Category Archives: nightmares

nightmares

Ow my brain.

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I think the best way to qualify what I just woke up from was a “defrag dream” (thank you Jo for finally giving them a name), partially because it was a weird “will it blend?” of work, the conference, family, and hell, anything else my brain could come up with, and partially because after two awesome awesome awesome days of An Event Apart: Seattle, I have a hell of a lot to defrag.

I’d tell you about the dream, but I can’t remember it because of the end of the dream. And it’s really the end of the dream I’m writing about because I want to know if this happens to anyone else.

Last night, I went to a rockin’ party, where I didn’t drink (only relevant because we’re talking about brain behavior), came back to the hotel, watched about a half hour or so of SportsCenter while surfing twitter and catching up on my email, and fell asleep.

I woke back up, got into bed, and turn on the music I usually sleep to. (Look up Dan Gibson’s Solitudes on your music store of choice. No relation, btw.). I don’t remember setting an alarm.

Normally, that would be a massive error on my part. I regularly sleep through my alarms at home, which is why I set three of them when it’s something important.

As an added bonus, I neglected to actually plug the phone into the charger. It was down to below 45% charge when I went to bed, and I was playing music at the time. It had no shot of living to morning.

So I’m asleep, and I’m dreaming all kinds of crazy shit about trying to get something work-related redesigned using css3 on my iPhone while waiting on the tarmac of the plane back to Philly, except the plane won’t take off because the runway is packed with people who got off their planes to go to the IA Summit and decided to just sit down in the middle of the runway to eat lunch… there were many dogs involved, something about us actually being in Japan, I was being followed, a few bits were animated, the plane has hotel furniture in it… see? Defrag dream.

Anyway, the phone in the hallway of the hotel (which was somehow in the plane) (and which looks really cool, I’ll try to grab a pic shortly) starts ringing. I know it’s my sister, in that it’s-a-dream-you’re-psychic way, so even though I’m in a hallway of a hotel inside an airplane in Japan, I answer it.

Here’s where it gets weird.

(Don’t give me that look.)

The voice on the other end sounds like a hairy monster. Pick a male muppet not voiced by Frank Oz, make him sound gruff, turn him into a faceless scary thing (that’s only about 2 feet tall). He screams about four words at me. When I say screams, I mean THIS BIT OF THE DREAM WAS 10 TIMES LOUDER THAN THE REST and I didn’t even know dreams had volume controls. I can’t understand any of the 4 words because they’re cut off like bad cellphone connections.

Instantly, I wake up. And it’s the exact time my first alarm would’ve gone off, if I’d set it, on the iPhone that’s dead anyway.

So here’s my theory: Rational Brain and Emotional Brain are working together to clean the house, and Emotional Brain (which by the way is better at cleaning) is in charge. Neither of them is watching the clock, but Rational Brain slipped Dinosaur Brain $20 and a bottle of Bacardi Mojito earlier to make sure we get up on time, because it knows we’re in trouble. Dinosaur Brain is very good at keeping time, so when the alarm needs to go off, it cuts in Matrix-style and violently disrupts the dream with extreme loudness. But since it’s Dinosaur Brain, it can’t talk to me in words, so Emotional Brian translates the entire mess into the next closest thing: a bad signal from AT&T.

Thoughts?

Maybe if i start writing them down they’ll go away.

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I dreamed that I had ordered a louisville slugger online directly from the company (why I don’t know) with my choice of paint colors (it’s blasphemy to paint a louisville slugger btw). it was going to be a personal piece of memorabilia so it was important that it was perfect. And I was going to use it to play backyard baseball and maybe join a league, so it was important that the bat worked.

When it arrived it was badly warped. And by warped I mean it was carved out of the elbow of a tree branch. When you held it out to bunt, the end of it pointed at the pitcher. The end appeared to be a drawer knob screwed on & wrapped with electrical tape. I’ve seen stick bats that were more game-legal than this thing. I could’ve carved a bat myself for less than the $629.50 I’d paid for this one. (I have no idea why mybrain picked that price, or why I remember it.)

So I hopped in my car and drove to the factory, which for some reason wasn’t in Kentucky. it was in Lancaster county, PA. There I asked for a replacement and got handed a bat so old the black paint was flaking off. Plus, I suspect it was a modified chair rail because it wasn’t shaped like a bat. Oh, and it was warped too, just not as badly.

