he had a lot of other places he was going to stop on the way.

Once we got there, we had to get to where the boats were. To do this we had to crouch behind things and dart from place to place stealthily because the other teams were trying to shoot us.

There was a part where I was trying to get some food. I went to a shopping district that had a lot of bars and I went into several of them to see if they had food. They all seemed to have some sort of buffet that had either just closed, wasn't open yet, or was so picked over that there wasn't much left.

Then for some reason I was trying to take a train to visit my grandfather. I went into this little shop to buy a ticket, but I couldn't remember the name of the town I needed to get the ticket to. We looked over a bunch of maps. I finally found one that had an area on it that I recognized as being close to where my grandfather lived, but I couldn't remember if he lived to the right or to the left. The map was pages 54 and 55, and so we tried to look for pages 53 and 56 to see if his town was on one of those, but all of the pages were loose and most of them were cut out so they only had parts of the pages left.

The first part of my dream was at the house, but it was totally different. For one thing, it was in a much denser neighborhood, with sidewalks running all through it, like an apartment complex. It was raining hard and there was a hollow just off our backyard that was filling with water. My mom was here and we told her that once it filled up, the rushing water would cause it to sort of "guyser" up the way that ocean waves sometimes do against rocks. We sat around on the porch waiting for it to do that so she could see. When it started, she was impressed. There was some other stuff but I don't remember it.

The second part of my dream involved a daily drive to pick up Dan. Wherever it was that we picked him up from there was a restaurant that we would go wait at. For some reason, Dominic was driving, and one of his friends was along with us. I told him as we arrived at the restaurant that he needed to remember not to tell anyone that I let him drive, since at 12 it was illegal. We went inside the nearly-empty restaurant (it was mid-afternoon) and he and his friend went over to a table as usual while I stepped into the restroom. As I came out I heard two middle aged women, the only other patrons, talking.

"What are those servant boys doing sitting in the dining room?" one of them asked. They started complaining about Dominic and his friend, clearly thinking they were not valid customers but rather somehow "the help" and were offended that they were allowed to sit at a table. One of them finally decided to put a stop to it and went into a nearby office, where a grandmotherly woman at a desk was apparently in charge of the place. She went on about how there were two "horrible boys" in the restaurant, and that they should be made to leave immediately. The manager woman looked a little confused but was promised to be out momentarily to handle things.

After the snobby lady went back to her table, I ducked into the office. The woman recognized me and I apologized for whatever was going on, and said "it's Dominic and his friend she's complaining about. I don't know why. They're not misbehaving or being loud or anything, and you know Dominic--he's a good kid." She looked shocked that the snobby lady had come in to complain about Dominic and said she would be out in a minute to say hi to him. It was clear he wasn't going to be in trouble, and I got the feeling she also wanted the snobby lady to see that she knew and liked Dominic.

There was a little dream fragment right before I woke up where I was in some sort of vehicle, but it wasn't as big as a car and it was open, but it wasn't a bike of any kind because my purse was on the floor. I wasn't alone, either. We were stopped for a light or something when two guys ran up and tried to take my purse. I can't remember what it was in there that was so important, but I was extremely resistent and holding my purse back. One of the guys who was with me worked out a "deal" with the muggers, where they agreed to let me keep my purse, but they took the photo of my cat that had been in my wallet.

The first part of the dream I remember is being in some house on a lake. This wasn't the lake in New Hampshire or anything like it, it was some random lake. By "we" I don't know who I mean. Dan was there, but there were several other people and I don't know who they were. We heard sounds, perhaps drums, and looked out into the darkness (for 'twas night, did I mention?) and saw a small flotilla of boats headed our way. The men in the boats had torches and seemed angry. We knew it was a raid and we would be attacked, so we got into our own boat very quietly, and headed off. We passed them in the dark, silently, far enough away from them that they didn't hear us. Mind you, these were like big wooden canoes, not modern boats.

So we were on a different lake and in a different house. I know this because I was worried and asked "this isn't the same lake, is it? Those men won't find us?" and was reassured that we were somewhere totally different. Nifty how in dreams you don't necessarily have to travel in order to get somewhere else, isn't it? So again it is night, but a different night, I think. Dan and I were in a room trying to sleep on a pad on the floor. There was a lot of sex, but I won't go into those details. Sorry. Then I noticed that Dan was fully dressed and wearing shoes in bed. I asked him why, and if he'd had to get up in the night and I hadn't woken up for it? He said he had gone out to help a friend, and they'd had to put the guy's pet rabbit to sleep.

