Author Archives: Dream Girl

Shoddy Swedish Dentistry

Cast of characters:

  • Sheri T. – A high school classmate and friend.  I haven’t seen her for at least 13 years, but she appears in my dreams more than anyone else!
  • A Swedish, male dentist.
  • A female bus driver.
  • Lazing Swedes.
  • A bunch of boy scouts.

Historical context:

  • Reoccurring dream!  Riding in a bus through a mountainous European landscape.  It’s almost always in Switzerland,  but in this dream, we were riding through Sweden.
  • Reoccurring dream!  Sheri T.
  • Reoccurring dream!  My teeth falling out of my mouth.
  • Don’t know that I’ve ever had three of my reoccurring dream themes show up in a single dream… crazy!
  • I have very healthy teeth!
  • In 1996, I was on a high school trip where we took a bus to New York City.  Only about an hour after leaving Waterloo, my younger friend, Adria, came to the back of the bus holding the fake half of her front tooth and asked me what to do.  She had recently broken her front tooth in half playing basketball, and the dentist had repaired it and given her a half-fake tooth.  She bit into some food on the bus, and the fake half of her tooth fell off.  She wasn’t in pain and ended up touring NYC with only half of a front tooth.
  • I generally think quite highly of Sweden and their health-care system and would have no hesitations about receiving dental care there.

The dream:

This dream jumped around a lot.  I was riding around in a yellow school bus throughout the Swedish countryside.  The terrain was mountainous.  I was sitting with Sheri in the green vinyl seats on the right side of the bus when I reached back into my mouth and pulled out my bottom left molar.  It had felt funny, and when I reached back to touch it, it just fell out.  When I looked at it in my palm, it was very small, like a front baby tooth.  But it was definitely my molar.  It was yellow with brown stains and was rotting.  I started to panic and told the bus driver that I needed to get to a dentist right away to get a fake tooth.  The bus driver told me that I was crazy to even consider getting dental work done in a third-world country like Sweden.  She told me that I should wait until we got back to the US.  I then had a flash in my mind of a 1970s-looking Swedish dentist office, with wood paneling on the walls, and a male dentist wearing a white smock and black rimmed glasses.  His hair was in a perfect 70s coif and was brown and graying.  He was sitting behind a dentist chair holding a pick and a drill in either hand, waiting for me to sit in the chair.  The scene frightened me, and I decided to wait to get my tooth fixed until I was back in the US.

Then I was back on the school bus, but this time sitting on the left side of the bus.  We came to a T in the road, stopped at the stop sign, and turned left.  Outside the window, I could see a bed sitting outside on the green grass.  The bed was covered in white sheets and was 100 yards long.  It was the longest outside bed in the world.  There were a lot of Swedes lounging around on the bed.  When we turned left, I could see the entire length of the bed.  It was so long!

All of a sudden, Shari and I were hiking on a dusty trail through the countryside with our classmates.  The path was made of dusty red dirt, and there were tall yellow grasses on either side of the path.  We walked along the path for a long time.  Eventually, we came upon a convergence of paths.  Another path merged into our path.  Sheri and I were at the back of the group, and suddenly a boy scout group merged into our path from the other path and cut us off from the rest of the group.  All the boy scouts were wearing khaki uniforms and beanies.  By the time Sheri and I were able to wade through all of the boy scouts to the front of the path, we could no longer find our group.  We saw a pine forest ahead and guessed that our group had gone into the pine forest.  We headed in that direction.

The end!

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My Baby Boy Surprise

Cast of characters:

  • Just me and my surprise baby boy.

Historical context:

  • My great-grandfather’s name was Leo.  I love the name, and if I had a baby boy today, his name would be Leo.
  • I want kids.  A boy would be great.
  • I recently had an appointment with a surgeon to schedule surgery to have my gallbladder removed.  He told me that, until my surgery, I had to eat a very low-fat diet.  But then he looked at me and said that, by the looks of it, I already ate a low-fat diet, so it shouldn’t be a problem.  Totally untrue, but I was flattered that he thought so, nonetheless. 🙂
  • I like watching Family Guy on TV.  Haven’t in a while, though.

