fox

I've noted before that my most common type of dream is mishaps while traveling: I can't get to the platform for the train I need because the station has turned into an Escher drawing, or the car is hovering just a bit off the road so the wheels don't have any purchase and I can't go anywhere, or the bus changes its destination after everyone except me decides they like the other route better, or whatever.

This morning I had the strangest feeling that I couldn't remember how I'd got to work. Did Himself drive me to the metro? He used to do that sometimes if the timing was going to be weird or the weather was bad or I had something inconvenient to carry or I'd turned my ankle or something like that - but none of those things were the case today. Still, I didn't have any memory of taking the electric scooter up to the metro station or of locking it up . . .

. . . and that's when my brain said no, of course you don't have any memory of locking up the scooter, because you're still asleep in bed, ya goofball.

Last night I dreamed I went back to my home town—it was weirdly shrouded in mist, but it came into view just fine at the top of the hill around the corner from my parents' house, the one that always wigged people out the first time they turned right and there it was but never really bothered me to drive down because I grew up going that way almost every day. Anyway then I started passing by buildings that should have been familiar, but they weren't there; the whole place was unrecognizable; I barely knew it at all.

And then I woke up and thought: Well, that was overt.

The only part of the dream I remember was the very end, where I was in a car on the passenger side and the driver slammed on the brakes so hard that despite the fact that I was (of course) wearing my seat belt, I was flung forward toward the dashboard. Which I hit, and cried out, and woke up and saw Himself staring at me because from his perspective I'd been sound asleep and then suddenly yelped and done a full-body flinch for, as far as he could tell, no reason at all.

i was so ... awake

My most common dream trope is mishaps while traveling - I take the wrong train (or, more likely, I take the right train but it goes the wrong way), or I miss an exit on the freeway and drive 200 miles in the wrong direction (that was a good one because I clearly remember in the dream thinking "You don't have to turn around and drive all the way back to the exit you should have taken; you can just wake up now"), or I'm in an airport where my gate seems not actually to exist, or a bridge ends before it should and I have to jump the car over the gap as if I were in a video game. Some time about five years ago I think it was Lin-Manuel Miranda who said something on Twitter about his travel dreams being a reflex of his anxiety, and it was the bell-ringingest moment I've ever had, and it hasn't made the travel-mishap dreams stop?, but it's made them make a lot more sense to me, or it's made more sense that I have them, if you see what I mean.

Last night I dreamed that I was walking across a street in a storm, and the wind gusted so hard that it lifted me off my feet and bobbed me around in the air as if I'd been queuing to interview to be the Bankses' nanny. I woke up before I blew away (or before I landed with a thud), thank goodness, but for the first time ever waking up from a travel-mishap dream, I could feel that my heart had hammered in my chest - what I learned was how anxiety feels, back when my dad was sick and that would happen as I was otherwise falling asleep - which must have been the moment my dream-feet left the dream-crosswalk.

I lay there gasping for a couple of minutes and then pulled the weighted blanket up over me so even my subconscious would feel confident I wasn't going to be blown away again. (And when I fell back asleep, I dreamed I was in Edinburgh and wandering the streets with no success finding that one shop I've always wanted to go back to. NB I don't have a particular memory of a shop in Edinburgh that I've always wanted to go back to . . .)

i was so ... anxious

I had two dreams late Saturday night / early Sunday morning. The first was a bog-standard anxiety dream where I was driving somewhere I should have known how to get to but the roads all went different unexpected directions and I couldn’t properly control the car—like, not pleasant, but I get lost-or-thwarted-in-transportation dreams all the time and it’s concert week coming up so it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to analyze that one.

In the second dream, we were staying in a seaside resort of some kind (where, though it didn’t seem super relevant, some of the other guests were working to pay their way rather than paying money, like in housekeeping and custodial positions) with several kitchen areas, and in every kitchen there were boxes and boxes of Keurig pods; but no matter what it said on the outside of the box, in the whole place there was no regular coffee. It was incredibly stressful.

