Inception is totally messing with my dreams. (Backlog, pt 5)

(this happened about a week ago)

I had fallen asleep watching Amelie, so in my sleep I could still hear the soundtrack.  In my dream, the Amelie score was kind of like the air in a balloon, keeping the dream world inflated.  The "world" was just southeast and east Austin, except that, instead of a sky overhead, we were obviously enclosed in a milky white, semi-translucent film that was not uniform in shape and consistency, but bulbous and rounded the way a child draws a cloud, with occasional wrinkles and creases like those you sometimes get in your chewing gum when you blow a bubble.  Anyway, the physics of this world, which were entirely dependent on the Amelie score, were not a prominent feature of the dream.  It was just sort of understood, in the same way that we all know that our lives depend on the oxygen and nitrogen in the air, but we don't constantly think about it.

The dream was not a single plot, but several disjointed vignettes.  I don't remember all of them, but these are the ones I do remember:

* My brother Jay and I were at an ugly brown Protestant church in that triangle between Cesar Chavez, Airport, and Springdale, where they were having some kind of young people meeting.  Some guy with a thick west Texas accent and dressed in cowboy attire was telling Jay and I that our parents didn't raise us right because we didn't have the same religious beliefs as the rest of the people at the meeting (they were all members of the church; we were just visiting).  Jay and I, instead of just recognizing that the guy was an idiot and not worth our time, or instead of attempting to argue the point that just because we have different religious beliefs doesn't mean we are bad people, were defending Mom and Dad's parenting skills to the ground.  And then we started doing gymnastics, as if that would somehow prove our point.

* I was at Springdale Farm, but no one else was there, and I really needed to get some spinach and cilantro.  I was walking through the gardens, trying to find and harvest my own, but all the plants were jumbled together and unlabeled.  A thunderstorm rolled in, which made it even harder to find my desired produce because the atmosphere got a lot darker and the rain was falling pretty heavily.

* I went to a client's house that is near the park next to the river off of Chicon.  She told me that she had discovered/invented underwater breathing without needing any equipment, and invited me into her house to show me.  The house was completely filled with water.  When she opened the front door, though, the water stayed in place instead of spilling out.  "See," she said, "The secret is making the water more gelatinous.  That's how you can breathe while submerged."  So we swam around her house, and her bird was "flying" with us underwater.  It was beautiful and a lot of fun, and I thought to myself, "If we had made the pool water more gelatinous, Zoe would have lived instead of drowned."

* I was at a different church farther north on Airport Blvd., near Oak Springs, but also an ugly brown Protestant one, and I had a plate full of food.  Some people were trying to find me, though, so I had to hide the plate of food from them.  I was in a room where they had vacation bible school, so I was pulling open all these drawers that were full of arts&crafts supplies, but couldn't find a drawer where I felt the plate of food would be hard to find and also not contaminated or spoiled by the contents of the drawer.  I finally settled on putting it in the drawer with the glitter, "because," I reasoned, "the worst that will happen is that the food will just look prettier and sparklier."

At the end of the dream, I was walking and chatting with a girl (she was not someone I know in real life) down Cesar Chavez, towards I-35.  While we were walking, I heard Nino knock on Amelie's door and say, "Amelie?" (you know what I'm talking about; at the very end of the movie when he shows up at her apartment while she's daydreaming about him).  I turned to the girl and said, "Oh, shit, we gotta get out of here.  The movie's almost over, and when the score ends, this world is going to collapse.  I have to wake up ASAP.  You better go."  The girl thanked me for the heads up and took off down Waller St.  I started running towards I-35, but instead of the highway, it was a blue door.  I could hear the final song in the score, the one that plays during the credit sequence, and I noticed that the sky was deflating, getting closer and closer to the ground.  Just as I reached the door, the sky was touching the ground behind me, sagging over all the buildings.  I opened the door, ran through it, woke up, and the credit sequence ended and the movie went back to the main menu.

Avani and her mom are magical. (Backlog, pt 3)

I sent this to Avani on 01/26/10.

I had the most strange but delightful dream about you last night, so of course I just have to tell you about it.  You, your mom, and I were in a round room that was all white: white walls, white ceiling, white counters, white tile floor.  I knew it was a kitchen even though I didn't see any kitchen appliances in it except the counters and a sink.  I was on the left side of the kitchen, which was filled with water up to my waist, but not like a flood or something bad; the water was clear and clean and there were koi swimming around in it.  Like an intentional indoor koi pond, I guess, and for some reason I was standing in it.  You and your mom were on the right side of the kitchen, which was dry.  The room had a ton of windows--in fact the walls were mostly windows, with just narrow spaces of wall between the windows, and they were all French windows, again with white trim.  We must have been on a hilltop, because all you could see outside the windows were white rooftops and blue sky.  You looked back at me and smiled, then you looked towards the windows and waved your arm, beckoning a massive tidal wave (think Mickey Mouse in Fantasia) that washed over the rooftops and over our kitchen.  The wave shattered the panes of glass in one of our windows, with the broken glass falling all over the counter top.  I wasn't afraid, though, and it wasn't destructive.  It was more cleansing, and I was excited that you were calling the water to us.  You beckoned another tidal wave, and again one came up from the horizon, over the rooftops and onto our house.  This time, it shattered all the panes in all the windows, with all the shattered glass falling all over the countertops.  Your mom immediately set to work.  I thought she was going to sweep the broken glass off the counter tops, but instead she start pulling flowers out of the sink.  The sink looked empty to me, but she would pull one flower out at a time from like the garbage disposal, or from thin air, I don't know.  It was just the flowers, no stems, and they were one of two colors: a deep magenta or a brilliant hyacinth blue color.  She would pick up a flower from the sink in her left hand and with her right hand she would pick up pieces of broken glass and grind them with her fingers into granulated sugar.  Then she'd dip the flower into the granulated sugar and set it on the countertop.  Then she'd go back to the sink, pull out another flower, and repeat the process.  I watched her do this for what seemed like a long time, then a bird flew in through the window and landed in the water in front of me.  It looked like a blue crane, the ones that come out to Bull Creek every spring, but smaller, the size of a duck.  You smiled and said, "See?  Now the birds can come inside and find a place to rest."  We smiled at each other and then I was watching the bird sit in the water and preen itself, when a koi swam up to the surface in front of me, between me and the bird.  It had a bandage on its back, in front of its dorsal fin, and you pointed at it and said, "The bandage is healing its wounds.  Look," then you removed the bandage and underneath it looked like some scales were removed and the area was a little red and inflamed.  I asked you, "Isn't this the koi that was attacked the other day?"  You replied, "Yes!  And look at how much it's healed already!"  The koi was very still, kind of swimming in place, while you put a fresh bandage on its back, then it dived down deeper in the water and away from us.  I looked up and your mother had turned all the shattered glass into granulated sugar, and the counters were now clean and filled with sugar-coated magenta and hyacinth flowers.  The sun coming through the windows made the flowers glow and sparkle, and the room was filled with the light of it--not just glowing with the light, but also the sunlight was being refracted in a lot of the sugar crystals, so there were little rainbows all over the walls and ceiling and floors. I looked out the window and could see more birds flying towards us, and then I woke up.  I didn't want to wake up.  That dream was awesome.  I wish you could see it yourself instead of relying on my lame attempt at description.  I wanted to live there forever.