Category Archives: Read a Little Dream of Me

Last night I dreamt that I hosted a party for 1990’s sitcom stars. Jodie Sweetin, Candace Cameron (who married the dad from Family Matters), and a bunch of other people. In the dream, I had also been a child star, and they all knew me from our time being famous.

I hosted this party in the basement of my parent’s house in Iowa. A tornado was coming, and the cast was grumbling about being an a small farmhouse basement (hey – it’s finished!) and I reminded them that we were safe from the impending weather.

We were grilling steaks and burgers (in the basement!) and everyone was catching up. Someone said something witty, and someone else started quoting an ode. We all finished the last line with them, someone pointed out that it was actually a quote from a movie (not the literary ode it was expressed as) and I said, “Do the Goonies one now!”

Then my aunt Sharon came down the stairs with some appetizers she got at Trader Joe’s.

I don’t see there being any point in analyzing this dream. It’s obviously pop-culture ridden, and I wouldn’t have dreamed it if I were a Masai tribeswoman. I also was up late working on a midterm and drinking Librarian Decaf. (Which is like regular coffee to my caffeine-sensitive body.)

Last night I dreamed that I was doing laundry. I was doing load after load of laundry for superheros. Our fortress was being attached by detached heads of the Golden Girls, and my only defense was to spit at them as they floated around me menacingly. I’m usually quite a good spitter, but in my dream, I was getting drool on my chin. Yeah, so I was a bit confused when I woke up. Yes, I had been drooling in my sleep. All I can say is that Bea Arthur looks threatening when her head is angry.

I have but one day left at Abbott. Tonight we’re going out for drinks at Jesse Oaks, the most amazing biker/family/sportsbar ever. Hopefully I’ll have embarrassing photos of coworkers to show tomorrow. Against my better judgement, I’ve let the outsidcat out of the bag. Even my boss has my URL.

Like that stops me.

Just don’t tell my grandma, for fuck’s sake.

Last night I dreamed and dreamed and dreamed. I think it was because I finished Social Blunders, and then had a really good phone conversation directly before going to sleep.

There is so much information packed into the dream, I hardly remember it. I laid in bed this morning trying to remember as much as I could, because once you move, you lose 55%. It’s a fact.

In the big ending scene, my fourth sibling has died. Everyone, a personal cast of hundreds, show up for the funeral/party, held in a city park. Alena and I decided the way our brother would want to be buried was wrapped entirely in a giant flour tortilla. There was a picnic table with him resting on it, and a tray of garnishes and food balanced on his torso. The tortilla was wrapped tight enough that you could make out his head from the rest of his mummified self.

Next in the dream was a parade of friends. A lot of people came dressed festively, as Lena and I had put “party” as the main purpose of the funeral. Both she and I felt halfhearted about this, as we had a recently deceased loved one. More and more friends were drifting into the park, and the general crowd noise level increased.

Jen and Dan came directly from their wedding. She was weepy happy, he was grinning with his whole face (like Dan does), and they were wearing their wedding clothes. They waved, and I realized that they had done this to poignantly state that good things happen in life too.

Anton came, with a full beard, and locked eyes with me as he took one of four unwrapped slices of American cheese off the tray on our fourth sib. He very deliberately folded the cheese and chewed it like it was a communion wafer. I thought this was odd, but didn’t say anything, because Anton is known for his silent, purposeful actions that you either get, figure out later, or never get (and it bugs you because it must have been significant and you feel really obtuse).

I greet more guests, and make my way over to the table with the body. Lena is there, and we look at the tortilla covering the face of our other brother. The tortilla is opaque enough that we can’t see his face, but it’s softening in the sun, and we can make out a nose, where eyes would be, and a slightly opened mouth. I can tell we’re both having the same impulsive thought: maybe I should rip the tortilla open so he can breathe.

We both look up, and realize simultaneously that it would undoubtedly be unpleasant to do that. Alena’s eyes search for something else to look at, and she darts her hand out for a piece of American cheese. The cheese has warmed in the sun, and is floppy. She starts tearing strips and eating them. I start to feel like something significant was about to happen, but I didn’t quite have the foresight to realize what it was. I decided I wanted a piece of cheese too. I took it off the tray, and Lena and I both realized that there was once piece left.