Anyway, then we heard the other people coming into the house (the other "we" people, not the bad guys) and so Dan and I went to try to latch the door. The door was less like a doorway door and more like a giant cabinet door, and it was painted and warped and so it would sort of push itself open a crack if you didn't latch it. The latches, of which there were three, were all loose and insufficient and the warp of the door meant that they didn't quite reach the part on the door that they were supposed to slide into, and so the latches wouldn't stay shut.

We eventually gave up and just went out into the main room to be social. Plus, we'd heard them talking about food ("do you want lentils or corn?" and we wanted to make sure that nobody ate all of our corn). Ding walked into the room, with her bandages*, and looked around. One of the girls said "aw! That's so hypocratical!" (yes, with an a) and Dan and I sort of looked at each other wondering what word she'd meant to use, not knowing what she was trying to say.

We started talking about something. There were probably 5 or 6 adults in the room, and Dominic was there as well. Out of the blue, Dominic aked "so does a period just drip out?" After a moment of stunned and awkward silence, I told him that wasn't really the kind of thing you just said out of nowhere in the middle of a conversation about something else. But then it turned out that Dominic had started his period. This seemed slightly strange to me, but as we are so willing to accept the bizarre in dreams, my main confusion was in figuring out exactly where to tell him to position the pad in his underwear.

Then Dan's alarm went off and I woke up. (He has to be in clinic today.)


*Ding is my nearly-18-year-old cat, who has a sore on her chest and so she has ace bandages wrapped around her torso, plus she chewed off her left dewclaw toe (she's neurotic) and so she has most of her left front leg bandaged as well (if we just bandage the paw, she can get it off).

There was a lot more to this dream but the parts I remember mostly involved three tiny aliens. When I say tiny I mean probably about the size of a grain of rice. They had a spaceship that was about as big as an earplug. I don't remember how the first one got destroyed, but later in the dream they had another spaceship. I was working with some people to capture them somehow (for some reason they were very dangerous, though I don't recall why). I met in a restaurant after hours with someone who had allegedly been helping the aliens. It was a trap--we'd lured him there on false pretenses. He thought he could get up and leave, but when he opened the door, the people I was working for were standing outside waiting for him and they did one of those comical movie punches that sent him flying back into the restaurant.

I was at the restaurant and there was a projection of a ball in the air. This was a representation (somehow--don't understand the "technology" it was supposed to be in the dream) of the ship, so that I could see what was going on. The other agents had it elsewhere. It had been moving around in a fairly normal manner but suddenly it started zigzagging erratically though the air. I was staring at it thinking "what the heck is going on?" Then I flashed to the site where the other agents and the ship were, like a scene cut in a movie, and saw the agents with a bumble bee trapped in a jar, shaking their heads. Apparently the bee had grabbed the spaceship and flew around with it.

While they were looking at the bee, we heard the cockpit chatter of the aliens. They were counting down a launch, which ended with "splitting the rockets" and taking off. Looking down, we saw the tiny ship split in half and start to fly away in two directions. One of them had barely gotten off of the ground when CRUNCH one of the agents just squashed it with his foot. The other alien was so distraught that he was now alone (there had initially been three, remember, and the first one had died with whatever it was that destroyed the first ship) that he gave up.

There was another part of my dream that involved Dan and I going over to some friends' house to hang out.( It was our friends Dusty and Sara; Sara goes to school with Dan and her husband Dusty is a veterinarian. He's been taking care of Ding.) Anyway, we'd brought Ding with us and we'd mixed some canned cat food with some human baby food to feed her (which is something we've been trying in real life) and suddenly Dan says "I'll try that." I thought he was joking at first, but it turns out he was actually curious what it would taste like, so he got a bowl of it and started to eat it.

I told him he wasn't allowed to kiss me for the rest of the day, and then I ran out of the room and threw up.

I woke up shortly after that.

I remember a handful of random details from my dreams last night but the only one interesting enough to write down is the part where there was a fairly large, creepy spider in the room. It kept climbing into contours and holes in the speaker and I was keeping an eye on where it went so I didn't accidentally come into contact with it. Then there was this adorable kitten playing with stuff, and sometimes chasing the spider. And for a little while I didn't want to touch the kitten because I temporarily got confused about what I was squeamish about touching, and had transferred my "oh icky" feelings about the spider to the kitten. As soon as I realized that, of course, I started playing with the kitten.

