Breams

2010-11-04T22:31:00.002-05:00

I was taking the elevator down in the math building, and even though I had pressed "1", it just kept going and going. Past -1, past -2, etc., and then it paused. With a lurch, the elevator tipped on its side, and shot sideways, the indicator pointing to "A," then "B," etc. When it stopped and I climbed out, I was in an underground bar, with strange and shady clientele, who could tell I was an outsider.

Later, we were traveling down the streets of LA, perhaps down Hollywood Blvd, in a topless car or limo. The streets were lined with tiny row houses, with immaculately groomed lawns that evoked Alice in Wonderland. Each house had one enormous window on the second story, and out of the window was looming a much-larger-than-life version of a celebrity, with eyes rolling. A rap song was playing throughout the neighborhood, and 5 or 6 of the celebrities were the rappers featured on the song, so they were lip syncing and bobbing along to the song.

Eventually, the limo stopped, and I tumbled out onto the sidewalk. I entered a garden supply shop that was just closing, and the owner of the shop casually propositioned me for sex. In the most blasé way possible, we started having sex, not even bothering to remove most of our clothes out of laziness. Part way through, he had to get up to attend to something in the shop, and I realized I had done something terrible. I scrambled to get dressed again, and ran out of the shop with my shoes in my hand. On the sidewalk again, I sat down on a bench next to a tree, and frantically tried to call M because I felt terrible about cheating on him, but my phone wasn't working. One of the regulars from the basement bar came along and tried to console me.

2006-05-18T14:07:00.000-05:00

Doing lights for the biggest show of my life, I find that my eyes cannot open. Or rather, they won't open when I want them to. I am trying to keep things rolling, listening for audio clues that it might be time to do something with the lights and stumbling to find a submaster to move. Occasionally, my eyes will flash open and I will be given a hint of the gorgeous show this could be, if only my lights were a little better.
The whole stage is predominantly dark, with blue pools of light that whirl around when I touch buttons. If only I could find away to light the rest of the stage, I think, to find the general wash and get everyone lit. I reach to my left, feeling for the general wash, but every sub I touch seems to be as ineffective as the last.
Eventually, I decide that the blue-ish pools are just what the show needs, but I still can't see the stage when I want to. Plus, Caitlin is the one who wrote down all the cues, but she left me without a script. The booth, which is high up like Fridley's while being attached to the promotion booth like ours, has a window through which light shines.
I can see people in there so I run in, blind, yelling "I need a script!" No one does anything. I scrabble through piles of paper, desperate to find a page, to find the name of the show, anything that will give me a clue as to what the play is about.
I am desperate because I know the show is continuing and the lights are static. Finally, I find the script, a pamphlet-sized booklet of glossy paper. I try to open my eyes to look at it, but I only get a glimpse of the bright light in the booth before my eyes close again.
The lights booth is dark, with only the disco lights on, but the light spilling through the long window is illuminating everything and falling into the audience. I can feel people thinking about standing up to complain. I want to yell at whoever was dumb enough to turn the lights on or not close the window, but the lights are more pressing.

2006-01-06T16:30:00.000-06:00

I had a nightmare that the portfolio review board from Coventry came to our school. It was during a huge art show, and they moved immediately to a section of uniformly sized square oil paintings. It turned out that the requirement for the portfolio was that you make an piece of art which represented you religiously.
I panicked. I wanted to go to their university so badly, and I had completely missed hearing anything about the requirements or the review. Everyone else at our school had been ready, why hadn't I?
I rushed home to see if I had any work that might qualify. "I must have made a clay chalice at some point," I thought, picturing the lumpy version I created in first or second grade. "Or maybe I made a painting, and just forgot about it."
When I arrived home, I ran through the door and up the stairs to my room. As I franticly made my way there, I noticed that the house was perfectly clean. My mother was holding an open house to try to sell our house, and I knew I had to be quiet and not disturb her. Everything was out of place, and I rushed from room to room trying to find something-- anything-- that I could show to the portfolio reviewers. I thought about asking my mom, but I knew that we needed to move and that if I disturbed her, I'd never hear the end of it.
Finally, I gave up.