“We have to feed it to him!” said Alena.

I thought she was going to rip the tortilla and stuff cheese down our poor dead brother’s gullet. I started to stop her, but what she did was rip up the cheese into several pieces, and layer them over where the mouth should be. Suddenly I felt the wave of rightness, that somehow the four pieces of American cheese, which the four of us ate, identified us as siblings, something you could never change or take back. Even though he was dead, he was still our brother.

And then, I woke up. I was happy.

(To those of you who don’t know me well, or maybe just don’t know my family, I have two other siblings. I have no idea who the dead guy is supposed to be.)

I’ve been having epic dreams, but I haven’t remembered them when I’ve woken up. I’m feeling triumphant that I have a thin grasp on last night’s, and I’m agonna share.

I was at the family farm. In fact, the twins and I were all living there, like it was back in high school. There was a storm, which there are; and we noticed some funnel clouds, which do occur; and we went into tornado mode. That is, we crowded near windows to look at the storm line. A tornado began to form. I cried out, bringing attention to it, since Anton and Alena had lost interest. We watches with that neat feeling of being near a terror of nature smugly separated from it by a well built house.

We watches the tornado drop down an begin to spin, starting southwest of Eldy’s, following the highway north. Just north of Eldy’s, the tornado stopped and spun in place. I thought that was weird, and then I noticed that the continued pressure from the tornado was drawing the earth up – not breaking up topsoil, but actually drawing the crust of the earth up. Suddenly we felt the house shake. The tornado was drawing that point upwards, like pinching a bedspread in the middle and lifting it up. Suddenly, our house was perched precariously on the side of a mountain. Our flat eastern Iowa farm was now the steep side of a mountain.

We began to evacuate – I went up to my room and tried to figure out what I needed to pack. I was methodically collecting everything when my dad came in and reminded me that we were in a house that was liable to start sliding at any moment. Haste was to be had. I puzzled over whether or not the collective worth of my Pez collection merited the time it would take to find all the boxes.

By this point, things had reached a fever pitch, and we had to abandon ship. There were folks from down below (or several miles away, previously) who came to rescue us. They were mostly from Wheatland, as Calamus was now part of the mountain.

We were evacuated to a sort of lodge, where other survivors/neighbors/relatives (in my area, you’d be all three) were gathered. The team that saved us had arranged a dozen sofas in lines in front of a TV, so we could watch movies and forget the danger we had just escaped from. All of the survivors and rescue team were familiar to me, but the only one I distinctly remember was Jeremy Cook. He invited me to sit next to him on one of the many sofas and, being exhausted from the events, I fell asleep. I awoke to find myself the ‘big’ spoon, curled around his back. My dad was silently motioning to me. He telepathically told me that the rescue team was actually a group of people who were going to take over, and to be on guard. Everyone else woke up, and the rescue team attacked.

There was a brief scuffle, and the refugees won. It happened so fast, all I had time to do was smile coyly at Jeremy Cook and think about how best I could hurt him.

My family collected our stuff and walked outside. Dana Soedt had just gotten a new truck, and my dad said amazedly, “That’s the new Silverado, isn’t it?” She offered us a ride, and we piled into the truck with our duffel bags and suitcases.

Then I woke up.

I wish I would quit dreaming about ex boyfriends.

It’s not that I find it disturbing. It’s that I find it perplexing.

Last night my dream was much more weird than the night before. In this dream, I had stopped at a convenience store on my way to work, where I ran into Holly. We chatted and she told eye-rolling stories about Signs Now. The owner of the store was a letcherous-looking old man who kept trying to get into the conversation Holly and I were having. Holly left, and I was perusing the doughnuts when the owner came over and told me that he was going to kill my family if I didn’t perform a certain favor. I didn’t see what choice I had, but then realized that this guy probably didn’t know where my family lived, and if I went to the police, my family could be protected. I ran out of the store and into the parking lot where there happened to be a police car. I ran up to it and told the officer. He smiled a charming smile and handed me four quarters. He said “Go stand over there in that line, and we’ll get right to you.”

