Since I was a little girl, I've had several recurring dreams. Sure, we all have dreams about our teeth falling out and being somewhere in public and showing up naked, but aside from the common recurring dreams that everyone has, I have some unusual ones.
The first is about tornadoes. In the dream, the setting and specific circumstances might be different, but the common thread is that there are always multiple tornadoes - often 7, but not always - and I am rarely scared. Most of the time I'll feel a mild anxiety at worst, and then feel matter-of-fact about it. The other common thread is that I always end up either getting caught in one of the tornadoes, but it turns out to be really weak and even if it destroys the building I'm in, I'm able to hang onto something and stay put, OR, the tornado gets smaller as it gets closer to me, so that by the time it's in front of me, it's only about 3 feet tall.
The version that I dream most commonly is that my family and I are in our old house in Leander, which was on 4 acres of land that backed up to hundreds of acres of virgin land, and the entire back wall of the house was windows. In real life, we loved watching storms through those windows, so in the dream, as a family we're standing in the living room watching the storm outside. As it progresses, several tornadoes start touching down all around the house (like I said, it's usually 7 tornadoes, especially in this dream). Suddenly we realize that one of the windows is open, but when I go to close it, a little baby tornado, about 3 feet tall, hops in through the window and starts spinning around the living room. Dad hands me a broom and says, "Break it up with the broom, Emily." So I start hitting the tornado with the broom, waving the broom around inside it to disrupt the airflow, and it dissipates into nothing.
Showing posts with label family. Show all posts
Showing posts with label family. Show all posts
Friday, July 30, 2010
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.
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.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
It's raining oil! Hallelujah! (Backlog, pt. 4)
(from some time in May, 2010)
My family and I were all in this huge all-wood, homestead-style ranch house out in the desert of West Texas, where there was absolutely no vegetation whatsoever, just miles of dusty beige rock as far as the eye could see. We were inside the house for the first half of the dream, but then Dad and I went out to sit on rocking chairs on the porch, and we were just talking and staring at the old timey wooden oil derrick that was just a few yards in front of us.
Suddenly, oil burst out of the top of the derrick and started raining down onto the yard. Dad and I just looked at each other calmly and I said, "Well, this isn't much different than the oil rain we'll be getting from the Gulf pretty soon." He just nodded his head in agreement, and we watched the oil rain for a while longer.
After a while, Jay came out onto the porch and he and I stepped into the yard and stood in the oil rain, looking out at some of the other derricks farther off. Suddenly, way out on the horizon, there was a huge explosion of dirt and rock shooting into the air. It made a loud booming noise, so we thought that someone had set off some explosives. But then another one happened closer, and then another one even closer, and we realized that the earth was splitting in half, one half rising up into a sheer cliff wall and the other half sinking down. Every time a piece of the ground would split, it would cause the big booming dirt explosions that we were seeing. We realized that the split in the earth was coming directly towards the house, so, logically, Dad told us to all go inside the house.
Once inside the house, Dad told us all to huddle towards the side of the house with all the windows, nearest to the porch where we had been sitting. But I wanted to go to the other half of the house, because it was closer to the well, and there was some kind of escape tunnel on that side of the house. No windows, though. So there I was, on one side of the house by myself, looking at my entire family on the other side of the house. The ground was already starting to part and my side of the house was starting to sink, so I felt an urgency to make a decision: do I stay where I know there's water and an escape route, or do I join my family? A dirt explosion happened right outside the kitchen window, and I woke up.
My family and I were all in this huge all-wood, homestead-style ranch house out in the desert of West Texas, where there was absolutely no vegetation whatsoever, just miles of dusty beige rock as far as the eye could see. We were inside the house for the first half of the dream, but then Dad and I went out to sit on rocking chairs on the porch, and we were just talking and staring at the old timey wooden oil derrick that was just a few yards in front of us.
After a while, Jay came out onto the porch and he and I stepped into the yard and stood in the oil rain, looking out at some of the other derricks farther off. Suddenly, way out on the horizon, there was a huge explosion of dirt and rock shooting into the air. It made a loud booming noise, so we thought that someone had set off some explosives. But then another one happened closer, and then another one even closer, and we realized that the earth was splitting in half, one half rising up into a sheer cliff wall and the other half sinking down. Every time a piece of the ground would split, it would cause the big booming dirt explosions that we were seeing. We realized that the split in the earth was coming directly towards the house, so, logically, Dad told us to all go inside the house.
Once inside the house, Dad told us all to huddle towards the side of the house with all the windows, nearest to the porch where we had been sitting. But I wanted to go to the other half of the house, because it was closer to the well, and there was some kind of escape tunnel on that side of the house. No windows, though. So there I was, on one side of the house by myself, looking at my entire family on the other side of the house. The ground was already starting to part and my side of the house was starting to sink, so I felt an urgency to make a decision: do I stay where I know there's water and an escape route, or do I join my family? A dirt explosion happened right outside the kitchen window, and I woke up.
