hrj

It started out with me getting caught up in some sort of massive police detainment of people for an unknown purpose. I was following wise principles and not answering any questions except with “am I under arrest?” And “am I free to go?” Which never got a straight answer. The police were making all sorts of vaguely threatening remarks like “you know, you’re a long way from home and any of your friends” which made me laugh because dream-me had been picked up only a couple blocks from home.

We kept getting herded in large random groups from one area to another in a massive convention center type space. (The dream gave one nod to COVID anxiety at one point when my group got moved into some sort of makeshift isolation tent and I pointed out that we’d all been breathing the same air before and were still breathing together there so what was the point?)

Somewhere in there, dream-me dropped the “don’t say anything” rule and started coaching other detainees on what and what not to say.

They hadn’t taken away our cell phones but were jamming them in some way so no one could get a signal. When you tried, your phone showed some sort of police propaganda video which was a cover for them hacking your phone and downloading it’s contents.

And that was when things got weird. Because they downloaded a bunch of research notes and images I’d collected for the Alpennia series, and the next thing I knew, a group of priests were grilling me on my theology, hoping to catch me in an error.

I told them, “if this is going to be an inquisition, then I want my lawyer *and* my bishop!” But dream-me was just yanking their chain because dream-me was still an atheist. Anyway the inquisitors were no more successful than the police had been in getting me to say anything useful. (I still had no idea what the purpose of the whole exercise was, though there were some suggestions that it involved a murder.)

They’d been projecting the research images from my phone on the wall of the convention center as they grilled me and that attracted a crowd from the other detainees that included a bunch of SCA folk (though no one I knew or who knew me). They started loudly discussing the context and meaning of the images to the bewilderment of the police.

Somehow I was suddenly dressed in an elaborate set of purple robes, including a drapey hood-like hat. And that’s when pearls started dropping out of my mouth as I tried to shout, “Am I under arrest? Am I free to go? I want to see my lawyer!” But my voice was getting raspy and no one could hear me.

And that’s when I woke up.

Analysis: the only part of this I can ascribe any meaning to is that the “pearls in the mouth, raspy voice” is probably when I started breathing through my mouth instead of the cpap mask and my mouth got all dry and it woke me up. But it’s nice to know that even dream me remembers proper police detention protocols.

I'm not sure much happened on Thursday--but if it did, it got knocked out of my memory by the weirdness that was today. Not even connected weirdness, but just a sequence of random weirds.

Woke up from a very vivid dream that...well, here's the summary from facebook: I’m at a science fiction convention at a downtown hotel. The guest of honor is a dragon. But nobody had counted on the fact that the dragon is not simply intelligent and clever, but also cruel and hungry. The con com is trying to negotiate with it on the matter of not eating the membership while said membership tries to go about the business of the con. Somewhat furtively to avoid catching the eye of the dragon That’s when the large Pleistocene-era tigers and wolves started roaming the streets. Less intelligent than the dragon but just as hungry. They hadn’t figured out how to open the glass doors of the hotel lobby but neither could we figure out how to lock them. So the tigers and wolves kept pacing past, looking into the lobby hungrily as we froze in place to try to avoid stimulating their pounce reflexes Someone suggested that rather than hanging out in the lobby we should go to the film festival, except the festival was specializing in jump-scare horror flicks and somehow that didn’t seem appealing at the moment.

It has been suggested that the first part of the dream might make an interesting flash fiction piece. I'll keep it in mind, but probably won't find the time.

Next up, did an early morning shopping run to deliver to Stockton tomorrow. Hitting the grocery store at 6am doesn't seem to be necessary for finding essentials any more, and they're still putting out the fresh produce at that hour (I almost missed getting lettuce) so maybe I'll try later in the day next time. I found everything on Earl's shopping list this time, with only one notable substitution. Also had a random encounter with threadwalker who spotted my car in the parking lot and texted me.