I asked for my money back & was told i could only get $200 back, but not in real money. I was given 4 options: gift certificates to township plays, gift certificates to township chicken barbeques, eBay rattan chair cushions, and a SEPTA pass only good to take the train home (thus stranding my car in Lancaster). The township GCs were only good in the township where you live, and the nasty woman who wouldn’t give me my money back wouldn’t listen when I said my township doesn’t do plays or chicken barbecues.

A moment on the decor in this dream. picture what your house would look like if all the walls were wooden paneling. now, take your floors out and replace them with stained cement. Replace your windows with ones that are two sizes smaller, and don’t open. Replace all your doors with ones that don’t quite close because all the door frames are warped, the walls are off plumb, there isn’t a square corner in the joint. This is especially evident if you use the bathroom, because the door won’t stay closed & looks rift out into the kitchen. Cover everything with soot. Throw out everything you own & replace it with $250 in furniture picked up at a yard sale in 1970. That’s what the bat factory in Lancaster’s main office looked like.

By now I had concluded this was not a legitimate Louisville Slugger.

As I was shaking the woman by the lapels demanding to know why I couldn’t have my money back (they’d spent it remodeling & redecorating) my boss’s boss intervened and convinced me to go get some dinner & go home.

He took us (suddenly Nighthawk was there) to a cafeteria-style buffet, which was built the same way as the bat factory. The food was mostly Italian, deli, or items-wrapped-in-crescent-dough, but everything was at least 5 hours old. I ended up with two sodas, a rock hard crescent mini-weenie, an egg roll made of crescent dough, and some cranberry goat cheese.

I don’t remember anything after that, but the dream kept going. I think I’m more tired now than when I went to bed.

Dream log

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Just woke up from a dream where we (mom, dad, someone who kept switching between my aunt Ginny & my sister, & I) drove up to visit my great grandmother because she needed help.

When we arrived, we found out that yes, she did need help getting her meals together and organizing her medications and fixing a few things around the house…. But meals on wheels & some other hired help was already doing that, & had been for a while. By the looks on their faces, they were pretty frazzled dealing with her, too.

But she’d really wanted us to come up and take care of Irving, her pet turtle, so she could go to the doctor. She was afraid he’d pee on the rugs while she wasn’t home.

So I explained that some newspaper on the floor of the kitchen, a few baby gates, and some lettuce, would keep
Irving happily occupied so she could leave the house.

The adults (suddenly I wasn’t one, I was only 6) then talked to her about her health, etc. while I used a hot paint gun (picture a soldering gun with a q-tip at the end that you dipped into paint) (yes my brain made it up) to write “ANNE + NNANA” on things. The extra N was a mistake but I’d decided if my grandmother was Nana, then my great-grandmother being Nnana made perfect sense.

Before I could graffiti on more than a box of cereal & an already graffiti’d book, it was time to go. Dad confided in me that mom had had enough. Nnana didn’t want to eat the healthy meals provided by the meals on wheels folks. She wanted an egg mcmuffin and gingerbread for breakfast every day. So we were going home. My sister and I got in the bed of the truck Mom & dad were in the front.

But the old Toyota pickup truck, which was navy blue at some point but was more rust than truck now, was broken in half at some point in the past, so the truck cab & bed were tied together with clothesline. While we were merging onto 422, the knots gave way. I was the only one brave enough to grab the rope, pull the two pieces back together, and retie the knot so the truck was one piece again.

Having saved the day again, I woke up.

My great grandmother on my dad’s side did live in a big old house on her own. She died when I was pretty young & the only thing I really remember is that we weren’t allowed to touch most of the stuff in the house. I doubt she had any pets. My mom is by far the most patient person I know when it comes to stubborn people, so the idea that she is the one who lost her patience is hilarious to me.

We never owned a Toyota pickup because they were always too small. My dad never would have let one go to that level of disrepair. I did ride in the bed of the truck we did own, but never on the highway, and I’m not sure my sister has ever ridden in the bed of a pickup.

And I had gingerbread for dessert last night.

And maybe I’ll have some for breakfast, too.