sueeeus

The dream is alive. Now, it’s just a matter of choice. What view would I like best, from my kitchen window

Shall it be water and mountains Or a grove of white barked trees. With large rock outcroppings scattered in the distance

I think I’d like the water view from a covered porch, where I can sit and enjoy the evening air.
I’d like to make the most of passive thermal heating and cooling properties, so I’m going to have to figure out the lay of the land, North and South, East and West. The dream is for a green home that uses energy wisely.  I like a woodsy, Asian, contemporary flair.  It will be a Pacific Northwest Zen home, at one with the environment and the family. So many things to consider, but oh! The possibilities!

The clock is ticking, but I’m not sure when we can take those steps and boldly go forth and immerse ourselves in Rural America. Mr. Gadget’s heart isn’t there yet. But I’m working on him.

For now, this piece of paradise is ours.  It’s a step.  A leap, in fact.

The good news is that I must be getting R.E.M. sleep, because I’m dreaming.  But the dreams   Questionable.

For instance.  I dreamt that I was terminal.  I was told, so I knew.  I had 5 months or 2 days.  Five months, two days, what’s the difference   It’s just the end as you know it.  I remember questioning the incongruity of dates while in the midst of the dream, but not enough to go lucid.  As in, to change the outcome and turn the dream into whatever I wanted.  So I basically accepted the end and dealt with it.  The two days and five months turned out to be equivalent in the dream, and I didn’t panic when faced with demise.  I wasn’t sad, or angry, or any of those seven stages, whatever they are (denial, anger, etc.).  I think I pretty much just said, okay.  Okay   Awake, and recalling the dream, I wonder at myself and how I could possibly be okay with that.  In real life I want to live, especially long enough to raise my child.  So, interpretation   I’m a wuss.  Basically.

Last night I had a convoluted dream in which I was participating in a graduation ceremony of sorts.  We, the accomplished, were instructed to take our places at these markers at the edge of a giant swimming pool.  The markers were like those markers on the Rose Line as depicted in The DaVinci Code.  We were to stand on our marker and during the ceremony we each would dive into the pool.  I was trying to explain to the orchestrator that I wasn’t so much of a diver.  She would have none of it, because this class I was graduating with was apparently some sort of a swim class, and we were all supposed to be accomplished divers.  I had therefore had to have lied or used some sort of deceit in order to have gotten myself into this graduating class for which I was to be lauded.  I was quite embarrassed that I would have to attempt to gracefully dive in front of an audience, and doubly embarrassed that my sham would be revealed.  During these emotions, a standerby came into dream focus.  It was the President, in point of fact.  Madame President.  Because the president was a she, and she was dressed in a smart creamy white business suit with black piping embroidered elaborately all over, like the meandering pattern I’ve seen on some beautiful wedding gown fabrics.  Very high end.  Tres chic.  Tres Chanel.  Or something.  She was actually the evil Vice President character from Prison Break, if that means anything.  And apparently, it was a well known fact that she was L.  Not that that’s any big deal.  In the dream, a coworker of mine appeared, also dressed in a smart creamy white business suit with similar black piped embellishment.   They matched so nicely.  Like twins.  Two blondes.  Similar bob haircuts.  Slender.  Tall.   Although M. President was a bit older, perhaps ten to fifteen years older, than my coworker.  It wasn’t the same suit, but very similar.  She announced her alliance with the President, and I was a bit surprised, because she had been straight, to my knowledge, prior to this.  Not that it mattered.  I was just surprised.  She chose this particular public ceremony in which I was involved to come out, so to speak. In retrospect, it might have been a good thing, because it distracted the public from my own fumbling attempt to demonstrate the dive for which I was ill-equipped.  I remained embarrassed, however.

Bottom line   Too much tv/movie time (DaVinci Code, Prison Break, synchronized swimming and twins appeared in a film I witnessed recently).  Plus, that whole diving thing reminds me of public speaking and the feeling I get, and I am a Dale Carnegie graduate, after all.  I was recently thinking about all the great things that I learned during my Carnegie training, and how I’ve not kept up with much of it at all.  For shame.  And finally   That black piping   I was reading about what can be done with a serger, as I have been coveting one for quite some time now.  Decorative stitching, piping, and embroidery came up.