The first half of the workday was pretty normal. My lunch bike ride was normal. I used the first bit of sourdough culture discard to make crumpets for lunch. (Needs practice, but delicious with marmelade.) I was planning spend the second half of the day pushing an investigation up to ready-to-review, so of course instead I got two new assignments over lunch. New assignments get top priority because they need to be evaluated for criticality. These involved some QC results that needed review, which sent me into updating my completely-unofficial-not-validated-seriously-just-for-my-personal-reference spreadsheet of purification QC results that I've been keeping up since the time when I belonged to that department.

And as I'm entering data, I notice something really odd. There's a test that sorts out a particular feature of the drug molecule into five different types and calculates what percentage of each type is present in a particular batch. The results are reported to the tenths place. And for this one batch, all the digits in the tenths place were zero. So it was like (made-up numbers): 47.0%, 25.0% 17.0%, 1.0%, 10.0%. It struck me that there were two possibilities. One was that by pure coincidence, this particular set of test results genuinely did come out rounded to figures with a zero in the tenths position. Or there had been some glitch and the numbers got rounded to the units position but then reported to the tenths place. The first is statistically odd, but the second suggests a complete failure of our validated calculation software. So I pinged the lab manager, pointed out the oddity, and asked if he could double-check it. He agrees it's odd and goes to look at the raw data. Well, as it happens improbable probability was the answer and the numbers were genuine and correct. Which is a big relief. But I don't feel the slightest bit of guilt at questioning them. Because I've had to investigate the consequences when the answer is "the software is rounding the numbers wrong and has been for the last couple years." It's not pretty.

That took me up to almost time for our departmental online happy hour, so I popped into the back yard to pick some mint for a mojito and went to wash it in the kitchen sink.
.
.
.
and nothing happened. No water. Nothing. I went and checked the bathroom sink. Nothing. I went out into the front yard to try the faucet there and look to see if there were any signs of water system disaster. Nothing. What the hell. I find the customer service number for the water company and call to report. They pass me off to an engineering department line that is only taking voicemail. I suspect that the voicemail will not be listened to until Monday, so I try a different customer service number and they tell me to call the emergency service number. (Water company emergency number, not 911.) Emergency operator says he'll call an engineer at home and have them contact me. In the meantime, I've logged on to the video happy hour and babbled a bit about what's going on.

Phone back from the engineer. He's checked status and no larger problems reported so he says it sounds like someone turned off the main house valve. Might someone else in my household have done that? Um...the cats don't have opposable thumbs, and they don't go outside where the valve is in any event. But he talks me through identifying and describing the cut-off valves by the front door, and sure enough, one of the two valve levers visible in the system is in the "off" position. When I align it with the piping, water begins flowing again.

So the best I can figure out is that sometime between 2pm and 4pm this afternoon, some random person came up to my front door shut off my water valve. For unknown reasons. Beats the hell out of me. But I'll know what to check first next time.

At that point, I thanked the engineer, rejoined the video happy hour, and spent a couple hours in social chat with my co-workers.

And that's what my day was like. How about yours?

Dream journal: Another lovely long detailed dream this morning. I wish I could journal it all but the details are slipping away already. Secondary fantasy world. Lots of gardening and unusual domesticated animals. Also bits about drawing diagrams in an office. Very vivid scenes but no coherent plot. Final scene was a bunch of people and animals sitting around relaxing and then a group of strangers riding large birds approached and I and another woman went out to meet them to make sure the encounter was friendly.No interpretations this time.

The current spate of being able to remember detailed dreams is almost certainly related to being on vacation and giving myself permission to sleep in (as well as actually managing to do so).

Dream journal: a recurring dream motif that I haven't had much lately is that I can fly by flapping my arms. There’s also a technique of simply pushing down in the air, sort of like how I swim underwater. In the dream I just had, I had this ability, not as myself, but as a creature who looked human but was really something else entirely.

In the beginning of the dream, I would sneak out to fly just for fun but was otherwise living an ordinary life. I had a job as some sort of teacher, I think of children, but there weren’t any direct scenes of that, just me keeping a journal about it. Interspersed in the journal were drawings and notes relating to my flying life.

There was something in the background about a repressive government and a motif was people in long lines to get through barriers that I was passing over while flying.