My dream this morning ventured into odd territory. I was at school, but it wasn't really my university in Georgia, even though my boss Shane was there (from my student assistant position job). For some reason he left to go somewhere and I was supposed to do something with his car. It was an SUV (which it isn't in real life--at all) and I had a hard time reaching the pedals. I drove to my old high school (which in the dream wasn't 2,000 miles way like it is in real life) for some reason--I think I had to get something signed. Anyway it was just a quick stop on the way to doing whatever it was that I was supposed to do. But it ended up taking over an hour. Then I went back to the SUV and got in and started driving though I couldn't entirely remember what it was I was supposed to be doing or where I was going.

The car ahead of me in the road started to slow, so I put on the brakes. They didn't respond. I mashed them down hard. NOTHING. I swerved onto the shoulder and put the car in reverse, and it slowed to a stop. I got on the cell phone with Shane and told him what was happening. It turned out he was nearby and walking down the same street I was on, and he got there while we were still on the phone with each other. I gave him the keys and let him drive. The brakes still weren't working, but we went off-road through this hilly field. We crested the first hill and the other side was steeper. It was scary. The second hill we crested we actually left the ground for a second. The third I said was too scary and got him to slow down (I think by putting it in reverse) as we got to the top, we rolled to a stop. The other side was indeed much steeper, plus there was a huge log across where we'd have been driving. And on the other side of the log: a lake. Good thing we stopped.

I only remember bits and pieces, but nothing coherently plot-like for this one. I remember we were driving in two cars. At first it was me and Dan, and then it was both of us plus Dominic and Dan's parents. Anyway, for some reason the cars were tethered together side-by-side, but not close together. We were driving down the interstate, and the other car was in the left lane, but we were over on the other side of the median, in the oncoming traffic's shoulder. There was a reason for this, and it had to do with why we were tethered together. I think we were kind of towing them, and we had to be over there. Anyway, we drove past a cop and I remember thinking "I hope he didn't notice..." which seems impossible. But he didn't chase us, so I guess he either didn't see it or didn't care.

We got to a place that wasn't really a town... more like a truck stop area. There was a restaurant there but it didn't look open. We peeked into the windows and saw that people were eating in there, though, so we went in. We sat at a booth. This was when I noted the fact that all five of us were wearing footie pajamas. Now, in real life Dan, Dominic, and I all have some, and Dan's parents were here when I gave Dan his... so in the dream I thought "oh, they must have liked the ones I got for Dan and went and bought themselves some."

My notes for this dream, which I jotted down when I woke up briefly and then went back to sleep for a few hours, say "weird food" at this point, but I don't remember what was weird about it. Oh well. What I do remember was that I got up to go use the bathroom and it was absolutely filthy. I mean filthy. It was a one-toilet bathroom, no stalls, and it was unisex. It had garbage all over the floor, the toilet looked like it had never been cleaned and was covered in grime. It was nasty. I decided not to use it and went back to the table.

At this point the waitress tried to steal our stuff out of our cars in the parking lot. We noticed, however, and went out and stopped her. Then we saw something off in the near distance. It was some sort of illusion, clearly--none of us entertained the idea that it was real for even a moment--but we saw what looked like a giant flying saucer lift up over the trees, and then a beam came down and rotated a house 90 degrees. So we were loading our stuff back into the car (the waitress had brought a lot of it inside while trying to steal it) and while we were packing up one car, the waitress tried to steal the other car. We stopped her again. My notes at this point say "luggage" but I don't know what that refers to. Oops.

I had another dream after I went back to sleep. I was visiting my Dad's house and they were cooking something... I think it was like scrambled eggs with shrimp in it. I reminded them that I was a vegetarian and asked if they could set some of the eggs aside before adding the shrimp. They said ok but it seemed like they thought my extending my vegetarian beliefs to include shrimp was silly. (In real life they don't feel this way, I don't know why they did in the dream.) I went into the kitchen to help, and they had the weirdest microwave ever. It was built-in above the stove, but instead of a glass door, the door matched the cabinets. There was a tiny cut-out in the wood that let you see the digital display so you knew how much longer it was cooking, but you had to open the door to get to the buttons, and you couldn't see your food while it was cooking.