The dream:

I was walking down Monroe St. in front of the Karl Junginger Memorial Library in Waterloo, my home town, when I felt a pain in my belly.  I lifted my shirt and looked at my skinny belly.  All of a sudden I realized that I was 8 months pregnant.  I wondered how I could be 8 months pregnant and still have such a skinny belly.  Then I realized I was in labor.  Within the blink of an eye, I was holding my baby boy, while still standing outside the library.  My baby was swaddled in a white blanket and had a little crocheted white beanie on his head.  I thought that I’d better name him right away.  I started to think of good names for my baby.  I thought that Stan, Spence, and Hank would be good names.  Then I thought that maybe Stillwell would be a good name.  There was a character on Family Guy named Stillwell (ummm, there’s really not, as far as I know???), and I thought that it sounded like a rather regal name.  But then I stopped and remembered that I already had a favorite name for a little boy, but I couldn’t remember what it was.  I thought and thought, and finally it came to me… Leo!  I don’t know what I named the baby in the end, because the dream ended right as I remembered, “Leo.” 🙂

Record-breaking, Cold Water Dive!

Cast of characters:

  • Dougie – An Australian friend of my friend, Alison, who I met in Chicago during Summer 2013.  Fun guy!
  • Random frat-house slackers.

Historical context:

  • Certain departments at work, especially the Kids department, work with the Guinness Book of World Records to set new records.
  • No other real context.

The dream:

Dougie and I were sitting on a couch in a dingy room inside of a frat house.  We were both slouching on a dirty, ratty old couch, and I could barely see over the glass coffee table full of old pizza boxes, beer cans, and ash trays.  On the other side of the room, two guys and a girl were passed out on another dirty old couch.  The girl was sleeping with her head tilted back with her mouth wide open, and she was wearing black sunglasses.  The walls were a dingy and off white, and the only light in the room was coming through the closed shades on the windows.  We were somewhere in “the North.”  Dougie told me that he had come from Australia to do a record-breaking, cold water dive.

All of a sudden, we were on an ice-breaker ship in the Arctic.  The ship was bright white.  I told Dougie that the water had to be exactly 18F for the dive to count.  Dougie stripped down to his swim trunks, which were a red and white floral pattern, and then he jumped into to the freezing water.  I jumped in right after him.  I had an underwater camera and was there the capture the record-breaking event.

That’s it… the end!

Grand Cathedrals in Iowa

Cast of characters:

  • Maxtastic of the Burma
  • Aunt Connie… actually my second cousin’s husband’s sister who lives in Illinois.  I met Aunt Connie at a family party in Missouri in July 2013.

Historical context:

  • None

The dream:

Since my trip to Bhutan last month, I haven’t written about any of my dreams.  Life has been busy!  Time to catch up.  Nothing better to do at the moment, since I thought I’d be watching the Packers/Giants game right now, but instead, Fox is showing the 49ers/Saints game.  WTH?

So I had a strange dream a couple weeks ago.  I was sitting on the white marble steps in front of a grand cathedral.  The steps were shallow and very wide, and there were hundreds of steps leading up to the white Cathedral.  The cathedral looked like the Sacre Coeur in Paris, and the steps were more like the Spanish Steps in Rome.  But I was in Iowa.  It was a bright and sunny day with a bright blue sky.  There were people everywhere; sitting on the steps, walking up and down the steps, etc.  Max was sitting on the steps about half way up, and I sat down next to him.  Then I realized that I had forgotten something in the cathedral, so I ran up the steps and went inside.  It was very dark and gloomy in the cathedral, and I was the only one inside.  The only light was candle light coming from a few candles here and there.  I walked through different passageways, looking in different nooks and crannies.  Connie came around a corner and said that I should go back outside.  So I did.  I went back to sit next to Max.  He was eating hard french fries that had hollow tubes down the middle.  He shared some with me.  They tasted good.

The end!

Shillings in Senegal

Cast of characters:

  • Female Senegalese shopkeeper
  • Me

Historical context:

  • Constantly dreaming of Africa these days.  I’ve never been to Senegal or Burkina Faso… or Burundi.  Though I’ve been close to Burundi.
  • I have a relatively good sense of African geography.
  • I used Shillings in Austria in 1999.  Maybe elsewhere, too?  Britain?
  • Otherwise, no real context.