2005-12-28T15:57:00.000-06:00

I was sitting in biology class, and the teacher was teaching us English grammar and vocabulary. Suddenly Jacob took out a pair of blue pointe shoes and put them on.

2005-07-26T17:38:00.000-05:00

I dreamed that as part of the graduation ceremony, the previous graduating class came back and did a little graduation initiation. Part of it was that everyone got their hair cut and dyed, and dressed up in costumes. I was sitting on the bleachers, watching the show. I saw all my friends come in, with their hair short or long or in mohawks and dressed up. They'd walk up, the name of their group would be announced ('vintage prom dress goths"), and they'd get their diploma. One group came in dressed as Harry Potter. I recognized my sister in the group. I was really sad that they'd thought she was a senior and had missed me.
Suddenly, someone began knocking on the bleachers beneath me. I looked down and saw Greg, and he motioned me to climb through this hole in the floor.
Sammy was with him (yeah, I know she hasn't graduated, but in my dream she had. I think it was the memory of thespian initiation that wove her in) and they brought me to this warehouse to find me a costume. We only had a couple of minutes, because no one had remembered about me until the ceremony had already begun.
There was basically nothing left in the warehouse, because everyone else had used the stuff that had been there. Greg started making me a triangle costume out of lath. I asked what group I was going to be in, and they said "the.... geometry group." I knew they were lying, and that I'd have to walk up after everyone else and someone would have to explain that I'd been forgotten.
I was crying because my sister was going into 8th grade, and she'd be put into a group, but I was going to graduate that day and no one had remembered me.

2005-07-24T11:00:00.000-05:00

A nightmare:
I am walking past a lake with some of my friends as we notice that there are men standing in the shallows, which extended about 100 yards out. They have long poles, and they are pushing pairs of corpses around in the water. The path we're on moves closer to the edge of the water, and we see a man standing by the edge. He's using his pole to push two bodies lashed together with twine. We know that he is telling us they are men, but suddenly one person says "those are girls!" And they are. Beautiful gothic girls with dyed black hair and rotting flesh. The man agrees that they are, indeed, girls, and he had been ordered to stand where he was until someone noticed.
We know that we are going to see the bodies again. The man looks up, as he begins to move from his previous spot. "Yes," he says. "You will see them everywhere. All of them." He gestures to the lake, where we can see hundreds of men polling their dead around. "In every horror movie, in every street. They will haunt you." We walk on.

I am in a junk room in the back of a carnival. It is dark, and the room is huge. The main fixture is a round track that runs a few feet from the walls. It is made of wood, and it reminds me of a catwalk. Junk is piled on both sides and underneath the track. A few items dot the it. Everything is covered in dust.
I am outside. "Cars are dangerous," a man says. "You need to learn that."
I am back in the room. The track is clear. A sports car is driving around the track, very quickly. I am standing in the middle of it, and I am forced to jump aside when the car comes around. The track very narrow, and I almost topple off. Another car follows the first, and another. Then, a steam driven train. I realize the room is bigger than I thought it was. The train whizzes past me, and I step behind a support of the track to avoid being hit. I see a kitten trying to cross the track. A car comes past and almost hits it. I realize I have to save it. I rush out and pick it up. It doesn't like people, and tries to attack me. I run back to where I was standing, and the kitten latches onto my shirt.

2005-07-10T20:30:00.000-05:00

Snippets from a very long dream:
I was climbing down a staircase using the handrails as steps of a ladder. I was completely suspended, maybe 5 stories up. A professional basketball team looked up from their game at the bottom and said "there's a watermark in the air."
I also talked to myself in a public restroom. I was completely aware of the fact that there were other people in the room and I didn't care. I continued to lecture to the air.
My locker was at a 45 degree angle, and I walked by and remarked to a friend "that's trippy!" but I never once thought I was dreaming. Then I opened my locker and it was full of pop cans, clothes, and paper. In real life my locker is empty. In my dream I couldn't fit anything else in.