Then we were sitting around a table... and by "we" I'm not sure who I mean. My mom was there, and I think some other people I knew, plus some people I didn't. But they were playing some weird card game based on the Everquest online game. They kept trying to hand me cards despite the fact that I'd repeatedly said I wasn't playing.

Then there was a part where we were outside some building, and people were sitting all over the grass waiting for tickets. There were various things to get tickets to, and apparently some concert was just about to start and several people were there to get tickets to that. I don't knwo why we were there. A group of teenagers ran squealing from the ticket window, shouting to their friends "We got front row! Come on!" and several other teens scurried after them, all excited.

I was up at the lake in New Hampshire with Dan and a few other people. It was a slightly unusual time of year to be there. I think it was a little later than usual (we rarely stay past August). I was down on the dock and I looked down and realized that I could see the bottom of the lake through the wood of the dock. At first I thought it was an illusion, like if you hold your finger up close to one eye, it looks like you can see through it because your other eye can see what is on the other side. But then I realized that I really could see through the dock. I got down with my face close to the wood and watched the rocks under the water, and the little minnows swimming around. There was an occasional larger fish, and then there was an amazing fish. It looked sort of like a bird and sort of like a butterfly. It was a pattern of bright colors and it was beautiful. It flapped its "wings" to swim through the water. It was amazing to watch.

Dominic came down to look at it, too. Then somehow he got a note that was either from a fairy or about a fairy and mentioned how lucky he was to have seen one. That's when we realized that the butterfly-bird fish was actually a fairy.

Then we were in a strange house near where our cottage was supposed to be, but we were trying to hide because other people had come into the house and it was important that they not find us. At the top of some stairs was a place where the wall didn't go all the way down and some fabric had been put over the opening, and we crawled in there. It was barely big enough for us to fit, and I was worried because it seemed like an incredibly obvious hiding place.

In the other dream, I'd started going to school at the college here in Cleveland (where I'll actually be starting in January). There was a very complicated student building with an area where you could use computers, but part of it was sectioned off for using computers only to look up information about classes. I found where my classes were and went to them. Then it was lunch time and I went to the food area, which was a lot like a food court in a mall. I didn't find much that I could eat as a vegetarian, and I got up from my seat and went back to look again because I was still hungry. When I came back some girl had taken my seat and had moved my stuff over. I don't remember exactly the circumstances but she started throwing food at me when I mentioned I'd been expecting to sit there again.

I got my stuff, which wasn't the stuff you'd expect--it was my bathrobe and a few other random things--and moved to another table. I went back to the food area because I'd seen some beans that looked like they might be vegetarian, but when I asked, they said they weren't. I complained that it was annoying when random meat-products were added to foods that had nothing to do with meat or any reason to have meat products in them. They acted like I was crazy.

Then I was wandering across the campus and I realized that I had lost track of the time and was supposed to be in class. Actually, I was about 20 minutes late for class. Then I realized that it was the second or third week of school and I didn't have my books yet, or even know what books they were, and so I decided to skip class and instead go to the campus bookstore.

The area where the campus bookstore was had an upstairs that was a lot like a mall, where the second floor is just a walkway around the edges but the middle is cut out so you can see to the level below, with a low wall to keep you from falling over. For some reason, I tried to climb up to the second level by climbing over that wall. It was a solid wall part of the way up, with a railing at the very top. I don't know how I reached it in the first place, but I found myself hanging from the rail, but unable to get my feet up onto anything, and without the strength to pull myself higher with my arms.

A rather heavyset (not fat) woman saw my plight and came to help. Rather than grabbing me and pulling me up, however, she climbed over the wall to my side. At first I protested, but then she turned to face me and wrapped her legs around my legs. I pulled with my arms, and she used her legs to lift the lower part of me so that I could get high enough to get myself over the wall. It was very odd.

In this dream I was traveling and was in some large city somewhere in the north to northeastern part of the US. I was with some people but I can't remember who. We were on foot, and some of the time it seemed like we were out in the street and some of the time we were in a huge indoor area, possibly an airport. There was a light rail style transportation system that consisted of two parallel tracks that ran at ground level in a straight line for quite a way, then went up sharply at both ends. I assume they were to get to the top floors of some structure or something. The fact that they were as short as they were, and in a straight line (you could see both ends from any point along the tracks) makes me think it was inside an airport or resort or something.