The real action began during one of these flights when people looked up and noticed me. There was a chase sequence through both open spaces and large warehouses where I sort of playfully kept out of their reach.

But then I escaped back to my office, and as I was writing in my journal I realized I was writing a goodbye letter. I never outright explained about being a different species but I knew it would be obvious from the journal contents, which I left lying open on my desk.

Then I took off. For a while I was flying free and happy. Then I realized I was being followed by a woman who was determined to track me down. Not necessarily in a hostile way but in a controlling way. There was another long chase sequence, taking place mostly inside a large elaborate building.

I could keep one step ahead, mostly by dint of doing things like flying up stairwells, or going through ventilation passages that could only be entered high up in a room. Eventually, when she’d chased me to the top of a sort of cupola, I was able to find an open window and escape. I skimmed away through the sky waving goodbye.

Analysis: My flying dreams often have motifs of dodging obstacles and working around barriers. A long time ago, a recurring motif would be flying through clouds and knowing there were high tension lines in them somewhere but if I could climb high enough I’d get above them and out of the clouds. I think that motif featured in this dream too, but mostly the barriers were due to flying indoors. Another feature of my flying dreams is how much effort it takes. Taking off is often slow and laborious and leaves me vulnerable to people on the ground. But there’s always a sort of surprised joy at being able to do it.

ETA: Sorry about the odd typos/auto-corrects (which I think I've fixed). I typed this up on the notepad function of my phone while still barely awake and then pasted it into the DreamWidth screen, but wasn't awake enough for proper proofreading.

No doubt the topic of the dream was sparked by being at a con and having books and book promotion on my brain.

So there I was, in my dream, in the audience at a talk show. (Something like the Tonight Show, but the host wasn't one of the actual historic hosts, though I have this vague sense that he was modeled after some tv host I watched in my youth.) There was one set of "special" seats with whom they did an "audience interaction" segment (which, in the way of Hollywood, was taped separately in a different location after the regular show). One of the folks sitting in that area had to leave before the end of the show and offered me their place. So there I am thinking, "What an opportunity, because when they ask me to tell a little something about myself, I can casually mention being an author and I just happen to have copies of my books on me to display (as you do)."

So when the regular part of the show was finished I and several other people got whisked off to be prepped for the special segment and assigned a couple of attendants to explain the ropes and do makeup and the rest. There was a bit of a competitive "Hunger Games" vibe to this part, because evidently the prep crews had a bit of rivalry going in whose guest made the best showing in the segment. My crew was telling me I was way more interesting than the other guests, with an air of personal triumph.

But then they screwed up my make-up and were having trouble getting it fixed and I had to rush off for the taping, and realized I'd left my purse and the books behind in the make-up booth, but also someone had given me bad directions for where to go for the taping and by the time I realized I was going in the wrong direction and backtracked, the prep area was deserted. [Only now while typing this up does it occur to me that those "bad directions" might have been part of the prep-crew rivalries. I'm not sure this counts as being part of the dream, since it didn't occur to me while I was asleep.]

I got a janitor to let me into the make-up area but my stuff was gone. So I rushed off to the stage where they were doing the taping and arrived just as everything was over (and found my purse and books sitting there on my empty chair). As the crew was packing up, I went up to the host to apologize for the screw-up and for not having been there and to offer him a copy of my book anyway. He was all snippy and said, "After that, I wouldn't even read your book if you paid me. Well, ok, maybe I would if you paid me."

So I pulled out a ten dollar bill and said, "I'll give this to your favorite charity if you accept the book." And then we chatted some more and in the end he decided I was an ok person and agreed to look at my book. So the dream ended positively with the vaguest hope that a major tv talk-show host might some day say something nice about my books.

Analysis: We will ignore the enormous implausibility of the actual scenario. The various logistical disasters in the dream probably represent standard anxiety motifs about being over-scheduled and afraid that I'll drop the ball somewhere. But the generally positive conclusion seems to reflect my more relaxed feeling about how my books are doing this time around. (As I've mentioned in previous dream journals, my symbolism tends to be fairly direct and transparent.)

