Category Archives: nightmares

nightmares

Sunday sleep

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Just spent a huge part of the night wandering Windsor castle looking for a pencil sharpener so I could write the queen a note that I had accidentally left something there when I was working there and now that I was going to be working in China’s government could she please send it over when she found it.

Then she showed up and found it and we all had Christmas dinner together – me and my husband and the queen and Prince Phillip and two princesses and their husbands who took care of the kids mostly and honestly it was like having a girls night out with people that you barely knew and at the same time you felt like you always knew.

I hope I visit the queen in my dreams again.

Historical nightmares are new. 

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Things I saw in my dream last night:

  • The remains of a 12th century highway overpass, which was standing over a 12th century cottage, both made of medieval plywood. 
  • An ancient frying pan which was glazed in a salmon pink coating with my great great great great grandfather’s initials (in fancy script) molded into the bottom. 
  • A set of kitchen canisters and salt and pepper grinders made of glass and pewter that stacked around each other like  matryoshka dolls from the 16th century. The far-flung relative of mine who was showing them to us on the family estate wanted to have recreations made so we could have some too. 
  • Scenes from said relative explaining our (totally dreamed up) family history including the doctor who cared for a now-poor family from the aristocracy. 
  • An ancient microscope hooked up to a 15th century touchscreen that allowed said kids to discover and draw extremely small details of natural things, and somehow also the whole town, but with extremely small lines. Sorry Antonie van Leeuwenhoek but we got there first, with better tech. 
  • The beginning of a plague that made people vomit extremely large volumes of something that looked like pepto  bismol 

I am relatively confident that during my next trip to England (whenever that is) my cousin and I will not be able  to locate any of these family heirlooms. 

Sherlock Holmes and the Swamp Thing Bigfoot

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Sherlock Holmes and I worked to solve a mystery of a dead camper in the Adirondacks. We found some unusual tracks and marks… Eventually we traced them back to a society of indigenous Neanderthals and/or Bigfoot that live near Lake Placid.

They’re much bigger and taller than us, with fur-like body hair, but they wear animal skins for clothing and have a democratic society. They’re rarely seen because they can also breathe water, so if pursued they just walk out into the lake and stand on the bottom until the pursuers go away. They can make their skin fluoresce on command, so they don’t need fire to see or move through the water or the heavy forests.

One of their children accidentally killed the camper. I sobbed. I don’t remember how Sherlock decided that we were going to resolve the case, only that we couldn’t take this tiny confused person out of their society into ours for punishment.

…

That covers about a third of my dreams last night but the act of writing it down erased the rest.

I wish dreaming burned calories. I’d weigh 90 lbs soaking wet and eat half a moose daily.

Really, brain, dinosaurs?

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Fun facts from my nightmare-filled brain, sorted from creepy to crazy:

  • The longer you’re pregnant, the more of the baby’s features you can see through your stomach. When you can see the baby’s eye color, you have about 24 hours until labor sets in.
  • Human/Tyrannosaur hybrids are a thing, and you might already know one.
  • Before running any kind of medical testing the hospital will lock you and 11 other strangers in a conference room with a big oak table. You’ll be naked because they’re going around to take everyone’s vitals. You won’t mind.
  • Everyone is given a personals samples bag to ensure you can all brush your teeth. Your bag will be about the length and width of a tube sock but contain full-size containers of: toothpaste, shampoo, conditioner, another shampoo, another conditioner, toothbrush, comb, napkins, mouthwash, razors, hairspray, and leave-in conditioner.
  • One of the women in the group will fall in love with the tyrannosaur and leave her husband and child to live with him. They spend their time roaming museums, often in their bed clothing
  • The tyrannosaur, by the way, started out looking like a normal guy, then turned into a flesh-colored dinosaur, then into a cross between the T-Rex from Meet the Robinsons and the toy T-Rex from Toy Story but had Wallace Shawn’s voice
  • when your brain starts injecting jokes about the flash-forward and flash-back scripting of your dreams, you’re about to wake up.

I just woke up and I’m already tired.

OMG THE GLASS CLASSPIDS

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I was asleep when the alarm on my IV pole started going off. I woke up enough to read “GLASS CLASSPIDS” rolling across the marquee in red lettering. No clue what that meant so I hit the nurses’ station bell and tried to fall back to sleep.

Holly had only been in here 20 minutes before, to shut off an equally annoying IV alarm, and I knew it had taken her a few minutes to respond then because of another patient emergency, so I didn’t worry when she didn’t show up right away. I fell back to sleep, but the alarm continued to sound, so I didn’t get much more than a few fitful moments of rest before I was up staring at the GLASS CLASSPIDS alert again.

I tried ignoring it two or three more times, with no luck. Finally upon re-waking I realized that the IV pole’s manual was out on my bed, flipped open to the apart for GLASS CLASSPIDS.

It said:

TELL HOLLY YOU HAVE A SORE THROAT AND YOU NEED A DRINK OF WATER.

This woke me up firmly, and I realized there was no alert on the powerless IV pole, nor was the a manual. According to Google there’s no such thing as a glass classpid. There’s just my lizard brain trying to get the attention of the sleeping brain bits using whatever metaphors it thought would work in my current envoironment.