Anyway there was some sort of special thing going on, not sure if it was near a holiday or something, but they were having a race along the light rail. It was meant to be just a show of good fun. Both trains were full of commuters or travelers or whoever it is that's intended to use them... or maybe there were people specially chosen or something to be on the train during the race. I'm not sure. The trains started in the same direction and came toward us. We were under the part where the tracks went up into the air on one end. They came very fast, and shot up the vertical part of the track. At the top I can't remember if they turned around somehow or if they just went in reverse to go back down, but they came back down even faster. It was impressive.

We watched them race toward the other end and go up the vertical incline there. It was easier to see the perspective of the whole thing from the farther distance. Then as the train on the right hand track reached the top something horrible happened. The front car of the train slowed a little more than the one behind it and the join between the cars buckled, displacing the wheels from the track. We watched in horror as, almost in slow motion, the top car tipped, then started to fall, dragging the other cars, one by one, off the track with it. They fell to the ground from the height of about a 30 story building, I'd say. We could see where they landed.

Of course it was panic at that point and people were running everywhere. We were trying to catch a flight I think, but it wasn't until later. By the time we went to our flight, the place the train had landed was definitely part of the airport. We walked by very close to where it had happened. Most of the debris was cleared by then but everything was smashed. One of the people nearby who worked there said that over 100 people had died. Surveying the extent of the damage on the ground, we all had a sobering thought... if the disaster had happened at the vertical part on the other end of the track, we'd have been right underneath it. We'd have probably been dead.

Later in the dream I was dropping Dominic off to visit his dad. We went to Rob's apartment, which was a new one I hadn't been to before, and had 4 bedrooms. I was going to get a tour but I had to use the bathroom first. Dominic had left his underwear on the floor in the bathroom (he'd gone in before me) and I almost said something, but then thought "nah, it's his dad's turn to deal with it" and didn't say anything. I had one of my cats, Ding, with me, and she and the cat that Rob kept when we split up were very glad to see each other. We watched them being so affectionate and said that we should bring the cat over for visitation every time we brought Dominic (which is unrealistic since he almost always flies when he goes to see Rob).

I was just about to get the tour of the apartment when the phone rang and woke me up.

There were different parts of my dream, and I don't remember any of the parts super well.

The first part involved being in some sort of a tourist attraction/park and there were monkeys of some type there. I saw one that had a little fuzzy baby monkey clutched to its chest. I gave the mother a slice of apple, and she handed me her baby. I held the little baby monkey while she ate the apple. It was so cute. Somehow, I was also taking classes here and this dream was interrupted by having to go to class for things--but I don't remember more about it than that. Later I came across another monkey with a baby (most of the monkeys were just running around, it was just these two that had little ones) but this baby was pink and hairless and I assumed it was probably only a day or two old.

This monkey also handed me the baby to hold, and when I looked at its tiny face, I was surprised to see that it didn't have well defined features yet. There we no eyes, for example, just sort of divets in the face--it looked like someone had used a fingernail to scoop out where the eyes would go in a clay or wax face. The whole face was like that. It didn't freak me out, though, in the reality of my dream, baby monkeys just developed that way--in a few weeks when it was a little older it would have eyes and fur and be just as cute as the other one.

In another part of the dream, I was in some auditorium waiting for something to start. I had an empty seat next to me and Weird Al Yankovic came and sat down next to me. He questioned himself momentarily about whether he was supposed to sit there or next to someone else "this time" and from that I gathered that he made it a point to sit with certain people at certain times/events and was just trying to remember if he'd gotten the right person for this event. He decided that he had and settled in.

We started to talk about different things while waiting for whatever it was to start. I remember asking him if he ever had any of his songs that he felt really attached to, like they were sort of "pet songs". He said "oh yeah," and sang a bit of a song. I was embarrassed that I didn't recognize it at all. I told him that for me it was "Harvey the Wonder Hamster" and that's when I noticed that he had a hamster with him. So we talked about the hamster for a while, and some about music and other bands and concerts and so on. I don't remember what the event was or if it ever started.

This was a weird dream. It started out with me somewhere in Atlanta, and I was going to go swimming at some country club type place. Dan's mom was driving me--it was 30-45 minutes away--but she was going to drop me off a couple of blocks away. So she drops me off on the main road we'd been driving on for most of the way, and I'm going to walk down a side street to get to the place. The side street is to the left. I get out of the car, but there is a lot of water in the road. And by a lot, I mean... well, I walked toward the traffic light in the left-turn lane, and as I got closer the water was rising because the road dipped down. By the time I got to the light, I was swimming in about 5 feet of water. Not clean water, either, but road-puddle water. I actually swam underwater for part of it, for some reason. I swam fast to make sure I caught the light, and swam left through the intersection just as it was turning from yellow to red.