This was one of those dream-withn-a-dream things. In the first-layer dream I was at a brother's place for the Christmas holidays. It wasn't a specific location or specific brother, but it was at a nearby (ca. 2 hour drive) location, which becomes relevant. I'd only been planning to visit for a couple of days, but on arrival I learned that there was a plan for all of us to bundle into cars and drive up to Bend Oregon for a ski trip. So I'm kind of whining about how it might have been nice to know this <i>before</i> showing up so that I could have brought my skis and packed warmer clothes. And I'm trying to calculate whether this planned trip will get me back by the time my vacation is up. And then there's the weird part. My horrible head-cold carried over into the dream, so in the dream I was spending a lot of my time nodding off to sleep constantly. And in those dream-naps I would dream that I was still in the exact same location and circumstances except that Mom was there. I was slipping between sleep and waking (in the primary dream) smoothly enough that it took me a while to figure out that I was dreaming and not hallucinating, and then I debated over whether to tell anyone about it for fear of making them feel bad.

Analysis: no deep inner meaning. I'm sick in bed. We just had a family holiday get-together. And I miss my Mom.

And then the dream verged off into being at some SCA arts collegium and I was trying to remember what class I'd promised to teach.

I think it must be all my friends who are in the middle of buying houses, but I had a homeowner anxiety dream this morning. My house was an enormous rambling place with lots of "owner-built" additions and modifications. I had just gotten a housemate who brought a vibrant and spontaneous social life with her (consisting mostly--for some inexplicable reason--of people hanging out on the Making Light blog). I was in the middle if introducing myself to the sudden crowd and laying down some house rules (like: "knock before you walk in the front door" and similar) when a massive rainstorm hit and pieces of the house started crumbling and exposing structural flaws. Which the crowd of strangers began eagerly pointing out to me and explaining how I could have fixed or prevented them. And then a leak started pouring through the roof and I started to cry.

When I posted this over on fb, it was pointed out to me in comments (and I had come to the same conclusion independently) that this may not actually be a homeowner anxiety dream -- although it borrows the symbolic language -- but an about-to-have-my-novel-published anxiety dream. A vast horde of complete strangers (as well as people I already know and respect) are about to "walk in" to my world without knocking and (at least implicitly) start critiquing the architecture, the furniture, the wallpaper, and the dinner menu. But dammitall I built that roof and I know for certain that it will not leak. So take that, you insecure subconscious!

The motifs on this one are so transparent there's no point in trying for a symbolic analysis.

The dream starts out in what must be a sort of family Christmas gathering context (except it otherwise feels like summer time). My immediate family is present and a group of cousins are visiting ... leading to a peculiar digression where we discuss social customs around whether one enters a house by the front door, the back door, or by coming through some gap in the back fence and in through the garage. I'm wrapping up a present that is some sort of IKEA-like kitchen table ... except that I'm wrapping it up unassembled and carefully wrapping each individual piece separately (including screws and bolts), labeled so that they'll be opened in order for assembly.

This segues into my conclusion that I desperately need a three-week road trip vacation for the sake of my sanity. I'm going to be accompanied by my youngest brother and one of my cousins and I start micro-managing what they need to pack for the trip. Then we have to go see my insurance agent for some reason to do with making sure my insurance will cover everyone who might be driving. And then it occurs to me that I need to contact my employer about the trip ... at which point I remember that I don't have any unscheduled vacation days left in the year, much less three weeks' worth, and that three weeks is a bit more than I could get away with calling in sick for. End of dream.

Every once in a while, my use of audio to stave off insomnia produces odd effects. Last night's reality: sleeping in my medieval pavilion at Beltane Coronation, running Jane Austen's "Emma" on the iPod. Last night's dream: attending Pennsic, except it was being held in a university dormitory-type setting with mazes of twisty corridors all alike, and all the Pennsic staff had adopted personas of Austen characters and would only communicate by quoting dialogue from the novels. There may be something symbolic in that my standard dream-Pennsic storyline involves realizing that I've been there for pretty much the entire event and haven't managed to meet up with anyone I know or attend any meetings or activities that I'd planned to do. (Note that I've only attended Pennsic twice in my 35 years in the SCA, so it's most likely that my dream-Pennsic stands for something else entirely besides the actual event.)

