Tag Archives: grass

A Misplaced Hacienda

Cast of characters:

  • Virginia – The best (and my former) stylist in Chicago.  She’s one year and one day younger than me, and sometimes, we have the same peachy-colored hair.
  • Me

Historical context:

  • I’ve been to several countries in Eastern Europe, but never really to the countryside.
  • Once again, I love Mexico.
  • No other real context.

The dream:

I had this dream a few nights ago.  It was a weird one.  I was standing in a decrepit shack in the middle of nowhere.  The shack was made of long-faded gray wood, and the shutters were hanging by a thread.  I stood out on the rotten front porch, looking over a beautiful green field of long grass towards a “hacienda” about a half mile away to my West.  I was somewhere in Eastern Europe.  I left the shack and started walking down a dusty road that cut through the green field to the South.  It was a bright and sunny day with a blue sky.  I walked towards the hacienda in complete silence, and the grass was swaying in the breeze.  When I arrived at the hacienda, which was really an old adobe-style Mexican house, I entered the courtyard from the South.  The house surrounded the courtyard on the West, North, and East sides.  The rooms of the house were open to the courtyard… the walls were a deep cream, and the roof was made of terra cotta tiles.  You had to climb 2-3 steps to enter the house from any direction.  I entered the North side of the house and stood in the empty entryway.  I was really confused.  Then all of a sudden I was in the East side of the house, and I realized that I was in a Mexican restaurant.  There were 3 tables with 2 chairs each in this room, and the walls were a dark peach color.  All of a sudden, Virginia walked into the room and put a bowl full of salsa on one of the tables.  I was so relieved to see her.  Her hair was tied up in a kerchief, and she was wearing a white apron… she was the waitress.  Now, I was in Mexico, not Eastern Europe.  The steps from this room down to the courtyard were old and crumbling concrete, and each stair was covered with plywood so that you wouldn’t fall through the stairs.  I started to slither down the stairs like a snake, disrupting the plywood as I made my way down to the courtyard.  Virginia told me to be careful.  Then I stood up, and started walking down the dusty road, through the green field, and back to the little gray shack.  I walked in complete silence, as the grass swayed in the breeze.  The sky was black with an impending storm.

The end.

BONUS:  Here’s a little snippet of another dream I had that night.  I was walking from my loft in Chicago to the California Blue Line stop, which is the El stop closest to my loft.  I stopped in front of the little Mexican grocery right in front of the stop, and looked down at my purse.  It was this cream colored purse from H&M that I bought when I was about 23 and that I haven’t seen in at least 10 years.  The zipper had split.  I kept zipping it back and forth, hoping that I could get the teeth of the zipper to start gripping each other again.  I just stared at my purse as I kept trying to zip it back and forth, back and forth, with no luck.

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An Inexplicable Series of Dreams…

Cast of characters:

  • Dad
  • A young, 1970s-version of my grama (mom’s mom).  It was my grama as she looked in my parents’ 1973 wedding photos.
  • Jan and Harry – Two clients with whom I traveled to Bhutan in October 2013.
  • A gigantic cast of randoms.

Historical context:

  • I have been on a hot air balloon ride in Turkey.  I did not crash.
  • I like banana pancakes; berry ones, not as much.
  • I’ve read the Hunger Games series.
  • Nothin’ else!

The dream:

This dream consisted of six, separate, unrelated scenes.  It was a bad dream.  The whole thing was very quiet with an overwhelming sense of foreboding.  When I think of all of these scenes, and how they quickly flashed from one to the other, I do think I’m probably a little bit insane…

Scene 1:  I was sitting in a dingy, gray, cement room in the middle of the desert in Mexico.  The room was probably only 12 ft x 12 ft.  There was a long, skinny window about 5 feet off the ground along the North side of the room.  The sunlight coming through the window was the only light in the room.  There were cobwebs and dust covering the window and the walls.  There was a round, wood table in the middle of the room.  I was sitting at the table with three other people, playing poker.  I don’t know if they were men or women.  I was about to lay down my cards and win the game.  But I had cheated.  I don’t know how I cheated, but I had cheated.  And the others knew I had cheated.  But I was going to lay down my hand anyway and “throw the match.”  As soon as I laid down my hand, I knew that war would break out around the world, and the world would end.  I laid down my hand.