Saturday night’s dream:

I was in the middle of nowhere in Africa.  Geographically speaking, I was in Burkina Faso in western Africa.  However, in my dream, I was in “Senegal.”  I was out in the middle of the desert, and I wandered into a free-standing store made of stucco.  It was painted on the outside in bright aqua.  The inside was painted a dull light blue, and it was brightly lit in fluorescent lighting.  The woman standing at the counter was in her 50s or 60s and was wearing a red kerchief on her head.  She was wearing a light blue dress with cream-colored ruffles around the scoop neckline.  I don’t remember what I wanted to buy, but I put it on the counter to pay and offered her some Senegalese money.  She said that that wouldn’t work and that she needed Shillings from Burkina Faso.  But in my dream, “Burkina Faso” was actually Burundi, geographically speaking.  I begged her to take my Senegalese money, and she kept telling me she could only accept Shillings from Burkina Faso.  I was stuck; I wanted and needed my goods, but couldn’t pay for them.  I had to get going, but there was nothing I could do.  The woman was friendly, but she couldn’t help me.

Oh, hell no!

Cast of characters:

  • Ticket guy on a boat
  • Unknown “friends”
  • Me

Historical context:

  • We drove all of my worldly possessions from Chicago to DC in a white Penske truck in January… towed my car, too!
  • I seem to only dream of Africa these days.
  • I am more petrified of dying in a sinking boat than of anything else on Earth.  I get paralyzing anxiety when in a boat under the water level.  I first realized this phobia when I was 6 years old.  My family and I were visiting my grandparents in Houston, and we visited the Battleship Texas.  I loved the visit and had fun running around on deck playing with the guns and such.  Then we toured the inside.  When we went downstairs to the boiler room (under the water level), I started screaming bloody murder.  My mom took me back to the deck, and I have been afraid to be under the water level in a boat ever since.
  • 11 is my lucky number. 🙂

Friday night’s dream:

So this was a tiniest flash of a scene: I was filling up my white Penske truck.  I then watched myself driving my truck across West Africa from the sky.  I could see my white Penske truck driving across the map of Africa from Northwest to Southeast.

Then I was in a gray metal boat, similar to a battleship of some sort.  I don’t know where I was, other than in a boat.  I walked down a thin flight a stairs into a room with a card table.  A few of my friends were milling around the room.  I sat down at the table in a folding chair.  The table had a maroon vinyl top with a few tears in it.  There was a guy with a buzz cut sitting across the table from me.  I don’t remember what he looked like, but he was probably about 40.  He gave me a square piece of paper, which turned out to be my cabin ticket.  I was going to be traveling on the boat.  I realized that my cabin was going to be under the water level and thought, “Oh, hell no!”  I told him that that wasn’t going to work and that he had to find another solution.  He said that there was nothing he could do and that I had to deal with it.  When I looked at the ticket again, I realized that it had a big “11” written on it in black marker.  So my cabin number was 11.  All of a sudden, everything was fine, because 11 was my lucky number.

Lamborghinis in Rwanda

Cast of characters:

  • Jessica F. – Longtime friend and former roommate in Madison, WI.
  • Random men in suits.
  • Me

Historical context:

  • I visited Rwanda in October 2012.
  • I would never park somewhere where I might get a ticket.
  • I have no particular affinity towards Lamborghinis.

Last night’s dream:

It was a bright and sunny day in Rwanda.  I was not in any particular city; just in a big bustling city in Rwanda.  I was standing on a frontage road/street that ran alongside a main road.  There were men everywhere dressed in conservative, drab suits, walking here and there at a quick pace.  The curbs were crumbling.  The stores were accurate… open-front stores with the goods set out on display on the sidewalks.  There was a big box of black shoes in front of one store.  All of a sudden I was in a car, driving up and down the frontage road, looking for a place to park.  I couldn’t find a legal place to park anywhere.  When I’d get to a T in the road, I’d turn around in a parking lot and go back to the other end of the street.  Back and forth, back and forth.  I finally called Jessica F. on my cell phone while I was driving.  I told her that I couldn’t find a place to park.  She told me to come back to the East end of the street, and when I got there, I could see that she had a place to park in a parking lot.  She was with four guys in suits in a maroon Lamborghini.  The Lamborghini was actually an old, 1980s, dull-looking, 4-door sedan, but in my dream, it was a Lamborghini.  I couldn’t believe that Jessica was in a Lamborghini!  Though the parking lot was empty except for the Lamborghini, I couldn’t park there for some reason.