Two very vivid dreams last night, both featuring close friends. The first one is for

thread_walker's ears only. The second one involved a trip that

scotica and

xrian and I were going on to see a museum exhibit in some other city. We'd made separate travel arrangements so we weren't sitting together on the plane. When I got off in Chicago, I was walking down long corridors to get to the rental car (or something) and realized that the others weren't with me. Whereupon I suddenly got very insecure about whether I was even in the right city -- maybe I was supposed to have flown to NY or Boston instead. Pulled out the iPhone to Google the exhibition and check, but the connection wasn't working and when I tried to phone my friends the phone started talking back to me so I couldn't tell whether anyone was on the line.

I think the second dream is reminding me that I need to make my Kalamazoo arrangements Real Soon Now. (The first one was even more transparent, when it comes to it.)

I dreamed I was rearranging furniture in my new house (yeah, how surprising!) but suddenly realized that instead of the single big open space I thought I had, there was a family/work room and a separate living room/parlor, and I was trying to figure out how I was going to move the couch and loveseat (this is a dream-only loveseat -- I don't actually have one of those) into the living room for company but keep the entertainment center in the family room where I'd mostly be hanging out. And I realized even as I was moving things around that it was never going to work because no matter where the TV was, that was where everyone would end up hanging out and the other room would be wasted space.

I don't think this is so much a "meaningful" dream as a tautologically obvious dream. But I do have my wonderful, functional open space so the dream can just take a hike. There's nothing to see here.

This may be the first dream to stick with me where I as clearly living in Concord. I'm starting on a road trip from the Bay Area to Seattle, in a little (and I mean LITTLE) sedan, accompanied by cryptocosm and two other men who seemed to be co-workers of mine. Cryptocosm had been driving (??to get to my place??) and it was just after dinner so I said I'd take the next shift. (And I know how small the car was because the guy sitting behind me had to push the seat forward enough that I had to sit sort of sideways to drive.) It was clear exactly where we were, but the gps showed the merge of 680 with 80, so I figured I was starting from Concord and that I'd figure out how to get on the freeway ok.

The next scene in the dream -- and this was definitely a "next thing I knew" not movie jump-cut -- we were parked on a stranger's driveway and had a flat on the left rear, and it was almost dawn.

Now you have to understand that in dreams I have a real "thing" about driving while asleep. I do it regularly and it scares the crap out of me. So in this one, I insisted that I hadn't been driving asleep, I must have gotten short-term memory loss from the trauma of getting the flat. (There was some indication that the car might have gone out of control and sideswiped some other vehicles, although the parking job seems to have been under control.)

But when I went to get out my phone to call roadside assistance. The case was there but my phone wasn't in it. Instead, in the same pocket, was a stranger's high-tech pager. There were a number of clues in the pager to the owner's identity (like information on his employer, since it was for his job), so I set about trying to decipher who he was and how he was involved. There was some sort of recording or broadcast coming out of the device (which was actually my radio-alarm) that I was having trouble hearing. And somewhere in there the owner of the driveway came out and I had to reassure her about what we were doing there. And round about then I figured I needed to wake up and get moving.

Interpretations and image sources: I was just talking recently about needing to plan another Seattle road trip. As noted, sleep-driving is a regular anxiety of mine in dreams, but I'm not sure if it means anything other than a real-world concern for falling asleep at the wheel. No clear resonances for the other elements, although I note that with 4 people in the car, somehow I was the one who had to organize everything. No waiting for other people to rescue me! And then there's the motif of getting distracted from an immediate problem by an abstract puzzle that needs solving.

Extensive vivid dream this morning about wildfires in the hills. In the dream I was more or less in my current location, but it was in the context of a group of people camping. When I woke (in my dream) I could see an absolute wall of smoke rising up over half the sky, and in the other part of the sky there were long streaks of smoke from other fires. The ridges of the hill were all ablaze. And periodically in the camping area, there would be small spontaneous blazes that would need to be put out immediately. Most of the people were just going about their business as usual but there were a bunch of us frantically running around collecting and filling buckets and trying to keep ahead of the little spot fires. I was working with a small boy who wasn't strong enough to carry buckets but wanted to help and I was showing him how to kick apart the sodden bushes after someone had dumped water on them to make sure there weren't any embers still hiding inside.