I've been having a lot of vivid dreams lately and hardly remembering any of them, but last night - more like this morning, because I woke up around 1am and lay there for a long while before falling back asleep, and this dream happened after that - I dreamed that we were adopting the baby daughter of someone I knew in high school, whom I'm friends with on Facebook and whose real-life young daughter is only a month or so younger than the prince.

In the dream, she'd posted to ask whether anyone could take her little girl, because she somehow found herself unable to care for her (she also has a boy who's a little older, and as far as I know her marriage to their dad is intact, so idk), and I/we said we could do this, and we got the house ready and got prepared and had taken her - the birth mom posted something about being stunned by having given her baby away - and were halfway through scheduling some sort of medical thing when the birth mom reminded me this was 28 days at a time, a month-to-month adoption arrangement of some sort, where of course at any given time she could give us sufficient notice and then at the beginning of the next month take her girl back and that would be that.

There wasn't a lot more to it before I woke up. The news is full of Afghan refugees and COVID orphans and that's probably what's seeding my subconscious with the idea of looking after other people's children. I have no idea what put this particular version of this particular kid in there, but my brain has always been an odd sort of place.

i was so ... okay
Crossposts: https://darthfox.livejournal.com/1470678.html

Lately I've been having a lot of dreams about moving - not of my current family moving out of our current house, but dreams where what's happening is I'm packing to move to or from one or another house or apartment. Happened two or three times in the past week, which I thought was interesting, especially because my usual recurring dream theme is about traveling somewhere and getting lost or thwarted by the roads or transit or what have you.

Then Saturday night I dreamed at least two people I know in real life (one who is married with a kid, though in the dream she was apparently divorced with no kid; the other who is single) were unexpectedly pregnant and scared that their families would kick them out (NB I don't know either of these individuals' families at all, but I have no reason to suspect they'd be turned out in the cold if they became pregnant and needed to go home to their parents for that reason), and I was talking to Himself about allowing either or both of them to stay with us for a while.

I didn't dream at all last night, because I was sleeping the sleep of the sedated.

i was so ... awake
Crossposts: https://darthfox.livejournal.com/1463473.html

The prince came down from his nap this afternoon and said he had felt like he was flying. When he got out of his bed he tried to stop. So he had a flying/floating dream, neat, it didn’t scare him, and I taught him the word “landing” for “stop flying.”

Tonight when I put him to bed I sat for a few minutes reading as usual and then got up to tuck him back in and say good night, and he leaned over for his extra kiss and said “Mommy? When am I going to feel like I’m flying?”

❤️❤️❤️

i was so ... awake
Crossposts: https://darthfox.livejournal.com/1462905.html

Sunday night into Monday morning, the prince came in to our room at about 3:30 to ask his dad to tuck him back in - I cannot wait for that child to work out how to get under his own damn covers, I tell you what - and we both had trouble getting back to sleep after that. In my fitful dozing I dreamed we were out to dinner at a restaurant. It was awful, one of those dreams where when you eventually wake up you have to take a couple of minutes to review and make sure you didn't actually do the thing you dreamed about. Ugh. (I concluded that it was a sign that I'm not ready to even try going back to the cathedral even to sing in an open space with at least ten feet between me and any other person. Anxiety dreams have messages, yo.)

