wordsmith

Didn’t remember this one until someone at lunch mentioned that things were growing on her porch. She meant baby vegetables and things, but the word “grow” must’ve tweaked the right neuron, because I suddenly remembered dreaming about B.C. bud, which is said to be a very strong strain of marijuana (I think; I may have that wrong, but whether it’s strength or something else, it’s supposed to be very good stuff. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen it).

In the dream, I was much younger and was with a bunch of friends at a party where my dad lived, though it was a house I’d never lived in. Two stories with horizontal siding, big casement windows and I think it was round or octagonal. He didn’t know we were having a party but there were a lot of us, so I don’t know how he didn’t notice. I was trying to get people to be quiet so Dad, who was a holy terror when he was mad, wouldn’t come downstairs and throw us all out. Not much avail on that one, though Dad didn’t show up.

Then, some people led me up a narrow spiral stair to a tiny little room with a pointy roof that was made all of glass. It was dark outside and the stars looked very bright. Someone nudged me with an elbow and when I turned, handed me a tiny white thing from which smoke was coming. It was about the diameter of a coffee stirrer and hollow, with a tiny white disk at the end like the guard on a sword. The smoke was coming from the other side of the disk and a teensy red glow was at the very end of a small cylinder, about the size of a little matchstick.

I looked at the person who’d handed it to me, puzzled, and he smiled beatifically and said, “B.C. bud, man!” I looked at it curiously, took a very small drag off it (it was so tiny that, had it been real, I don’t think you could have gotten one even if you were the size of a hamster) and suddenly felt very calm and floaty and serene. I thought something inane like “Wow” and passed it on to the next person, and it evidently lasted through several more. Don’t remember any more than that, except for half-waking and thinking, “That’s pretty peculiar.”

The really fascinating thing about this is how something very ordinary can trigger a memory of something so ephemeral that you didn’t even remember. Wonder how that works? The other thing is that my dreams hardly ever include a sense of feeling something; there’s a lot more observation, usually, than anything else.

WEIRD dream, much stranger than most I have, and not at all entertaining: My mom was in the hospital (in Hazen, go figure) and docs had done surgery for kidney cancer (I have a vivid mental image of a tiny spot of white in a corner of her kidney X-ray). When I got home that night, Mom, all 67 pounds and 89 years of her, was curled up naked on a bare mattress on the floor, surrounded by blood. I asked her what the heck she was doing out of the hospital, and she said they’d sent her home.

I looked at her back and stomach, just in case, but didn’t see any incisions, or anything else that should be bleeding. So I went to find a phone to call the hospital, and found blood here and there on the walls and floor. The phone cord was broken (interestingly, instead of being cut or snapping, the inside wires had pulled out of the sheathing and the plastic thingie that goes into the wall had broken in half).

Somehow I got hold of them anyway, through some extremely cumbersome 911 system where I had to stop and chat with everyone about their families and vacations, and the horsepistol wanted to know where Mom was! They had sent her home for the day, but she was supposed to come back there at night. I asked them what the heck they were doing sending her home after major surgery at her age.

Next thing, I’m back where Mom is and asking her if they sent her home, explaining that she’s supposed to be there at night. She gets up on the mattress, starts to walk, fussing about getting there before it’s too late, and whirls around and falls over, while I’m hollering at her not to do that because she’ll fall down. Fortunately, I think, I woke up at this point. I don’t usually have gruesome dreams, but this one was distinctly unpleasant.

Here’s a weird one… not long ago, I woke myself up laughing at a dream, and last night, I woke myself up spitting. I do remember why: I was dreaming that I had eaten a bug, and it tasted like a cross between battery acid, gym socks and anchovies. Bizarre.

Boy, this is so unfair. I was having such a great dream that I woke myself up laughing in the middle of the night. Of course, I can’t remember any of it now, and if I’d woken up enough to write it down, I’d not have been able to go back to sleep. But it was funny. I giggled for quite a bit even after waking myself up with raucous laughter.

A lot of my dreams are about houses. Some are houses I’ve actually lived in; others are ones I’ve never seen (and that probably couldn’t exist). Some of the latter (and the former, for that matter) turn up repeatedly, often with new rooms and features. They all morph in dreams, of course, which is part of the fun. A lot of dreams, I spend just exploring new parts of the houses. I love these dreams!

Last night, I was moving into an enormous old Victorian house with tons of beautiful woodwork. The bottom floor layout was rather like an old “mansion” in White Oaks, near my hometown; I never saw the upper floors of the Victorian though, during the dream, I did wonder about them. All the ceilings were extremely high, like 12-15 feet. I remember wondering if there was any indoor plumbing anywhere in the place.

In the front of the house, on the left side, two huge rooms were devoted to a (family-owned?) packing business. Big rolls of aluminum foil, plastic wrap, butcher paper, and other wraps hung on stands around the room; boxes and tape and other things were in shelves and drawers and cubbies. Right in the center was a large chaise-like thing, very scruffy and dirty and piled with bits of magazines, books, food, and other junk, on which rested an old person (gender indeterminate), and a cat or two, of varying ages, was always in residence with him/her. This person, who I think might have been female judging from the way others talked, spent a lot of time talking to and cuddling the cats, and it seemed that the cat/s spent a lot of time half-smothered under her.