I queued, and spent several hours in line. The line thinned out as people started giving up and going home. Finally, I was left with just one other person. I asked him what the quarters were for, and he said to buy (something; I don’t remember) and then he left. I wasn’t sure what to do, because if I left, the police wouldn’t help my family, but if I stayed, the fam could be hurt in the meantime.

I left. I went to the safest place I could think of, which was an apartment several of my friends had. (These were friends I had in college: Jeff Oleshki, Jeremy Koch, and John Bowser.) I figured I’d be safe where there were big angry male friends who could fend off a crazed convenience store owner. They seemed indifferent to my story, which made me angry, and their attempts to calm me by offering me a turn with the PlayStation didn’t help.

That, my friends, is where I woke up.

I had my first reoccurring dream of adulthood last night. That is to say, I’ve now had the dream more than once.

I was in Chicago, but not a neighborhood I knew, and a group of friends from AmeriCorps and I were doing something superheroish, and we were all captured by Ali Issa and a band of villains. He took us below ground to a large cavern with a dirt floor. We were scheming a way to escape, and I discovered a hidden passage that went straight up. We engaged the villains in witticisms to distract them, and I made a run for the passage along the wall. My hands were bound, but I somehow managed to wiggle myself upwards, like up a chimney but sideways, away from the villains. I knew they’d follow me, so there was both a sense of fleeing and a sense of dark-small space. The upwards slant turned downwards, and I rolled down it hitting a plywood flap that flipped up, depositing me on a bright orange seat of a ferris wheel. “Huh, this secret passage ends up at Chicago’s oldest ferris wheel,” I thought. “Now I know of TWO cities with secret passages.”

(To clarify, this was definitely not Navy Pier, and I don’t know of any other secret passages in other cities. That was only factual in the dream.)

I ran down the street, which looked a lot like Wrigleyville, and ducked into an apartment building because I saw villains tumble out of the ferris wheel. They spotted me, and I ran zig-zag until I found another building to hide in. I was able to get into the building because there was a party. I went into the stairwell, and down the stair, and noticed my friend Noah sitting on a chair in the middle of the landing, getting a haircut. The person giving the haircut had taken scissors and cut most of his hair close, leaving a mohawk. He had shaved close around the base of the mohawk but was having trouble getting the clippers to cut. I asked if I could try, and started buzzing close to Noah’s head. I was doing a good job, but stopped paying attention and buzzed off part of the top of the mohawk. I was trying to figure out how to fix it when I woke up.

I’ve definitely dreamt about being a superhero, the secret passage and the ferris wheel, and running from villains down the streets of Chicago, but never have I given a haircut in a dream.

I have Koufax’s Saturdays Alone stuck in my head, and it’s been that way since I woke up.

Last night I dreamt that I was living with Jason and Jake in a really really big room in a small town somewhere I’ve never been. I drove into the parking lot of our, uh, room and a guy jumped out of nowhere and tried to attack me. I tried running him over, using sweet Grand Turismo-style moves, but he disappeared. I went inside, and he followed me. Dude looked like Chris Cooper and I tried to run away, but I noticed he was trying to rob the place, so I turned around and tried to talk him out of it. I was trying to surreptitiously take a picture of him with my cameraphone, and realized I should call 911.

I’ve never called 911 before, and in my dream, I accidentally hit 944, and I have to redial. When I get an operator, she asks where I am, and that’s when I realize that I don’t know. I mean, I live there, but we must have just moved. I explain that I’m west of the Circuit City, east of the grocery store, and on the south side of the street.

Chris Cooper leaves before I can do anything, and I go find Jason and Jake, asleep on a bed. I’m mad at them for not helping/saving me, but the police come in a brown car and tell me they’ve apprehended a suspect.

That, my friends, is when I woke up.

Last night I dreamt that the new pope died.