I don’t know what I think of dream analysis.  I can usually find threads to relate to the myriad thoughts that cross my mind through the day.  I think that dreams help to de-stress.  All these fragments get woven into a dream that makes perfect sense while dreaming.  Or else, sense is irrelevant whilst dreaming.  Hence the freedom and release. 

I would very much like to experience more of that lucid state in which I can fly, though.  Now that is incredible.  And wonderful.

Mr. Snazzy Pants (new nick name) is sick again.  (Consequently, so am I.)  Although I don’t care much for the sensation of rattling brains and oxygen deprivation during a coughing fit, I don’t so much mind, in the sense that this ailment isn’t painful or annoying apart from the coughing.  The head and sinuses are generally clear.  There’s no aching.  No fever.  No lethargy.  There is just this deep deep cough that is mostly unproductive.  It starts from a tickle and can easily end up in a fit if one doesn’t attempt to suppress the convulsions.  My son has had all of his shots, including 4 out of 5 installments of his Pertussis vaccine.  If a coughin fit does takes place, and goes unsuppressed, it gets unpleasant, with rattled brains and oxygen deprivation, or, with my son, the inability to keep one’s dinner down.  My fits seem worse than his, because I tend to try to cough something up, and that makes it worse.  When he starts to cough, he usually stops after a few coughs, but he did get caught in a gag reflex a couple of times and ended up losing the contents of his stomach.  I haven’t seen him have any trouble breathing.  We’re waiting it out.  The medicines we’ve tried are thus far ineffective.  I’m somewhat comforted in the knowledge that we are sharing the same malady, so I know that this particular bout doesn’t physically hurt as much as other maladies we’ve contended with recently.  But I am at a loss and wracked with anxiety over the helpless and concerned feelings I have for my boy when I hear him cough.  So much so that my anxieties surface in my dreams, and I dream unpleasant and frightening dreams that make we wake up in tears. 

When I have disturbing dreams, I try to explain why I’m so upset and describe the dreams to Mr. Gadget, but rather than comfort me, he tends to get angry or annoyed with me for letting the dream, which was so vivid, shake me up.  How can you even for a moment think it’s true, he’ll say.   True to form, he responded negatively to my mumbled description of the most recent dream.  He was angry with me for sharing the unpleasantries or even suggesting the possiblity of such.  Because in this dream, our boy was hurt.  It was convoluted, as dreams so often are, because the characters morphed back and forth and forth and back.  The gist of it was we entrusted him to somebody else’s care for a period of time and he ended up being hurt in a violated kind of way during that time, and I learned of it and it was too late for me to stop it, so all I could do was be horrified that this had happened to him, and hold him and try to comfort him.  I don’t know how to describe those feelings.  I woke up in tears at the moment of awareness, when the horror hit, and before the mama bear surfaced to demand retribution of the one who had harmed my child.  Mr. Gadget, on the other hand, was awake for a few hours after that, and angry as all get out, wanting to exact retribution right then and there.  The power of suggestion.  It was just a dream, and it was horrible.  It’s comforting, in a sense, that his papa bear surfaces immediately.  It tells me he would be swift to take action should anything ever happen.  God forbid.  It’s disheartening, also, that he’s not there for me, to give me comfort.  Comfort is what I seek when I wake up sobbing from a bad dream.  It’s also disheartening that the anguish cripples me enough to wake me, so that I don’t continue with the dream and perhaps do something constructive to remedy the situation like extinguish the bad guy(s) or conquer the evil.  I don’t get to learn what I might do if the situation was not fictional.  I don’t get to find out if I would be a hero.