2005-07-05T22:03:00.000-05:00

"Pay attention to your dreams: when you go on a trip, in your dreams you will still be home. Then after you've come home you'll dream of where you were. It's a kind of jet lag of the conciousness."
(Animal Dreams, Barbara Kingsolver)

So I had a jetlag dream from London. It involved some terrifying Underground stations. All the escalators were hilly, and you had to hang on to keep from being bucked off. Plus, you had to go up to get to the Underground (which, as the name suggests, is usually underground). The station we started off in was a high school pool area. It housed a swimming pool several times Olympic size, or rather two large pools seperated only by a foot thick wall in the middle. To get to the underground station you had to cross this tiny bridge, and I was terrified.
We took the tube from there to a very underground station, which was carved out of the dirt. We got off at our stop, and my dad sprinted for another train that had just arrived on the opposite platform. Knowing how long trains usually wait, the rest of the group walked at a more leisurely pace. (By the way, I don't remember who else was with me, but I know they were friends of mine). Well, as soon as my dad reached the doors and got inside, they shut. We saw we were missing our chance and ran after the train. It stopped. We slowed down, releaved that the driver had seen us. But as I reached out to push the door open button, the train lurched forward again. Again, we ran, again the train stopped and again I tried to hit the button. This was repeated until I felt as if doing anything else would be futile. Then the train drove off entirely. It has been blocking the entrance to what we now saw was a tunnel, and light flooded in.
Through the light walked Greg, pushing a stroller (a "buggy"), and followed by the two small children he explained he was nannying.

2005-06-08T21:37:00.000-05:00

Ok, this is a several day old dream, but I'll try to remember as much of it as I can.

It started out with me walking around the Cornell campus. This group of guys was standing on the edge of the sidewalk, selling art. There were maybe 12 of them. I walked past, and suddenly the campus turned into this alley by KFAI (the radio station).
I was back at the beginning of the alley and I had to walk past the guys again. I could see them up ahead, and there were only about 5 left, but I saw Scott and was like "you need to come with me."
We walked up to the door of the building where the radio station is, and buzzed the doorbell. They immediately let us in, which was good because one of the artist guys was following us. We both managed to get through the door and close it, but my belt got stuck.
Then we got into the elevator. That place has the slowest elevator in the world. When we got to the top we saw that someone had entered the building from the coffeehouse on the ground floor and had run up the stairs to beat us to the door of the station.
He walked in, and we followed him. None of the recording studios were there, and the entire station was one huge square room, with a wall cutting it almost in half. On one side of the wall, a band was playing, and a number of armchairs were set out for people to sit in. I settled down in mine, and began listening to the music.
Then a member of my church walked up. "Do you smoke, Amelia?" No," I replied. "Well, you should move to the non-smoking section, cause someone might light a cigarette." I followed her past the band and around the wall to the non-smoking section, which was a number of folding metal chairs. I listened to the concert, which was typical of my church. Everyone there was a member of my congregation, but some of them aren't in real life.
Suddenly the concert was over, and we all began milling out of the building. The man who had entered in front of us was one of the artists, and he was offering drugs in small capsules.
He had every color of capsule, but most people liked blue or red. To take the drug, you cracked open the container and drank the liquid inside. He offered me one, and I refused, even though the twins were doing it, and they are good kids.
We walked across the parking lot, and went to cars to go to the afterparty. Sometime between the end of the concert and getting to the cars, I found Scott, but he had become Andy and was under the influence of the man's drug.
We got to a house, which happens to be the one my girl scout troop leader lives in. I sat down in the floor, in front of two computers which were sitting on a couch.
I looked out the window and saw a scruffy girl spray painting a neon green and a red circle on the front walk. She waited until the paint dried, then rubbed them with sandpaper to make them look old. I decided this was a new form of the hobo sign, and I needed to figure out what it meant.
The first computer I tried was on a dictionary site, but it wouldn't let me leave until I gave it the right password. The prompt was "A boy who has just died." I kept typing in "Justin Blomquist," but that was the wrong answer. (The right one was something that began with an "E" that I don't recall.) Everyone was telling me what it was, but I wouldn't type it in. I gave up and went to the other computer.
As the browser opened, a car drove up and parked on the opposite side of the street from the house. Andy, who had been pawing me the entire time due to his drug induced state, said "maybe you ought to get under that table," motioning to a coffee table under the window. "No," I replied, and moved on my belly to under a chair just to the right of the door.
As I got there, the man arrived at the front door with a machine gun. He began shooting everyone in the room, but Andy walked through unhurt. As I lay dead on the floor, I was wondering what the neon green and red stood for.
Then I woke up.