A great deal of the dream I spent trying to figure out how to arrange my stuff, none of which I’ve ever actually owned, and decide whether I needed shelves, drawers, cubbies, or what to make best use of the space. I remember asking the package people whether they thought they got the best space use from drawers, shelves, cabinets, or cubbies. I got a uselessly vague answer.

Anyway, I spent days in this place, admiring the architecture and woodwork, and getting up each morning determined to get stuff arranged in the living room so I could stop tripping over things. And each night, I went to bed (also in the living room, I think) with not very much, if anything, changed.

At one point, I was talking to one of the packing women who lived there and she said that the old creature on the chaise drew life from the cats — that every time one of them died, the old one perked up and felt better. One of the kittens had died underneath her the previous night, so she was feeling spry and chipper that morning. Ick.

Outside was a towering oak tree and beyond it a carriage house (a little too old to be a garage, but big enough to hold two or three cars). I debated frequently whether I should put a bunch of my stuff out there, and whether the packing people would notice if I moved a bunch of their stuff out there, since most of what was in the house had obviously sat in the house unused and unnoticed for two or three generations.

Before that, I’d been in a war or battle that I think involved blue and gray uniforms, though it didn’t seem Civil War-ish. I’d found some papers or a book or something that Mr. Pain-in-the-opolous, who was frothing about, trying to catch me and have me arrested for having them, had written, I think, though those copies didn’t seem to belong to him. I had a part in the war, but was far more worried about avoiding Mr. PITA and protecting the stuff I had than in whatever I was supposed to be doing. I was carrying a gun, though. 🙂

Initially, everyone was milling about on the battlefield, but eventually the guys on my side pulled back behind a long wall-like assembly of shrubs and branches. We divided into two groups and went to each end of the wall-y thing, and came out on either side to catch the other guys. But all the other guys were gone, and by the time I came around the corner, all *my* guys were gone, and I discovered that my ammunition was blanks, so I wandered up into the covered bleachers, still keeping my papers safe.

There, I ran into a bunch of people — including Tony Ortiz, for goodness’ sake! It turned out that following our freshman year in college, the Powers that Be had decided we should start over as an experiment. So all of these people I’d known and gone to school with for a year were now strangers, and we had to get acquainted, and somehow we knew we weren’t getting acquainted with the same people and in the same way, so that our freshman year would be very different from the original one. Don’t remember much else about it, except that quite a few of the people weren’t from my college years and that I recognized them even though I didn’t technically know who they were.

That morphed into the house dream, which was a lot more interesting and complex. I wish I could remember more about the fixtures and objects and architecture in the Victorian house. There was a lot of really neat and amazing stuff in that house and I spent a lot of time just looking in nooks and crannies and admiring things.

This was a dream from last week or so, but it was pretty entertaining. The boys and I were in a large room, waiting. Lots of people drifted in until, eventually, Christopher came in with a girl he introduced us to. It turns out to have been the rehearsal for Chris’s wedding, though none of us knew this girl existed or had any clue that he was interested in anyone. Her parents seemed nice, but of a completely different world from mine, and we sat in the back watching as the rehearsal proceeded. The whole thing had a really warm, fuzzy feel to it, despite the astonishment the other two boys and I had at the realization that Chris was getting married without any warning or notice to someone we’d never heard of. When I told Christopher about the dream, he was pretty astonished, too. 🙂

Great dream of the morning: I was walking out around Golden Valley, where there were lots of hills and rocky cliffs, and up to me walks a cheerful, blue-gray, but brown-eyed, Blue Heeler puppy about four months old. She (despite the masculine evidence on her underside) insisted on following me wherever I went, and displayed an amazing talent for climbing rocky cliffs, trees, and the sides of buildings. She followed me home, which required us to trek across cliffsides and past what appeared to be a state or national park, with a long lake in the background and bark-lined paths leading off toward the lake and a few backpack-clad, sturdy types hiking down them. The dog (who quickly named herself, but I can’t remember what) frolicked up and down the cliffs, her nails extending to grip the sandstone surfaces.

When we reached home, we went up a winding gravelly path with rocks and cliffs on both sides to reach the house, which looked like a desert-rat outpost: corrugated-tin roof over a gravel-and-dirt patio kind of thing, but no recollection of the house. Along the sides of the path nearest the house were rock walls about three feet high, with little bowls and pottery holders filled with dirt, rocks, pebbles, etc.

Pretty soon New Dog shows up with a container of some kind filled with beautiful black stone spheres–not polished, or as if manufactured, but as if they occurred that way naturally. I put some of them in one of the little bowls (like one I actually have, the footed bowl that has feet to hold it up, come to think of it) and felt very pleased at their beauty.

Blue (the existing part-blue-heeler dog) came out and met New Dog, and they went streaking down the path growling and jumping and bouncing around, happy dogs playing. Then I woke up.