Science is wrong: the sun is just a gigantic orange. (Backlog, pt 2)
(from 9/2/08)
I was inside my house (although it wasn’t any house that I’ve ever lived in in real life) doing something unremarkable, perhaps reading a book, when my father came in.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him.
“You need to come outside with us. The world is ending soon and you should spend the final moments of your life with your family,” he replied, somewhat more placidly than the situation called for.
I followed him outside to the lawn, where the rest of my family was sitting. We were on the peak of a low, broad hill that looked out onto a wide sky. Hanging low in it was a too-big sun that had the charred appearance of a dying ember. Its outer layers had peeled away like the skin of an orange and coiled like a fiery helix from the north end of the sky to the south, lying parallel to and just above the horizon. The atmosphere was a terrible red, and I felt a stab of fear in the pit of my stomach as I surveyed the phenomenon and wondered how long it would take for the world to succumb to its inevitable fate. But then I relaxed and smiled as I thought, “Thank god! This means I won’t have to get Alzheimer’s like my grandparents!”
What. This is how you're *supposed* to behave at funerals. (Backlog, pt 1)
So... to populate this blog from the start rather than have it be dead and boring for an undetermined amount of time, we're going to post some old dreams here that we had documented elsewhere earlier in our lives. I'll start with this oldie-but-goodie.
(from June 19, 2006)
I was at the funeral of a guy whom I was really in love with (I think we might've been a couple, 'cos I was seriously in love with him), although it wasn't anyone from my real life. Pretty much everyone that I've seen, talked to or thought about in the past few days was at the funeral, including Mellowdrone and some of the people who were at the Austin and Dallas Mellowdrone shows. My coworkers were there, my sister and brothers, Amy, Val, Sabrina, Deidre, Bethany, Sara, Caitlin, Beth, Rafi, Leigh...so I'm serious when I say pretty much everyone I've interacted with in the past few days.
Anyway, we're in this funeral home that looks pretty much exactly like the one in Six Feet Under, and this guy whom I was in love with who died had apparently committed suicide, and had chosen Bright Eyes' "No Lies, Just Love" to play at his funeral. I was standing in the aisle in the back, watching everyone grieve and listening to this song, and I'm just sobbing, because I'm so sad and shocked and overwhelmed. Then suddenly, I became furious at the absurd emoness of the situation. I mean, what kind of asshole kills himself and then requests a Bright Eyes song to be played at his funeral, right? So this wave of blind hatred hits me, and I want to seriously hurt him. Of course I can't hurt him because he's dead, adding helpless frustration to the utter rage. Hot tears were coming out my eyes and burning my cheeks, and I was like, "If I don't do something right now, I'm going to claw my own face off." So suddenly I remember that I sell sex toys! Of course, hello! So I walk into the grieving room next to the funeral parlour, and of course my box of sex stuff is in there (I mean, why wouldn't it be?). I pull out this ginormous dildo, rush into the funeral parlour and up to the casket, and start trying to cram the dildo into this guy's dead mouth, screaming, "COCKSUCKER! YOU'RE A FUCKING COCKSUCKER! COCKSUCKER, I HATE YOU! SUCK A COCK YOU FUCKING COCKSUCKER!" It wasn't as easy as I had hoped, though, because his face was all cold and clammy and rigid, so I was kind of clawing at his chin with my hand, and his gross dead-guy makeup was getting under my nails and grossing me out, but I was so angry that I couldn't stop clawing at his chin with one hand and shoving the dildo into his lips with the other hand.
In the meantime, pretty much everyone at the funeral rushed up to me and was trying to stop me. Most people were grabbing my arms and waist, trying to pull me away from the casket, and someone was trying to pull the dildo out of my hand, but I looked over and a few people are just straight up laughing, namely: Jay, Bev, Beth, Rafi and Amy. There might've been more, but I don't remember. Seeing them laughing made me want to laugh, but then I was pissed off because I was losing my momentum, and I still really wanted to cram that dildo in his mouth. But then Jon (Mellowdrone's lead singer, for those of you who don't know) came up to me with a grave look on his face and began to chastise me: "Em, what are you doing? You're embarrassing Brian. Look! The man's blushing, Emily! Did your mother raise you to be like this?" I looked up and, sure enough, Brian (Mellowdrone's drummer, for those of you who don't know) was turned away from me, head down, face flushed, looking mortified.