I drank two cups of water from the pitcher at my bedside and started typing this up… And my GLASS CLASSPIDS feel much better now, so I’m going back to sleep with the hope that lizard brain doesn’t find anything else to harass me about before 7am.

It was famous comic people night in Anne’s head

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I had a beautifully long post here about a very strange dream I had.

I met comic author Lea Hernandez and her son at the supermarket, and they helped me find the right yarn for the project I want to knit (it was in the refrigerated section between the Coca Cola and the milk), and we all got free cookies that Fox picked out because i won a contest at the supermarket.

Then I went to a party with my friend Steen and her daughter at a ski lodge, where some of the guests from another party, including Neil Gaiman, thought our party was cooler so they joined us. (Neil had planned to hang out with Scott McCloud and Amanda Palmer, but Scott was sick and Amanda was in New Zealand. Scott, if you’re reading this, get well soon! Amanda, I don’t know if you’re really in New Zealand right now, but it sounds awesome.)

Then we all went back to my house (which wasn’t my house – it was located where my parents house is, but it was my friend Camille’s parents’ mountain cabin from that trip we took 20 years ago) but we got lost on the way. This happens so often in my dreams that it didn’t even stress me out (this time). Friends shouldn’t let friends dream and drive. But if you have to dream and drive, it helps to invest in a good dream-based GPS, which apparently I had with me, in the purse I carried in high school.

Once at my house, we figured out who would be sleeping where (Steen and her kid got the big bed because there was a Tinkerbell decal with “Christine” over the bed, and Neil Gaiman was totally OK with taking one of the two twin air mattresses on the floor. My brother took the other one.) and we got down to the task of partying, which consisted of some people jamming on the guitar, others talking about writing, and still others playing Killer Bunnies.

The reason I wrote this beautifully long post was because as I wrote it, I realized that a whole bunch of situations that would have totally stressed me out when awake (like, how do you ask an autistic kid to help you at the supermarket? Is it rude to just assume he could and would help? And how do you say “Just pull up a chair,” to Neil. Fucking. Gaiman? And is it really OK to give the only guest bed to the person with the kid when you have people with bad backs and people who get cold easily and famous people in the house? And why do all my dream parties look like high school theater cast parties?) totally failed to stress me out at all.

In fact, I woke up because in the dream I was starting to stress out about what I looked like and suddenly had the need to put makeup on (which, by the way, I screwed up. I painted lip gloss on my eyeball, trying to use the lip gloss as eye shadow) and guests started asking me questions like “Do you really think Neil Gaiman wants to be at YOUR party?” and I realized I must be dreaming because I hadn’t been stressed out about this stuff the whole night and it was stupid to put on makeup just because someone famous I wanted to be friends with was at my party.

It turns out I am a much better person when my left brain is asleep, because my right brain doesn’t care if people might be offended or might think I’m a no-talent hack or stupid or ugly or I haven’t updated my comic in months. My right brain says, “say hi, be polite, and you might get something awesome.”

My left brain tries to put green lip gloss on my eyeball to make me look pretty for my guests, all the while telling me I can’t possibly look pretty enough for them to like me. Like whether I look nice was going to matter to Lea Hernandez and her son.

And then I had to exit the post for a split second because of an incoming text message, and WordPress ate the entire goddamned beautiful post.

I lost easily a half hour of writing, nuance, and description on a dream that it now rapidly fading from my mind as it’s replaced by grouchy dog whining.

So goodbye beautiful post and beautiful dream, good morning world, and fuck you WordPress app. I’m going to go feed the dogs.

Teaching

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I remember that a whole bunch of my family were staying at a cabin-like place and the place had giant chicken-like birds that we were supposed to be taking care of while we were there. But a huge part of the anxiety about this cabin was trying to get all the beds in place so we all had somewhere to sleep and none of the women had to share a bed with a guy they didn’t know (because apparently a bunch of work people were there too.)

There was also a major shortage in bathrooms but an overabundance of closets, all of which had the exact same stuff in them. And we couldn’t block any doors.

I don’t remember how the scene shifted from the cabin to a hospital but the next thing I knew I was at an offsite for the OmmNomNom Project (so nicknamed because it eats the budget and staffing of any other project that crosses its path) with at least 4 teams of developers, trying to fit all the bits and pieces together.

But one of the business groups had decided we needed to offer a few new services: video chat, customer education, and a third I don’t remember. These were introduced to us when K, who is very pregnant both in the dream and real life, climbed up on a folding table, and built abstract sculpture of the new capabilities out of an artificial Christmas tree, Christmas tree lights, and newspaper.

The video chat problems were all tech problems – asynchronous delivery of chat and bad lagtimes would make it virtually unusable. Didn’t matter, we had to find a way to do it anyway.

While some of the dev folks tried to figure that out (and groaned and complained and I don’t blame them) we learned that the other project – customer education – was about helping our richest clients pass their high school finals or get GEDs. And the more we all objected to the very existence of this goal the more we were told “if we don’t help them, who will?”

At that point, since we were making no forward progress we stopped the meeting so I could go to my testing at the hospital. The halls were filled with coworkers and small children and I woke up shortly afterward.