Last night I dreamed we went to the zoo in the evening. Somehow in the dream there were a couple of parking spaces right at the zoo entrance, and we arrived just as the time restrictions on them ended, so we were able to park in this improbably convenient spot, how nice for us - and a family we entirely didn't know, who were getting ready to go in to the zoo, also congratulated us on our good luck and then put some of their stuff in the trunk of our car. And I said excuse me, what are you doing, please don't, and they said oh, we'll come right back and get it before you go, and we argued about that for a bit, and they took their things out of the trunk but then a couple of the older members of the family put their jackets on the passenger seat, and we said look, you can't leave your stuff in our car, what's this all about. And they said "can't you do us a favor?" And we said "who the hell are you?" - and that made me uncomfortable in the dream and waking up, as I'm not thrilled with the sentiment; I am, of course, willing to do things to benefit strangers, even at a cost or inconvenience to myself. That doesn't normally involve taking charge of other people's belongings for an undetermined period of time - which, by the end of the dream, was what I ended up explaining to these random people, that because I didn't know them we'd have no way to find one another and get them their stuff back before one or the other of us needed to leave. I remember discussing with my actual companions how this family of randoms must not have been prepared for how big the zoo was going to be, like maybe they were expecting one of those small zoos that can fit inside a city block so they assumed it would be easy to find us and get their jackets out of our car but in fact it's a big place and if they left stuff in our car and we all went in we might easily never see them again.

Not sure what that was all about.

i was so ... awake
Crossposts: https://darthfox.livejournal.com/1462627.html

I dreamed I saw a picture from Ivanka's wedding, in which she was standing at the back of the venue before the ceremony, waiting for her father to come walk her down the aisle, watching him approach in that goofily rapturous way she always seems to look at him (and, to be fair, brides often do look at their dads), as he approached - eating a piece of wedding cake out of his bare hand.

When I woke up, two things were obvious: (1) the completely gross metaphor about that man's relationship with what is clearly his favorite child and (2) the glaring contrast with a dream I had about Joe Biden once, which I can't find where I wrote it down (not here, not Facebook), but I still remember it, so here it is:

I once had a dream in which someone told me that when he's hosting a reception or similar, Joe Biden always goes through the buffet line first so that he can take the smallest piece or the thing that's broken or a little burnt or whatever and make sure what's available to his guests is as perfect as it can be - and when I woke up from that dream (several years ago, maybe before the last election or maybe between the election and the inauguration, ugh) I remember thinking that seemed to ring fairly plausible with most of what I'd heard about the guy, I'd believe it.

i was so ... awake
Crossposts: https://darthfox.livejournal.com/1461422.html

My therapist agrees that the recent (and two for two) attempted-sexual-assault theme in my dreams represents The Virus itself and how one is afraid of it as an assaultive force. She also, more interestingly (at least I think so), wondered if my anxiety dreams have had a travel theme only since my dad died or whether I had that sort of dream before. I'll have to look in the ol' "dream theater" tag to see if I can tell.

i was so ... anxious
Crossposts: https://darthfox.livejournal.com/1458386.html

( CW: Sexual assault )

The can't-find-my-gate stuff is a normal anxiety dream for me - I realized some months ago based on something Lin-Manuel Miranda, of all people, said on Twitter that I have travel-related anxiety dreams a lot, where I get lost or the train I'm on doesn't go where it's always gone or I'm driving and the road falls out from under me or whatever - and the child-care stuff (even given it's other people's children) is pretty transparent right now also. But I don't know where the recurring personal-violation stuff is coming from. Maybe a question for the therapist.

i was so ... anxious
Crossposts: https://darthfox.livejournal.com/1458144.html

This morning I got up at about 4:30 to use the bathroom, and when I went back to bed I had the following terrible dream.

( CW: Corona, sexual assault )

then I woke up with a splitting headache and as is so often the case with the worst dreams, it took a minute before I worked out that none of this had happened. I told Himself about the dream, and he was appropriately sympathetic, and later on when we were downstairs I told the prince I'd woken up with a headache and he said "Oh I'm sorry Mommy! I can give you a hug and kiss, that will help!" which is totally true, and by now (couple of hours vertical, half an episode of Buffy - so about 22 minutes - on the elliptical, one cup of coffee) the headache is mostly gone. But, you know: I can't live with this kind of anxiety the whole time we're on plague watch. If this goes on longer than the initial couple-few weeks we're looking at right now - and it will - the tension is going to have to ease up or that's going to be more dangerous to me than anything else. :-/

In other local and nonlocal news:

( Mom )

( Friends )

( Products )

( Dream non-theater )

I thought I had another thought, but I can't remember it now. Maybe it was to complain about work. Meh. Fill in your work complaints here. I'm sure we're all frustrated with our jobs in one way or another.