Suddenly, I felt so guilty for making Brian feel bad that I was like, "Aw, Brian, no! It's ok! I wasn't really trying to cram a dildo down his throat! It's just a hankie, see?" And sure enough, my dildo was now a frilly hanky and everyone who had been trying to pull me away from the casket was magically back in their seats, except for Jon who was still standing in front of me, and Brian, who was now facing me to see whether I was holding a hankie or a dildo. (And by the way, I love the fact that we were even calling them "hankies" in my dream.) I sort of shook the hanky in the air so Brian could see it, and he cracked this huge, beautiful grin and said, "You should stick that up his nose." So I turned towards the coffin to cram the hankie up Dead Guy's nose when the thin little stick that was propping the coffin lid up snapped.
The crash of the coffin lid slamming down woke me up.
Moral of the story: If you ever date me, don't think about commiting suicide and having Bright Eyes played at your funeral, or you will get a dildo crammed in your mouth, or a hankie crammed up your nose, or both.
(from June 19, 2006)
I was at the funeral of a guy whom I was really in love with (I think we might've been a couple, 'cos I was seriously in love with him), although it wasn't anyone from my real life. Pretty much everyone that I've seen, talked to or thought about in the past few days was at the funeral, including Mellowdrone and some of the people who were at the Austin and Dallas Mellowdrone shows. My coworkers were there, my sister and brothers, Amy, Val, Sabrina, Deidre, Bethany, Sara, Caitlin, Beth, Rafi, Leigh...so I'm serious when I say pretty much everyone I've interacted with in the past few days.
Anyway, we're in this funeral home that looks pretty much exactly like the one in Six Feet Under, and this guy whom I was in love with who died had apparently committed suicide, and had chosen Bright Eyes' "No Lies, Just Love" to play at his funeral. I was standing in the aisle in the back, watching everyone grieve and listening to this song, and I'm just sobbing, because I'm so sad and shocked and overwhelmed. Then suddenly, I became furious at the absurd emoness of the situation. I mean, what kind of asshole kills himself and then requests a Bright Eyes song to be played at his funeral, right? So this wave of blind hatred hits me, and I want to seriously hurt him. Of course I can't hurt him because he's dead, adding helpless frustration to the utter rage. Hot tears were coming out my eyes and burning my cheeks, and I was like, "If I don't do something right now, I'm going to claw my own face off." So suddenly I remember that I sell sex toys! Of course, hello! So I walk into the grieving room next to the funeral parlour, and of course my box of sex stuff is in there (I mean, why wouldn't it be?). I pull out this ginormous dildo, rush into the funeral parlour and up to the casket, and start trying to cram the dildo into this guy's dead mouth, screaming, "COCKSUCKER! YOU'RE A FUCKING COCKSUCKER! COCKSUCKER, I HATE YOU! SUCK A COCK YOU FUCKING COCKSUCKER!" It wasn't as easy as I had hoped, though, because his face was all cold and clammy and rigid, so I was kind of clawing at his chin with my hand, and his gross dead-guy makeup was getting under my nails and grossing me out, but I was so angry that I couldn't stop clawing at his chin with one hand and shoving the dildo into his lips with the other hand.
In the meantime, pretty much everyone at the funeral rushed up to me and was trying to stop me. Most people were grabbing my arms and waist, trying to pull me away from the casket, and someone was trying to pull the dildo out of my hand, but I looked over and a few people are just straight up laughing, namely: Jay, Bev, Beth, Rafi and Amy. There might've been more, but I don't remember. Seeing them laughing made me want to laugh, but then I was pissed off because I was losing my momentum, and I still really wanted to cram that dildo in his mouth. But then Jon (Mellowdrone's lead singer, for those of you who don't know) came up to me with a grave look on his face and began to chastise me: "Em, what are you doing? You're embarrassing Brian. Look! The man's blushing, Emily! Did your mother raise you to be like this?" I looked up and, sure enough, Brian (Mellowdrone's drummer, for those of you who don't know) was turned away from me, head down, face flushed, looking mortified.
Suddenly, I felt so guilty for making Brian feel bad that I was like, "Aw, Brian, no! It's ok! I wasn't really trying to cram a dildo down his throat! It's just a hankie, see?" And sure enough, my dildo was now a frilly hanky and everyone who had been trying to pull me away from the casket was magically back in their seats, except for Jon who was still standing in front of me, and Brian, who was now facing me to see whether I was holding a hankie or a dildo. (And by the way, I love the fact that we were even calling them "hankies" in my dream.) I sort of shook the hanky in the air so Brian could see it, and he cracked this huge, beautiful grin and said, "You should stick that up his nose." So I turned towards the coffin to cram the hankie up Dead Guy's nose when the thin little stick that was propping the coffin lid up snapped.
The crash of the coffin lid slamming down woke me up.
Moral of the story: If you ever date me, don't think about commiting suicide and having Bright Eyes played at your funeral, or you will get a dildo crammed in your mouth, or a hankie crammed up your nose, or both.
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