My dreams take me to the wierdest places—sometimes good, sometimes bad—but there are some of them I just don't want to forget. So good or bad, they go here. My dreams take me on a journey into the farthest parts of my mind. If I can figure out what they mean, maybe I can understand myself a bit better. You are more than welcome to take this journey with me, but don't judge what you read. Remember, it was just a dream.

That said, a lot of these dreams have at least one part of them that would be great in a story. Some of them would make amazing stories all on their own, so I do get a lot of writing inspiration from these pages. Maybe one day you'll read one of my stories and know exactly which dream inspired it!

Thursday, July 13, 2017

Put It Through Hell

The third dream of the evening. It actually seemed to be a flashback of the first dream, taking place during the family gathering. It was just completely independent of the events of that first one.

I was sitting down talking with the family, and Mike and his mom were discussing cooking. She was laughing, saying, "Man! My husband can't cook at all. He can't even boil water right!"

To which Mike replies, "Well, sometimes with the ones we love, their flaws are the things we love the most. They make us love them more. For example, I mean, I seem to recall somebody trying to burn our house down boiling water."

I instantly divert my full attention to the conversation. "Oh, hell no. Please do not tell this story."

He just laughs and continues telling the story that he tells over and over about the time I tried to boil eggs and ended up forgetting them on the stove. Hours later we come home and the house is full of smoke, the smoke detector is going off, the propane burner on the stove is still turned on, and the pot is still sitting on the burner, but it's completely bone-dry. The inside of the pot is black and there are bits of charred egg not only in the pot but all over the kitchen. They had completely exploded.

He turned off the breakers just in case (before we knew it wasn't an electrical fire), I turned off the stove (once I found it on), we opened all the doors and windows and started clearing the house out...but it was only after the smoke had cleared somewhat that we realized the smoke killed my bird. Literally, smoke inhalation was the cause of death of my favorite cockatiel. (We buried her an hour or so later in the front yard, though I'm not sure if she's even still there anymore since the cats and dogs love to dig.)

But, he was telling this story in the dream and I was fighting him along the way, because I hate when he tells the story; it makes me look stupid and forgetful. In my defense, I was pregnant at the time, and you know you don't really have all your brain cells at that point. In the dream, of course, I was kind of laughing as I told him to stop, so I wasn't completely serious. I guess I was just embarrassed.

I remember asking, "Why do you love to tell that story so much? It makes me look stupid. How did that make you love me more?"

This is where he came in with something completely profound, and I wasn't expecting it out of him. He says, "The things we love people for are not the things they're best at, but the things they mess up. We love people for their mistakes and their flaws, because they are challenges and hardships we work through together, and that brings us closer. It's like making a sword. You don't harden your metal with flowers and candy. You forge it in fire and beat it with a hammer and put it through hell. That is how you make something stronger. And it's the same with relationships. It's the hard things that make it what it is, that make it last."

And I just thought that line about forging needs to be in a book somewhere because it's beautiful.

Unrealistic Property Lines

Mike and I were going camping down by the lake. It was our lake, but for some reason it was massively huge and there were islands in the middle of it. I thought that was very strange, because they were HUGE islands, so our lake must have literally been gigantic.

Anyway, we were down by the lake and we were on the back side, up the bank a little ways, and we had a lot of trees around our little clearing. There was a kind of lean-to under the trees; I'm not sure what it was made of, but it appeared to be constructed between a small cavern of tree roots and wrapped in thick canvas. The front entrance was open save for some tree limbs that reached down over it, so it didn't exactly have any real privacy. If anyone were directly in front of our entrance, they could see right in. It was only private from the other angles.

So we're in this little lean-to, and we have a bunch of camping supplies with us to last the night. Mike suggests we take advantage of our alone time (wink wink) and at first I was hesitant (outside, in the dirt, under a tree, with a wide-open doorway? Umm...) but as it turns out, my delayed response worked out for the best. A few minutes later, a giant ship flew overhead. When I say giant, I mean something out of Star Wars (I actually think we might have these in real life, too, though). It was one of those triangular ships with a top fin that sticks straight up and the two wings can fold up to the top when it lands.