♥

i was so ... okay
Crossposts: https://darthfox.livejournal.com/1442896.html

The prince woke up at 4:30 this morning, which is (a) thankfully no longer normal and (b) the worst possible time, because it's too early to be up for the day but too late to get any good sleep after getting him back down again. So that was fun; I spent 20 minutes nursing him and putting him back to bed and then I went back to bed myself - at which point I had an awful, awful dream.

( My children were grown. )

I've been up for close to four hours now and I still feel a little queasy about it. The whole morning at home and the whole ride in on the train, I can't stop thinking about it and it's also reminding me of other unsettling (at least) dreams I've had. Like the one where my mother walked out into traffic. Or the one with the perfume sample zombie clones. Or the one where a friend was killed in a bar fight. ... It's going to be a strange kind of day.

*I'm aware of the irony of a horrifying alternate universe being one where someone doesn't have a beard. That's like the only vaguely amusing thing about this.

i was so ... anxious
Crossposts: http://darthfox.livejournal.com/1437270.html

Sometimes dreams are so obvious a seven-year-old child could interpret them. About 2am last night I dreamed that I opened a window when it was 40 degrees (F) outside and then went to go pee for the second time in about five minutes.

An instant later I woke up and knew, with absolute certainty, that my central nervous system was telling me the following things:

You must get out of bed and go pee right now.
When you return, maybe don't get under all the covers.

i was so ... awake
Crossposts: http://darthfox.livejournal.com/1426779.html

Last night I dreamed I was visiting with my dad, but it was a dad who had somehow been cloned from healthy parts of the original dad, because we were all totally blase about the fact that he had died before but wasn't it great that because of science we could have him back in our lives. What science hadn't covered, and what we were talking about in the dream, was what was going to happen when he died again (because unlike in most cloning stories I think I'm familiar with, this was not a whole-different-person clone; it was a copy of the original right down to the memories and experiences—like the copy-zapper thing in The Prestige, as I remember it?—if not also the terminal illness). I don't remember how that worked out - maybe we were going to be able to sort of add him to his existing grave when the time came? - but we were also talking about the eventual necessity of moving his grave, once my mom was also gone, to somewhere closer to where my brother or I live rather than back in the home town. In the dream this idea, that you would casually disinter someone and redeposit them in a more conveniently located cemetery, was the most obvious and natural thing in the world.

i was so ... awake
Crossposts: http://darthfox.livejournal.com/1426457.html

Last night I dreamed I was in the hospital. I don't know for what, but it mustn't have been terribly debilitating, because after they came around to check on me one night I got up out of bed, got dressed, cut off my hospital bracelet, and left to go to (a) a brunch thing the next morning and (b) work. There was some other stuff about where to park, getting towed, and taking the bus and the subway to get places and get back, but the next thing I remember in any kind of detail is that someone from like hospital security came and found me at my job and, after verifying who I was, said I wasn't supposed to be there and kind of dragged me out and back to the hospital and back to bed.

In a whole separate dream, I dreamed that at work we got a memo rating all of our projects on a scale of 1 (low) to 7 (high), and what we were most concerned about was the two projects in which our efforts had 1 ratings (one each for the writing/editorial and graphics subteams, I think), because the rubric specifically said something like "Continued results at this level will endanger your contract." The fact that we had many, many more projects up in the 5 area and a non-zero number up at 6 and 7 didn't seem to matter to us because we were all hung up on the job-threatening 1 ratings.

