More snippets

I should write about this before I forget. I had a most fantastically strange dream the day before yesterday. The strangeness isn't unusual, if you've know me for any amount of time then you'll know that my dreams are all quite bizarre. So, without going into the entire dream I'll just tell you all how it ended and the particular bit that my roommate found hilarious in my recounting of it.

"So, her mom walked up the stairs and onto the roof. And we just knew inherently that she wanted us to empty all the food out of our tupperware onto the ground below to make a trampoline for us to jump down onto. "

It's not the strangest dream I've had but it's up there. That bit sounds crazier without the context of the rest of the dream but it just gets too long. But be rest assured that the necessity of a trampoline was real. In case you're curious, the food in the tupperware was linguine and green beans . . . and lots of it too.

I'm sick therefore you failed your exam, not really though . . .

Being sick is the worst. I don't know what I had but I was not a happy camper yesterday. It started in the wee morning hours and lasted all day . . . and a little today too. Completely tense muscles, body temperature alternating between freezing and feverish, and all the while a pounding headache, it made for a very miserable ol' me. But the worst of it was that even when I was passed out from exhaustion I was sick in my dream too! In my dream I was an assassin and I was on a mission with my assassin buddies but because I was sick and couldn't keep up they kept on dragging me here and there and then sticking me in prickly bushes when I needed to be hidden. So unfortunate . . . and so painful. I don't know how we were assassins because really we didn't seem to have a target and were just running around a giant wilderness where other people seemed to be having a pleasant barbecue but that's dreaming for ya.

Now that I'm feeling better though, it's back to the daily grind. I have to catch up on all the work I missed while I slept yesterday. This entails grading papers . . . massive amounts of papers. Grading makes me feel like an over educated elitist . . . or maybe the kids in the class really are just painfully simple. If you're in the class I apologize, I'm sure if you have the sense to find this blog and realize who I am you're not in the portion of the class that did abysmally on the exam. But what can I say when about a third of the class didn't even answer the essay question that was posed and the other third couldn't support their argument with a shred of evidence from lecture . . . so sad, but perhaps my expectations are just too high. Or maybe being sick is making me crotchety and hence a crotchety grader.

Have you been dreaming lately?

Just two notes from my dreams of late . . .

1. I'm stuck in an octagonal toaster and can't get out
2. The cheeky nerve of bananas only being sold in bunches but when I yank them apart because I want all my bananas to be individual fruit they reattach themselves!

Dreams are weird . . .

Dreams are weird

Highlights from my dream last night:

1. Being dive-bombed by a hooded, caped chipmunk
2. A life-threatening lack of dental floss

Need I say more?

It's all mini - mini pizzas, mini celebrities

Alright, Irfan this time you actually did have a starring role in my dream - how happy are you? *grin*

Here's what happened, Irfan and I had to go get lunch for ourselves and 8 friends (apparently they weren't important enough to be in the dream although the number of people was very important). So, we drove around debating which grocery store we should go to and finally we decide on one with a super tiny parking lot (only room for 4 cars!). Once inside we split up because I was in charge of beverages and Irfan was in charge of food. For whatever reason I decide that we don't really need beverages and decide that I should help Irfan pick out food. I find Irfan in the deli section, except it wasn't so much a deli as it was 6 giant stainless steel industrial ovens in a cluster. Irfan is, as usual, super excited about his selection of food and insists that I take a look inside the box he's prepared while he gets something out of the oven. I look in the box and find that Irfan's selected 8 tiny slices of pizza, each could fit in the palm of my hand, and 2 tiny burritos, which for some reason aren't folded up but instead stuffed into Dixie cups. Obviously at this point my eyebrows are raised and I'm giving Irfan a cynical look, "That's it? This is what you chose to feed 10 ravenously hungry people?!" Meanwhile, Irfan is excitedly heating his own mini pizza slice in the oven but insists on watching it with the oven door open, which incidentally, he happens to be laying on as though it's a piece of furniture. At this point I say, "Irfan, careful you don't burn your eyebrows off," to which Irfan replies, "Don't worry, I won't do that again." In reality I don't remember Irfan having ever burned off his eyebrows so I don't know what that's about. Irfan, that hasn't happened to you, has it?

Anyway, at this point, as can only happen in dreams, we're instantaneously transported back to wherever it is that we came from. I still can't see the other people that we're hanging out with but we're sitting at a rectangular table that in my mind is most definitely a poker table. It actually looks sort of like a foosball table, because the center is sunken in and the sides have a considerable lip. The surface is green like a games table and everyone's cards are propped up against the lip of the table facing outwards so that you can see everyone's cards but your own, bizarre no? Anyway, the strangest part was that as part of the game there was a miniature Owen Wilson frantically running around the table moving everybody's cards! Not a robotic miniature but a real live Owen Wilson who was only 3 inches tall! And that's when I woke up.

How weird is that? I don't even know where to start . . . except to say that if I could, I really would like to have a miniature Owen Wilson. And I wish I could remember what this bizarre version of poker was because the whole idea of playing an entire game without seeing your own cards seemed crazy and yet wildly exciting.

The vivid unreality

There was a time when I had extremely vivid dreams on a regular basis. And when I say vivid I mean sometimes I wasn't sure if I had merely dreamt things or if they had actually happened . . . which is frankly unnerving. It's been a while since I've had such a vivid dream but last night's was a doozy. Not that it was elaborate, just so realistic that I was really confused when I woke up this morning. In the dream I was with Sarah and Carolyn and we were riding in a steam engine locomotive with a chef (in full chef garb) and some guy dressed up as Abraham Lincoln (minus the beard). Now, this wasn't just any ol' locomotive, we were in a train carriage made out of a hot-air-balloon basket. And even though everyone else was nicely dressed I was wearing my pajamas . . . but not the pajamas that I was actually wearing as I slept, if that makes sense. Anyway, the locomotive was traveling across plains of tall amber colored grass and it looked so beautiful, then we suddenly crossed a large river and the water was glittering in the sunlight and I was breathless from the perfection of it all. At which point we plunged, locomotive and all, into a futuristic tourist village enclosed in a giant glass arcade with too cute to be real antique storefronts. That's when I woke up . . . although I swear I saw a giant Christmas tree out of the corner of my eye before I woke up, and it wasn't anywhere near Christmas time.

Sometimes I wish we had more control over what we dreamed about . . . be with people that we miss or see places that we have yet to go to or return to places we've enjoyed. But the completely random nature of dreams is what makes them so amusing in the first place, so perhaps having such control over them would render them pointless, just another daydream. Either way, when dreams can be so sweet it's hard not to wish that we could stay in that unreality rather than to open our eyes to the reality that is our lives.