Likely triggers: news about the fires in Texas (especially from Texans on my FB feed), local news yesterday about possible lightning storms this weekend creating fire hazards, and in fact since there were a couple of actual lightning caused fires in the Mt. Diablo area overnight, it's even possible that the wind might have been right to bring a hint of smoke through my window.

Underlying metaphoric meaning: possibly some frustration with the usual tendency of organizations to be carried on the backs of a small set of people, even in emergencies, but no immediately obvious specific mappings here.

I don't usually get real-time audio intrusion in my dreams. In fact, based on observations relating to my conscious perception of my anti-insomnia audio-streaming vis-a-vis the sleep-wake interface, my brain appears to shut down speech perception processing when I go under. But this morning when the NPR news came on at 6am and I hunkered down for an extra half-dozen winks, I had a vivid dream in which I was in London waiting with a crowd on s street corner for some sort of parade or event and a nearby loudspeaker was blaring the morning KQED traffic report and I was simultaneously thinking, "what a silly thing for them to be broadcasting here in London where nobody cares about the accident holding up traffic at the Caldicot" and "isn't nice that I don't have to pay attention to the traffic report because I'm here in London and don't have to get up to go to work."

Silly me.

This dream needs no interpretation. In it, I came home (to a house with a different configuration) to find I'd been burgled once more. The alarm hadn't gone off (yes, I had the alarm system in the dream) because they'd entered the house by prying the walls apart.

So there was this dream just before I woke up. I was in Amsterdam with

thread_walker for some sort of extended embroidery workshop. So far, so good. But I had no idea how the workshop was organized, so while everyone else was frantically trying to sign up for the specific classes they wanted, I wandered out into an open plaza, thinking I should get in touch with

aryanhwy to get together for dinner or something, and found there was an open-air museum display about Thomas Becket, including detailed reproductions of garments associated with him. Wanting more information, I went into the small museum gift shop, which was located in a disused church, but all they were selling were these sets of pop-culture-medieval coloring books and touristy crap. For some reason I hadn't pre-arranged for a place to stay in Amsterdam so I spent the night out in the plaza. In the morning I went back to where the embroidery workshops were being held and started trying to figure out how the event was organized so I could participate. All sorts of people were already getting started on their projects, and it was one of those "start of the con" atmospheres where people were arriving and greeting old friends. And the new arrivals were chatting in various different languages -- I caught a bit of Welsh at one point. But I was starting to get that feeling of "I don't know anyone and they aren't interested in meeting me or talking to me" and in the dream I pointed out to myself that I'd sworn off going down that road so I gathered up the nerve to ask someone where I could get some coffee. It was halfway across town, so I could either have my coffee or I could continue trying to get integrated into the workshop. And that was about it -- I woke up. None of my usual repeating motifs, nothing feeling "meaningful", just very specific, concrete, identifiable details.

So the standard "not ready for some event/trip" dream involves a plane flight where I'm not packed, I'm not at the airport on time, I don't have my ticket (or passport) or some combination of these. In tonight's dream the trip involved me,

cryptocosm, and some German guy flying to Germany for some award/ceremony (having something to do with Apple computers, but I don't recall the details). When I arrived at the airport, I was so excited about the trip that I forgot to get my suitcase out of the trunk of the car and didn't notice till later. But we were very early for the flight so we were hanging out in a restaurant or something for a while until it was time to go to the gate.

Then two things happened, and the chronology is confused in my memory at this point. One was that I realized that I'd left my suitcase in the car and ran back to get it. But I couldn't remember which parking lot it was in and the first one I searched had this weird one-way architecture so that I kept going up levels and couldn't go back, until I ended up at the top of a hill, when I could find a path of steps descending the hill through a park-like area. At that point I think I figured I just needed to get to the flight and we back to join my brother and the German guy.