I don't remember which order those came in, and I'm not sure how to interpret them; the first one was probably to do with how I keep waking up feeling achy and exhausted and knowing there's no point in taking a sick day, because I'm not sick and staying away from work won't make me feel any better (and might make me feel worse because my work wouldn't be getting done). Or they could both just be the baby messing with my brain. Hrm.

i was so ... awake
Crossposts: http://darthfox.livejournal.com/1426277.html

I dreamed I was in Some Primarily Muslim City with a tour group. (It was never obvious in the context of the dream what city this was - not that I've ever been to such a place in real life, so I wouldn't recognize it waking anyway.) I've been awake long enough that the details are a little fuzzy, but at one point something about my training in linguistics was really interesting to the tour guide; at another point, I'd been separated from the group and had to find my way to Pier 6, which was somehow miles away from where I was (at something like Pier 3, because this part of the city was apparently built in what remained of a really giant amphitheater or stadium and the neighborhoods were named after the points around the circle? or something?). I got lost a couple of times and a man (a policeman? a sidewalk cart vendor? something?) tipped a little kid to show me the way to where I was going. Finally I met up with

sanj and another couple of people from the group, who were pleased to see I hadn't gone completely missing. As we were crossing the street to get to our next destination, we could see the tops of the buildings in the old part of the city - lots of minarets and mosques, and we wished we could go see them, but I at least was only wearing a knee-length skirt, so even granting that I'd have covered my head, I couldn't go into the mosques with bare legs. (NB I don't have any idea if this is true. I know head-covering is a given, but I have no idea about the relative standards of modesty expected -a- in different kinds of mosques and -b- of non-Muslim visitors. But in the dream it was totally obvious to me that I wasn't dressed appropriately.)

i was so ... awake
Crossposts: http://darthfox.livejournal.com/1410619.html

Last night, or probably more accurately this morning, I was dreaming that a couple I know from a curling club in another state - people I like very much but don't really know very well at all - were renewing their wedding vows, and had asked me to officiate at the ceremony. Somehow in the course of planning I learned that this would in fact be their third wedding to each other, rather than just their second; they'd originally married when they were eighteen or nineteen, and it hadn't worked out, but a few years later they'd got back together for good. (I have no reason to have the slightest suspicion that this is the case in real life.) And then I spent a lot of time trying to find the right quote about a Shakespearean couple with the same kind of history. I couldn't find the passage I was looking for in The Merchant of Venice, because the couple I was thinking of was Beatrice and Benedick, of whom this is also not true.

Then I woke up when the alarm had been going for two full minutes and I hadn't even heard it, so Himself, whom I adore, had to shake me awake because otherwise I might never have moved.

My computer continued to freak out, and this morning it wouldn't even reboot. So when I got to work I made an appointment at the Genius bar, and the Genius said his diagnostics showed that there are some burgeoning faults with my hard drive, and also I don't have enough RAM for human purposes anyway. My choices are (1) do a full backup and then reformat the hard drive [free]; (2) install a brand-new hard drive [$70-100]; (3) buy a brand-new computer [probably the sky's the limit]. This ascending order also pertains to the longevity of each solution. So I brought the thing home and it's working okay right now and I'm backing the hell up out of it. (Or however we're dividing "back up". I don't know.)

I dreamed that I was tired, and was going to curl up on a couch at the place away from my home where a bunch of us were gathering - I'm not sure why; there was some sort of performance event of some kind, and I was singing something in Russian?; the details are fuzzy - and have a sleep. But first I had to go around and make sure the lights weren't too bright, but the place wasn't pitch black in case anyone (kids especially) needed to move around while it was dark, and I had to make sure enough doors were closed to baffle the sound from some not-as-tired partying (Russian, also) types in another area of the ... house? complex? place, and anyway to make a long dream short by the time I got back to where the comfy couch was, someone else had sacked out on it. So I went to where I knew there was another couch, smaller but also comfy, and it was also occupied. Somehow I knew that somehow other people had been bedding down on all the sofas while I was busy making sure the place was comfortable and secure enough for us all to get some shut-eye, even though they knew I was busy doing this and that was why I wasn't already in possession of a sofa. So then I spent a lot of time exhausted and prowling around trying to find a place to sleep, and by the time I found one, my alarm went off.