I climbed out of the water onto the side street, which went uphill. I was soaked, obviously, but so was the bag I had. It was a black canvas tote bag which had my purse, my towel, and a change of clothes in it. I was already wearing my bathing suit. In fact I was only wearing my bathing suit. I had planned on putting the towel around my waist as I walked to the place, but my towel was soaking wet with muddy water, so I walked just in my bathing suit, feeling self-conscious.

When I got to the place, there was a sort of fenced-in patio, like many restaurants have. There were people sitting around at tables, and one of the people was my friend Tom from Tucson. He's an interesting looking guy--6'7", long hair, tattoos... He looked a little out of place among the country club folk. Anyway, I hung my bag on the back of a chair and went to talk to some lady about getting a new towel. They had a fancy towel boutique but all the towels were over $50, so I said nevermind.

I went back out onto the patio in time to see a guy in an orange shirt and orange shorts casually take my bag off the chair. "Hey, put down my bag!" I yelled. He took off running. "Grab the guy in orange, he's got my bag!" I shouted toward the tables of people that the guy was running past. Some guy got up and started chasing. I was chasing, too, but they were much closer. He was going for the opening in the fenced-area, and some guy was coming toward it from the other side. I shouted to him "stop the guy in orange! He stole my bag!" and that guy tried to head off the thief. I saw Tom glance up from whatever he was doing at the table he was sitting at. "That guy stole my bag!" I called out to him, pointing. Tom got up and more or less stepped over the fence (it was one of those low decorative wrought-iron fences that is just to keep the table area enclosed) and chased the guy. Tom has long legs. He caught the guy pretty fast and grabbed my bag.

I got my bag back but the guy ran off again. We were standing around considering calling the police, and I was going through the stuff in my bag and laying things out on the table to dry. A guy at the next table sees that I have several photographs that I've put on the table to dry, and he says "hey, we should put those on the internet!" I said I didn't think we should. They were all like mug-shot or id-style pictures of people's faces, but I can't remember who they were of, or why I had them. The guy seemed fairly annoyed that I didn't want to put them on the internet and said sarcastically "oh, I suppose you are too busy".

Nearby, a woman was talking on the phone. She seemed to be a doctor or nurse, because she was questioning someone about symptoms.

Somehow, connected to the people at the table, or maybe to the photos, there was an Asian man. The whole scene changed, sort of like a flashback or maybe a scene cut in a movie. Suddenly I was still looking at the Asian man, but it was through bars. He was in some kind of prison. It was very surreal--it was black and seemed like it was outdoors, but at the same time it felt like it might be inside a very large building. The bars were a very high cage or fence, that enclosed a large area with probably a hundred prisoners.

An older Asian couple, who I took to be the man's parents, was talking to the man through the bars. I noticed a closeup of the low block wall that the bars came up from (it was very much like tv or a movie at this point, as far as the angles that I could see from. I don't think that I was actually "there" as a character in the dream anymore) and saw that it was crawling with thousands of bugs. The couple started running and went around to the back somewhere, and into the small building that was in the middle of this prison yard. (Well, middle right-to-left--the fact that they could get to it, outside the fence, I guess means that it was up against the fence on the side across from me). They came out of the building calling to the man. As they did, all of the prisoners rushed toward the building at the same time, but were suddenly jerked to a halt--they were chained to the fence. The chains were about 20 feet long, and attached to metal collars around their necks.

Several guards were positioned around the building, and they held the parents back while also threatening the prisoners. The one nearest to me was a heavyset woman in her 40s or 50s. Her hair was up in a bun and she was wearing a uniform, but it didn't look like a typical "prison guard" uniform. It looked more like a store or restaurant uniform. The shirt was red with a white collar, and had large writing on the front. There were four words, but I only remember two of them: "paper" and "company". She was brandishing a knife at the prisoners, but not the kind of knife you'd expect; it was a table knife like the ones in a set of silverware, that you'd use to spread butter on your toast.

I started to wonder where we were, and suspect that it wasn't an actual prison... what was going on...?

Then I woke up, so I guess I'll never know.