This giant ship flies directly over us, very low to the tree tops, and lands on the largest island on the lake. It's really close enough to paddle a boat to in just a few minutes, that's how close it is. I was getting worried about it, but Mike said, "It's okay, it's pretty far away," But then a second one came and landed in the mud on the bank next to us, just a few trees away. I'm freaking out, saying things like, "Oh my God, they're on our property! What the hell is going on here?" I was very grateful that  most of clothes were still on (nothing "revealing" had come off). I put my pants on and climbed out of the lean-to behind Mike.

He walks up to the men coming off the ship that landed on the bank to tell them they're on the wrong property, and my paranoia is going haywire imagining us being killed for "seeing too much." It had a very "high-level military" feel. But they just referred us to the overseer of it all, so we got into a small boat and crossed over to the island. Once there, we went to a small building where the overseer was said to be waiting for us.

This guy was a tall, light-skinned black man with a shiny bald head, very similar to the man on the TV show Scrubs. He was leaning back in a reclining couch when we walked in, yelling at a guy for touching him. "Stay away from me! Don't touch me! You know the rules!"

Mike tried to talk to him and get his attention, but the overseer refused to listen. Mike tried to tell him, "Hey, man, you know you're on our property? What's going on here?" but he wouldn't have it.

"Stay away from me! I don't know who you are! Don't touch me, don't come near me, get away from me! Security!"

Finally I got fed up with it all. Fuck this, I thought, and I walked right up to the guy and shoved my hand in his face, as if to shake his hand. "Good evening, SIR," I said very pointedly, "I'm going to have to ask you to get your ships off my property."

At first the guy kind of leaned away from me, but I guess I was exuding enough confidence, because he actually acknowledged my existence and shook my hand briefly. "Okay, so this is your place here? I don't think we're on your property, but we can check the property lines and we'll figure out how to situate this so that everybody's happy."

I was fine with that, because I was pretty sure I knew where our property lines were. I was fairly certain at that point that we had actually leased out the islands for their use, but that the far bank was ours.

My view changes to a bunch of different maps; GPS maps, Google maps, hand-drawn maps, etc. All kinds of amazing maps. They each show the lake coming into view or being drawn out, starting close up and panning back, showing dotted lines for the property lines and circles around the islands to show where it was his, but then...it showed a section of the bank being cut out to indicate it was also on his side.

I wasn't sure where along the bank we had been camping; I had been pretty positive we were on our own property at the time, but seeing that part of the bank cut off really dug into my confidence, because it made me worried that I had confronted somebody when I was wrong, which is a huge fear of mine. But that's where it ended.

Just Come Home

In the first dream of the night, my family and I were all sitting in a quaint little house, the whole family shoved inside—brothers, sisters, mothers, grandparents, etc. I sat with my husband and mother-in-law, talking about their lives. Nothing major. Mom, of course, was talking about moving back to her house, though none of us seemed to think she would.

At the next table over, my sister-in-law Danielle was telling her younger sister, Jessie, that she had dropped out of college. It was one of those world-stopping lines that seemed short and harmless enough until the brunt of the meaning hit you. I stopped listening to Mom and my hubby to pay attention to the details Danielle was about to disclose.

She went on to say that her kids were growing up in front of her eyes and she was never there to see it. She was missing out on school events and hobbies and fun stuff, and school was taking up so much time that she just didn't want to miss anymore. So she changed her mind, dropped out, and said she was going to try again in a few years when her kids weren't so busy or so active; when they were old enough that they didn't need her as much.

Mom couldn't believe that she would drop out (apparently she was listening, too), but we all understood her reasons. She had to do it.

I don't remember what else happened during the gathering, but at the end of the night, Mom was crying. She said she just wanted to come home, and that she was tired. I remember very vividly putting a hand on her shoulder, looking into her eyes, and saying, "Just come home."



I guess the point of this was that you have to do what you have to do, even if it's not what you want to do, and that sometimes, people believe in you and push you to achieve your dreams, because the only one holding you back might just be yourself.

Loving a Techie Genius Con Artist

In this dream, the techie man I had been so in love with looked and sounded exactly like Alec Steele, the blacksmith. It was pretty amazing....