Then the second thing that happened was that I paused a moment to find my ticket and then turned towards the gate I thought we were going to (we were in my standard dream-airport where I always go to a particular gate) and then realized that I'd lost the other two travelers and they knew the right gate but I didn't. And I knew that If I looked at my ticket I could find the gate listing and someone could tell me where it was. But as usual in a dream I was having vision problems and couldn't make out what it said.

But then somehow I found the right gate, and it turned out that I was carrying my backpack which had my laptop and a bunch of other important stuff in it, so all I was missing without the suitcase was clothes. And I said I could just buy more clothes. And then I woke up.

This is an unusually "in control" ending for one of my not-ready-for something" dreams. The mapping is quite transparent.

So the dream was all about going out kayaking with this other person. But really, the dream was about safety. First we had to agree what route we were taking, since it was important to use the buddy system and we had to keep together but (in the dream) I was a much better kayaker than the other person was, so there was a lot of negotiation and frustration. But safety first! Then there was the digression for slathering SPF 500 sunscreen all over, because it was bright and sunny and ... safety first! And then there was the bit where we had to avoid getting electrocuted by power lines ....

But whatever else happened, we were safe!

Had a very extensive (that is, I remember a lot) dream that spanned several waking episodes. No clearly meaningful elements but a lot of enjoyable meandering action. It was set in an old downtown -- more European in feel than American although that wasn't a specific element of the action. Several rather 19th c. gothicky-feeling buildings, filled with random antique objects and a lot of really nice old books. There was an elderly woman who was some sort of mentor to me and who, at the end of the dream (and there was a clear concluding end with a home-coming sequence of sorts) had developed a romantic relationship with another woman. In the middle there was a much more modern-feeling sequence with some sort of complex piece of laboratory/production equipment that I was interacting with. And there was this odd (and possibly symbolic) episode where I had to get all my laundry done before I could pack up and go somewhere but every time I thought I was finished things had gotten dirty again. But overall it was about wandering around and exploring in these old buildings with interesting and valuable (to me) objects in them leaving me with a pleasant happy feeling.

I only wish it had left me with a more rested feeling.

I dreamed of my mother last night -- or rather, I dreamed that she dreamed of me. The way the story revealed itself was somewhat confused, but here's how I understood it as a whole.

I found myself in a slight variant of the house I grew up in. It was the middle of the night and I heard my mother calling out for various family members. I got up and found her wandering down the corridor. She was in the confused and frail state of my next-to-last visit. I took her back to bed and she kept asking me to explain what was going on. I tried to explain to her that, in my reality, she was dead, and therefore she must be dreaming this. But the explanation didn't take hold and I kept having to repeat it.

The seasons had moved on, it was spring and the flowers were blooming. And I thought, if death meant continuing on in a dreamland, weren't you supposed to revert back to your prime, rather than being stuck in an eternity at the end of life? It didn't seem fair.

So I forced myself to wake up (out of the dream within a dream, so I was still in the first-layer dream) and there was something confused about moving or preparing for a camping trip and the last thing I recall before my alarm went off was admiring someone else's racing bicycle that had an incredibly light frame (made out of some sort of fiberglass or plastic) such that you could toss it up in the air with one hand. And I was deciding that I had to get a bike like that.

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June 2025

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Entries tagged with dreams

Dream Journal: No one expects...

The Weird Is Among Us

Another Dream: Gardens and Large Birds

Dream Journal: Flying Away

Dream Journal: Book Promotion at a Talk Show

Dream Journal: Layers and layers of family holidays

Dream Journal: Building houses (or worlds)

Dream Journal: Road Trip (Not)

Dream Journal: No mysteries here

Dream Journal: Itineraries

Dream Journal:The center isn't holding?

Dream Journal: Road Trip to Seattle

Dream Journal: Fire!

Dream Journal: Wait -- where am I again?

Dream Journal: Oh come on now, not again?

Dream Journal: Oddly Specific

Dream Journal: More ready than I thought?

Dream Journal: Cal-OSHA Edition

Dream Journal: Odd adventures in old houses with books

Dream Journal: Laying Ghosts