I can point to various aspects of any given dream and correlate them to anxieties that I harbor.  Last night I put my sweet sleepy little boy in his bed, and stayed there with him as he fell asleep.  As I was caressing his face and hair, I was thinking of how much I wanted him to be well, all well, to stop coughing, to get over this silly bug.  Do we go to the doctor, do we not go to the doctor   We just went to the doctor.  Do we go back   We’re getting better.  There’s no fever.  He’s eating.  He’s drinking.  Things are moving through fine.  He’s playing.  He’s laughing.   I’m pretty sure the doctor would say we’re doing the right thing and all we can do now is let it run its course.  I thought all these things, and I also wondered if letting this run its course would actually strengthen him somewhat and build his immune system up so that it will be stronger in the future.  I’ve heard so many times and tales of people who have compromised their immune systems by overmedicating.

Anxiety!  There’s so much at play here.  Guilt.  Guilt for not going to the doctor.  We never went as children, and sometimes perhaps we should have.  Sometimes we definitely should have.  Am I like my mother   Ack, God forbid!  It doesn’t help that Mr. Gadget will invariably make some comment in a displeased tone about me not taking him to the doctor.  It’s all on me.  Why is that  

Last night I dreamt of graduation.  It seemed that everyone at my university had to go to the administration office to receive a packet of graduation materials.  It was absolutely necessary in order to graduate.  I went to the office and there was a very long line of students, all waiting.  There was one small table with only a couple of people seated behind it, answering questions and handing out the materials.  Students had to show their badge to the administrator, and the administrator would then look up their name in their flip card file.  I asked someone in line who I recognized from my classes if this was the only line and he said yes, and that we needed our badge, so if we didn’t have it, we’d have to go get it and get back in line, at the end of the line.  There were hundreds of people in line, so I was glad we spoke, as I didn’t have a badge.  I went to my department and inquired about the badge.  In the dream, the professor was Hugh Laurie.  He sent me to a booth where I had a photo taken, and printed on a badge.  With my new badge in hand, I went back to the line.  I was a bit dismayed that I’d have a long wait, but happily found that the line had dwindled to almost nothing during the time it took me to obtain my badge.  I finally got to speak to the woman behind the desk, and she looked at my badge and said she was sorry, but she couldn’t give me the papers I needed, because people with that kind of badge didn’t get to graduate now.  What kind of badge, I asked.  She showed me the upper left corner of my badge where there was a miniature image of the badge, a badge within a badge.  I hadn’t thought anything of it, but it turned out that it was a special mark, given to a selection of students, mainly engineering students.  I was upset and stormed off to find my professor (Hugh Laurie) to learn why I wasn’t allowed to graduate.  But I have good grades, I told him.  I’m an honor student, I told him.  Yes, he knew that.  He wouldn’t say directly why I couldn’t graduate.  He was very mysterious about it.  I gathered that there was some special assignment that the top engineering students had to do, so we weren’t going to graduate (yet).  It was all very vague, and there was nothing I could do about it.  I had to simply accept the fact and wait.  Wait to learn what was next, what was required of me.  . . . and then I woke up, with a headache, realized it’s Monday morning, I have to go to work, I haven’t prepared breakfast and lunch for my munchkin to take to daycare, and, and, and. . .

I actually did have a professor in college who was Hugh Laurie-like.  At least, he was lean and lanky with blue blue eyes, tousled hair, and a dry wit.

Yum.  Oh, did I say that out loud

Last night I dreamt that my mom gave me a gift, and with it the normal commentary that she had intended to make something, but found this (undoubtedly thrifting or yard saleing) and couldn’t pass it up because it was so much nicer than what she could have come up with on her own.  It was a handbag.  A purse, and of course we all know that I am nuts for purses.  So.  She gives me this purse.  It’s made of an assortment of fine materials and she’s pointing out the various rarities and identifying them.  The purse had a partially wooden structure, and the one visible flaw was that the side piece and the front piece didn’t fit quite smoothly together, but it was something that could likely be easily fixed.  I turned it around and there was a pinkish shimmery leathery part on the base.  This, she explained, was a rare pink alligator skin, or something like that.  She was excited about it and turned it inside and out, showing me different things about it, telling me the exotic woods and materials it was made from, and for some reason, and this I don’t recall, but it made sense at the time (in the sense that it was something she would do, explain it as she did it, do it, and then not be able to undo it because she went too far), she clipped the corners off.  Swiftly, deftly.  Snip, snip, snip, snip.  There, that’s better, she showed me triumphantly.   And she was still going on about what a find it was and imagining it’s value, because she had an eye for this sort of thing…  …and then…  a piece of paper, like a postcard, slipped out and she picked it up, and it was a valuation sheet.  It had the purchase price and an appraiser’s price.  It had been overlooked until now.  This bag had made it through the thrift store/yard sale circuit, into my mother’s hands, without the tag.  A true find.  The stuff of Antiques Road Show dreams.  It said $1,000,000 for the original price, and $255,000 for the appraised price.  It had lost quite a bit of value in its life, but nonetheless, this proved that it was indeed an item of value.  Either way, it was a LOT, since she’d gotten it for almost nothing (under $5).  There was anguish as she realized what she had done, because that quick little snip snip had decimated its value.  The dream ended with me telling her not to worry about it, that I’d very very carefully hand sew the pieces back.