Too Close for Comfort

Cast of characters:

  • Actress Amy Jo Johnson as my random college roommate.
  • Actress Amy Jo Johnson’s random college boyfriend.
  • Me

Historical context:

  • I went to college in Madison, WI.
  • One of my favorite people in the world lives on Gorham St. in Madison near James Madison Park.
  • Last night, I was trying to watch this Canadian drama called Flashpoint on Ion Television, and I just couldn’t get into the show.  Yet there was this actress on the show that I knew I had seen before.  I googled, “Flashpoint actress,” and learned that she was Amy Jo Johnson, who played Julie on Felicity.  I watched Felicity religiously with my roommate, DeAnna, in college.  Incidentally, she was also the pink Power Ranger.
  • Garden/basement apartments scare me, and I have sworn that I’ll never live in one.  I’m too afraid of robbers and mold.
  • The main wall in my loft in Chicago is deep red.

Last night’s dream:

I was in my college apartment on Gorham St. across from James Madison Park in Madison, WI.  This wasn’t a real place… clearly something that my mind dreamt up.  It was a garden apartment.  The door faced the West, and upon opening it, I had to take about 5 steps down into the room.  It was only a bedroom; no bathroom, kitchen, or living space.  The bed was on the East wall, directly in front of the door.  The closet was on the left or North wall.  The South side of the room was dark, and I couldn’t see what was there.  The room was dimly lit, and everything was dark red or magenta.  The walls were painted a deep red, there were dark reddish-magenta curtains covering one window to the left of the bed near the ceiling.  A little bit of sunlight was coming through the curtains.  There were also dark reddish-magenta curtains covering the closet, which was really messy and had clothes falling out of it.  The 1980s comforter on the bed was brick-red satin.  There was clutter all over the floor.  I walked into my apartment, walked down the stairs, and then laid on the right side of the bed.  After a few minutes, Amy Jo Johnson walked in the door.  She wasn’t an actress in my dream, just my brunette roommate.  She walked down the stairs and laid on the left side of the bed.  It occurred to me that we had no money, and that’s why we had to live in a garden apartment with no kitchen or bathroom and only one bed.  It sucked.  We both fell asleep.  When I woke up, Amy Jo Johnson’s dark-brown-haired boyfriend was sleeping in the middle of the bed.  Don’t get excited, Guys… nothing happened.  It was normal that he was there, so I went back to sleep.  The end!

Shoes in a Food Court

GUEST ENTRY!

Since my dream last night was not very substantial, I thought I’d take this opportunity to publish my very first GUEST DREAM POST!  Yes, there are others who’d like to share.  This dream comes via my awesome second-cousin-by-marriage, Nancy, who lives in Madison, WI.  When she texted her dream to me last week, it made me laugh out loud on the Metro on my way to work.  I wasn’t laughing at the dead kitten part… just at the absurdity of the dream as a whole, especially the end.  Plus, you just have to know Nancy.  She cracks me up. 🙂

Nancy’s dream last week, in her words:

“Was still living in my childhood home, but apparently staying down the street with Wrigley, our dog.  We are staying in a brick house I always wanted to see the inside of, but had never been in.  I went out the front door to walk up to my real house and I could hear a cat meowing…there was one in the basement window of the neighbor’s house.  Since there was no glass in the window (???) I called to the cat and it came towards me and then stopped and licked its dead kitten that was lying in some snow.  It had a collar on and I suspected the neighbors were keeping it against its will.  I had to lay down in the snow to read the number on the collar.  Since they were really tiny I HAD TO PUT MY GLASSES ON!  Now Wrigley gets out the front door that I had left open and trots off up the street.  I am frantic that she will cross the street.  Cut to me in a food court winding my way through the tables and trying not to trip over all the shoes littering the floor.  BAM!”

OK, so I just laughed again after reading it.

Branded Cupcakes

Cast of characters:

  • Me

Historical context:

  • I like cupcakes.
  • We are in the middle of a major branding initiative at work.

Last night’s dream:

It was only a flash of a dream.  I was standing in a nondescript room with a cake-box full of chocolate cupcakes with chocolate frosting on the table in front of me.  The room and the table were gray, the box was brown.  The cupcakes were “appropriately branded” with my organization’s logo.  But then I realized that I had an actual branding iron in my hand, and I started to brand the blank cupcakes with the branding iron, which had our logo on it… like how one would brand a steak.  Branding the brand with a branding iron.  Geez.

At least it made my VP of Marketing’s day today after I told her.  😀