That's right: the dreaded dream in which you get no sleep. My least favorite kind. I woke up feeling exhausted and very cranky, speculated at Himself that I'm not sleeping well (apparently) because of job-related stress, and reset my alarm and stayed in bed for another hour instead of going and getting on the elliptical. So today I am in a mildly foul mood.

i was so ... awake
Crossposts: http://darthfox.livejournal.com/1387977.html

I dreamed that the Gentleman Caller and I were getting married, and as the wedding day approached, we were still getting responses from people we'd invited (long after the time when, in real life, we'd have had to have a firm head count if the thing was going to be catered). One such response came from my grandfather (my father's father), who sent regrets and included a note in which he wrote that he'd thought long and hard but decided he really couldn't make the trip, as he'd explained on the phone the night before with cousin R (my mother's cousin's wife); but he'd send an even bigger check as a present because he was so sorry he couldn't attend. I remember thinking I didn't care about money, I wanted him there; and then I remember wondering why on earth he'd been talking about this with a cousin waaay on the other side of the family; and then I remember remembering (still in the dream, mind you) that my grandfather died in 1995.

Moving day approaches, and my subconscious is evidently anxious about that. Also evidently finding other ways to think about my dad. Hmm.

i was so ... okay
Crossposts: http://darthfox.livejournal.com/1380390.html

Previous dreams with my dad in them, over the past couple of months, have mostly been on the pleasant or at least comforting side - the one I remember the clearest was, I came down to the living room in my childhood home and he was in his chair watching TV, just like always. He didn't see or hear me, and my mother didn't see or hear him and to her the television wasn't turned on, in other words, I was the only one who saw him - but I saw him as he was often happiest, so hey.

Last night I dreamed he came into the kitchen and sighed theatrically and started cleaning up after my breakfast, which I was still in the middle of - throwing away the coffee filter, that kind of thing. And when I went over to the counter for some reason, where he was fussing with something, I bumped into him - so I could feel him, he was really there, but when I hugged him he didn't hug me back. Then it shifted to another dream the precise details of which I've already mostly forgotten, but I was talking to someone and Dad was there and maybe he wanted to talk to me?, but I wanted to hug him first, and he pushed me away.

Going back to the house this coming weekend for the first time since the memorial service, so between that and Other Things I'm dealing with but not talking about yet it's not a huge shocker that the anxiety has ramped back up. But I don't like it.

i was so ... okay
Crossposts: http://darthfox.livejournal.com/1365578.html

In my living room, talking to

datlowen about something he'd come over to pick up, or something. He was on his way out when the land line rang. Who could be calling me on this line, we both wondered, since I never give anyone that number. (In real life I don't even have a phone plugged in.) It was Gentleman Caller, and I waved so-long to N as I said hi, he let himself out, and GC said "Listen, I've been thinking - I'll see you on Saturday, but. Yeah. So, yeah."

My legs went out from under me, I couldn't draw a breath to call N back, and I woke up.

Dreams suck. :-(

i was so ... awake
Crossposts: http://darthfox.livejournal.com/1337008.html

Sure enough, vivid dreams in the last hour or so of sleep. I was in a fancy suite in a hotel that had the potential to be even fancier; there was some talk about how my friend, her husband, her children, and her parents were going to get home from some event, and eventually it turned out the best thing was for the friend (and the husband?) and the kids to stay in the hotel with me, which probably meant activating the extra room; it was very nice, except for the nest of mysterious bugs up in the eaves, which someone from the hotel said she'd send an exterminator right away; an old co-worker of mine was buying everyone a round of drinks in the kitchen; a second soprano from my chorus and I got into a very nice conversation about living in England, which (in the dream) she had done between the ages of about nine and nineteen.

i was so ... awake
Crossposts: http://darthfox.livejournal.com/1331808.html

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