I dreamt that I had sleep apnea and I was a doctor, looking at myself (you can do this in dreams, be more than one character), and I put the stethoscope to my chest and realized that I was missing 3 beats for every 4 beats, so I wasn’t getting enough oxygen to my brain, which explained why I so often wake up with excruciating headaches. I guess that also means I’m ¾ dead. I do get an inordinate number of headaches. I probably do have sleep apnea, actually, because I’m told I snore like a sailor, and sometimes I find that I wake myself up, choking and coughing. I should go get it checked out.

I had another dream that I belonged to this huge powerful company and everyone was in a big auditorium. There were food tables here and there and people were lining up to grab something before sitting down for whatever was to come. I wanted to get in line but somebody needed me, and when I could finally get to the table the meeting was about to start and I had to sit down, but it was too late anyway, because all the food packets were gone. One of my coworkers found me and told me about a design that another coworker was pushing, and he was very upset, saying it would be creating some troubles down the line because of inconsistencies between models. We need to keep options consistent across the board, for simplicity, for configuration control, and also to keep costs down. I told him not to worry, I completely understood, and I’d find my other coworker and let him know we had to work out the design requirements a bit more, to make it consistent. It meant a lot more work on our parts, up front, but it made things smoother in the end. Later, in the dream, it was like being on trial. I didn’t want to stand out or have any attention brought on me. People were being called accountable for things and they were made to be seen as they were. I cowered, hoping I’d not be called, but I was. And I was told I was a… …I stuttered and mumbled and tried to deny it, something about not being a Squished Piggy (really, it was just like that in the dream, literally those words), but the verdict came out as I felt my form change to that of a pig, and I was horrified to feel my nose change to a snout and the rest of me follow suit. So there it was, plain as a day. I’m a pig. I didn’t like that dream very well.

Another one. This one morphed from the pig dream. My company was on the verge of announcing a brand new product. The biggest personal transport ever. It might have even been meant for space travel, or something, but it was a gigantic ocean liner that had the hugest seating capacity; a great many abreast on the top deck. It was all hush hush. I might have had a premonition about it, that it was a doomed venture. It was perhaps a dream within a dream, but I saw several of these ocean liners on the high seas, being tossed to and fro by the gigantic waves, and they were straining and out of control, subject to the fury and whim of the sea. I awoke just as they were about to be clashed together on a huge wave. I was strapped into my seat and remember seeing part of the hull of another ship, painted a nice shiny blue. Part of it was silver, towards the top. There was work that needed to be done – some metal had to be spliced in, where there was corrosion, as though an old ocean liner had been used for the frame and parts were rusted out. It looked so out of place, to see rusted through patches on this sleek new ocean liner.

Note to self. Consider not having caffeine and/or chocolate after 6 p.m., because face it, it sometimes affects me.