2005-05-29T15:53:00.000-05:00

I dreamed I had some amazing blue and green striped underwear. Then I put them on.

Yeah, I have boring dreams sometimes.

2005-05-09T15:21:00.000-05:00

Fever dreams are always fun, and this one was no exception. It was one of the most beautiful and trippy dreams I've had in a while.
I was staying in a psychiatric hospital, but a really nice one with old brick walls and vines and stuff (think secret garden). Since it was obviously a holding place for crazies, we were all locked in. I needed to get out and get some air, so I managed to escape through a back door, maybe a loading dock or something. It had a huge door that opened downwards, like a castle door, and I managed to get through just as it was begining to raise. There was a creek that ran behind the hospital, and it was full of little stepping stones. I started out running, jumping from one stone to the next. After I got past a little bend, I heard the doctors coming after me, trying to catch up.
I felt so secure. I knew that I was fast and barefooted, and they were old and wearing fancy doctor shoes. They'd never catch me.
Since dreams never run exactly in chronological order, I jumped back to a few years earlier, when I was living in the hospital. They'd told me that someone new was coming, and that I knew them. I forget what his name was in the dream (something alliterative with the initials ZZ), but it was this kid who I'd known in preschool named Ben. He had ADHD, and he was one of the "bad boys," as I called them.
Even though I haven't seen him since I was 3 or 4, I was really excited, and was looking forward to seeing him. He never actually showed up in the dream, and this section does not have the feel good ending the last one did.

2005-05-07T21:18:00.000-05:00

First, an explanation of this blog's title. It comes from the fact that I was a crazy little kid and couldn't speak english. Instead of saying "sweet dreams" to my mother when she tucked me in, I'd say "breams." Everyone thought it was cute, and it stuck. My parents still say it to me. XP.

On to dreams! I had a couple of crazy ones lately...
One involved Dan, which was awkward. I wanted to tell him about it (in real life, not in my dream) but I felt like that would be awkward.
The second one was last night, and it was basically me driving an 18-wheeler forever. It had two gearshifts, which was crazy. I was driving all slow, but then I realized that one of the gearshifts was set too low.
Then I drove to a house with a whole bunch of people I knew sitting on chairs in the one room that was the house. I had this premonition that someday there'd be a flood, and the water would come pouring in through some other rooms to drown us all.
I decided I was being crazy and went into the house. It was really creepy, and I have a feeling that no one in the room had faces, sort of like the dishcloth concert. I sat down in the only empty chair, and I felt like everyone had been waiting for me to complete some necessary number of people for something.
A couple minutes later, I stood up from my chair andwent out through the one door. In the minutes I'd been in the room, someone had built all the rest of the rooms of my premonition, and there was an old woman and an evil monster in the room. For some reason, I was the only person who the old woman liked, and the only one who could survive being near the monster.
I was really afraid of the flood, then, so I decided to drive off somewhere and prepare for it.
Then I woke up.

2005-05-01T16:37:00.000-05:00

Two nights ago I had a dream where I was in a huge warehouse with my dad and my sister. It was really strange because the perspective switched between being with my dad and being with my sister.
It was a huge warehouse, and my sister and I were hiding in the shadows. It was dark, and I'm pretty sure we were all but invisible. We kept drinking this strawberry tea that was amazing.
My dad was freaking out because he thought we were going to get killed. He's a really level-headed person, so I was scared and searching around trying to find us.
The strangest part of the dream was that I could see both perspectives, but I couldn't share information between them. While with my dad, I didn't know I was drinking tea in another area, and while with my sister I didn't know that my dad was searching for us in a frightened way.
I woke up after my third cup of tea, and half expected to find my pockets full if tea bags.