There aren’t very many women where I work. I’ve been the only woman in my group for many years. Recently, we hired another woman. I had a dream where she was one of the main characters. We stopped by her place for some reason, and she had one of those super cool industrial turned living quarters places. It had all these big pipes and valves running overhead and here and there, and was very spacious. It was relatively new to her, and I’m not sure she knew all the workings of the valves and plumbing. When I walked in, I also noticed she had the exact same furniture set that I inherited from my mom. Only hers was pristine, as though it were fresh off the showroom floor. Mine is in the garage, filled with cobwebs, chipped and scarred and battered and very well worn. I was very impressed with the condition of her furniture. Someone who was with us (it could have been me) fiddled with one of the valves, out of curiousity. What does this do It’s just a water valve. Or something. Suddenly, the room was filling with water. There were these manhole looking plugs in the floor and water was coming up quickly. She ended up with several inches of water on the entire floor before we were able to figure out the proper combination of valves to use to make everything drain and go back the way it was. These are some of the hazards with using an industrial space for a home, when the machinery hasn’t been disabled.

I don’t know what that dream is all about. I don’t even know her. She’s in my group, but not my subgroup, so I never see her and never speak with her, unless it’s group meeting day. Even so, we don’t interact unless work dictates a reason. Not that I wouldn’t be friendly. That’s just how things are at my office. We’re sort of autonomous.

I had another dream that featured my brother as a teenager. He had that sparkle in his eye. It was a good-natured sparkle, as though he were happy and amused by something. We were outside the house, maybe behind it, hanging out on the hill. In real life we seldom hung out together, because I was in college when he was in high school. Maybe I was actually my younger sister in the dream. Anyway, he was making jokes or teasing or just being pleasant. This dream was a happy dream, and it makes me happy and sad to think about it. I wish he could have stayed the kind of person he was in that dream. Happy. Maybe if he could have lived longer, he would have found that sparkle again. I miss him.

A part of me wants to think that the dream was his way of reaching out to me to tell me that he is okay now, and not to worry. All is well. If I could remember that dream more clearly, I might know. But the details of that dream escape me, and I’m left with wistfulness and sadness for the beautiful boy he was, and the troubled man he became. I wonder if the sadness will ever go away. I think of him every day. Every single day. More now than before, when he was alive, when I took for granted that he would always be here, at least as long as I would be here. I figured he’d get through the rough waters and things would settle down and all would be well again.

I had a recurring murderous dream that deeply disturbed me. I already wrote about it. I read somewhere that murderous dreams aren’t really about murder, but about changes in life and/or attitudes. I certainly hope so. Even so, those kinds of dreams shake me up. To the core.

It’s late. I should be sleeping. But I have so little me time. Not that I have anything in particular to write about. I’m a good waster of time. I just wasted a good half hour reading through previous posts. Of my own. I ponder a bit over why I would be entertained by day-to-day things that I posted previously. There have been times when I’ve gone through old journals and read them as well. Consuming quite alot of time in the process. I guess it’s not so odd. At least not for me.

Here’s something. I love sentence fragments! Okay, I don’t really. But I talk this way. Sometimes. And it’s kind of fun, even liberating, to write this way. I feel like I’m a kid getting away with something. Something devious. You see, my dad is a linguist. A genius, really, as far as language goes. At one time he could speak, read, and write in 14 languages. Later, he added a couple more, speaking only. I asked him to teach me French when I was a teenager. It didn’t last long. He wasn’t very patient with me. Later, I took a semester of French in college and did quite well. I was the second best in the class. Excellent pronunciation, I was told. I would have liked to have given it more time and become fluent.

Anyway. About language. My dad would constantly correct us. No split infinitives! No dangling participles! Blast! Bloody Barbarian! I don’t actually know what a split infinitive is, or a dangling participle. I know I’ve looked them up before, but I can never keep those definitions in my mind. I can’t keep any grammatical definitions in my mind, come to think of it. Except conjunctions. Know why Conjunction junction, what’s your function First person, second person, third person I guess I could figure out first person would be “I this, I that”, and maybe second person would be “she this, she that” Or “you this, you that” Is third person “Sueeeus this, Sueeeus that” I don’t know these things. I have a worn copy of Strunk and White that I consult if the need arises. But anyway, I don’t care! It’s my blog, and I’ll write the way I want to!

So. I was thinking about dreams and recurring dreams and dream analyses. With a little forboding I mustered up the courage to google dream analysis. According to the experts (insert grain of salt) dreams of murder are about radical change, or the death of an attitude or belief within yourself. I’ve been thinking of making radical changes in my diet. I’ve been daydreaming of making radical changes in my lifestyle. I haven’t actually done either.

I was thinking about those people who get bariatric surgery. It’s scary. One in a hundred DIE from it. The lap band is supposedly the safest and least invasive. Before I read about what a post-op lap band patient eats, I thought it would be the easy thing to do. Physically render oneself unable to overeat. So why not avoid the risk of death by surgery and try the diet alone I read up on the diet they have to follow post op. It’s basically liquid – protein shakes – for the first six weeks, then low carb after that. Needless to say, tiny portions all along. So it seems to me to be very much like what I would call a crash diet followed by an Atkins/South Beach/low carb/diabetic diet. All the experts say not to crash diet. It’s the worst thing. So how can the lap band be a good thing Crash dieting screws up your metabolism. Of course I know it’s true. I’ve done that before, more than once, and did hose my metabolism, more than once. The lap banders do lose the weight. Do they keep it off Do they hose their metabolisms

TV advertises wonder pills like Relacor, Cortislim and Zotrin. A little pill to make you happy and make you lose weight. They call it (Relacor) the happy pill. Can it be that easy I wish. But I don’t think so. I don’t trust it. People died from diet pill crazes. Ephedra I think it makes holes in your heart. I think one of my brother’s (still living) compromised his heart with that stuff. Scary!

The simple answer, although not so simple in execution (for me, anyway), is to eat right, in moderation, and exercise. When I went to Europe the first time, I backpacked for two months. I walked somewhere every day, went outside every day, and ate when I was hungry. I lost 20 lbs and toned up and looked the best I’ve looked in 20 years, all without even trying. That was twelve years ago. The office job is not so good on my waistline. Or my well-being. But it does allow for the roof over my head. With the job comes much stress. Without it would come more stress, but in a different flavor. I’m now daydreaming of a lifestyle and adventure something on the order of Under a Tuscan Sun.

• I have post nasal drip. Again. I hate post nasal drip.
• Sometimes my dreams are so realistic that they freak me out. Sometimes I wake up my husband and tell him about my dreams and make him assure me that they’re not real.
• Sometimes these dreams are so realistic that I don’t believe him when he reassures me that it wasn’t Colonel Mustard, in the library, with the pipe wrench.
• Sometimes I think I have a recurring dream, but I realize it might be that I’m dreaming that I’m dreaming. And this freaks me out as well.
• Sometimes I get deja-vu. Like right now. And this sort of freaks me out too.
• When I have a night like last night, I wake up wondering if I’m losing my mind. Or if I should call the police. Or at least say a few Hail Marys.
• How does one pluralize Hail Mary, non-possessive Hail Maries
• I believe there’s more to seeking pardon than chanting.
• Is a person responsible for what they dream
• Maybe I’m a reluctant psychic. (More freaking out.)
• Perhaps I watch too much TV, especially CSI.
• The latter is the most plausible explanation.
• Perhaps I am becoming mentally ill.
• Also plausible.
• Could be more freaking out if I don’t stop thinking.
• The baby woke up crying at 3 a.m. Heart wrenching crying. Was he dreaming bad dreams Is he mentally connected to me Did I dream the bad dreams before or after he woke up I don’t remember.
• He’s got five teeth pushing through at once. It must not be very comfortable. Poor little guy.
• If I really did have a recurring dream, should I look into it further Dream analysis
• I wonder if dream analysis is a bunch of hooey.
• Or not.
• Again, too much TV. Maybe I should write for CSI. I have material.
• I need to load up on some romantic comedies or slapstick or anything light-hearted.
• Inspector Clousseau, I need you.
• I don’t always have bad dreams. Sometimes they’re quite nice. Most times they’re decidedly odd, but not without explanation.
• I think I need to change shampoo for a while. My hair is all limp and doesn’t feel fresh, even though I just showered.
• I am so tired.
• When the mascara brush barely grazes the surface of the eye and the eye tissue instantly gets all gooey, it probably means it’s time to get new mascara.