Scene 2:  I was in a dark tent, sitting in the blackness.  The wind was howling outside, and it was freezing in my pitch-black tent.  I opened the zipper of the door and looked out.  All of a sudden I had a view of my little black tent from hundreds of feet above.  It was daytime, and my tent was high in the mountains, pitched in snow.  All there was to see for miles was snow and rocky outcrops of mountain.  Snow was whipping around my little tent, and the sky was gray.  There was nothing but snow and rock for hundreds of miles.  I realized that my Dad was out walking in the snow and was lost.  I got very worried.  I then had a view of him trudging through the snow.  He was wearing animal skins and furry boots.  Suddenly I was back in the tent, and he opened the door and came in.  He was drenched.  He said he’d been walking in a circle for 12 miles, just like he did every day.

Scene 3:  I was in a hot air ballon with Jan and Harry.  We were in a small basket by ourselves with no pilot.  The sky was gray, and it was very windy.  Our balloon was rainbow colored.  We were flying to the west, completely out of control.  Our balloon was being torn up by the wind.  We knew we were going to crash and just hoped we would survive.  Our basket skimmed a large oak tree, and part of the balloon fabric was torn by the tree branches.  We then flew only another couple hundred yards and skidded to a landing in a rock-solid field of dried and cracked mud.  We were thrown onto the ground, but we survived.  We realized that, before we hit the tree, we had flown over a decrepit little village.  We started to walk back to the village for help, and as we approached, we could see people peeking out of their windows with deep suspicion.  The roads of the village were dirt, and the homes were shacks, at best.  The whole village was falling apart.  The villagers started to come out of their homes and descend upon us.  The old women wore white kerchiefs on their heads, and the men wore cabbie hats and smoked pipes.  The entire village, including the clothes of the people, was gray and brown.  We were in a village in Eastern Europe.  The people were all old and had no color in their skin.  As they started to circle around us, we knew there were going to kill us.

Scene 4:  I was sitting in a long, white breakfast room at someone’s house in Europe.  There was a long plank table on the west side of the room with long benches along each side.  My grama and some others were sitting on the bench closest to the wall, and I was sitting on the opposite side with some others.  There were no lights on in the room, but plenty of sunlight was flooding into the room from a large window on the south side of the room.  I looked down onto a plate of very flat pancakes.  There was some sort of berry compote on top.  My vision then moved around the table from plate to plate, with a birds eye view of all the pancakes.  All were flat with berry compote, and all were on terra cotta plates.  Then I was back in my seat and looking diagonally across the table at Grama.  She was the 1970s version of my grama… big dark brown beehive, royal blue lace dress.  Grama had a big fluffy pancake on her plate, and it started to grow.  The more she poked it with her fork, the more it grew.  It grew until it was about a foot tall and two feet wide.  We all looked on in wonder.  It was going to explode.

Scene 5:  This one was the worst.  I was standing in the middle of a grassy field.  The grass was about a foot tall… half of it was tan and dead, the other half was barely green and still alive.  I was standing with someone’s brother, and there was blonde girl (maybe early 20s) about 30 yards away from us.  The sky was gray and the day was calm.  We were dressed in mesh armor from the middle ages.  All of our armor was silver, and we all had on maroon felt shoes.  I was standing facing the girl, who was trying to kill someone’s brother who was standing behind me.  My only mission in life was to protect the brother.  It was a stand off for what seemed like hours.  The girl and I just stood and stared at each other, as a bit of wind tousled our hair every now and then.  The brother just stood behind me.  After what seemed like forever, I thought I could better protect him if I turned around and hugged him.  I hugged him so tightly.  He was about my height with light brown hair.  This is the first time I ever saw him.   I hugged him and hugged him and hugged him.  Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the girl lift her hand, and in one quick motion, she threw some sort of weapon at him and it sunk deep into his neck.  The weapon was made of shiny lead and was about 6 inches long.  It had a long handle with what was like a spur at the end.  It was the spur that stuck into his neck and killed him almost immediately.  I had failed at protecting him, and we both sunk to the ground.  I held his bloody head in my lap as I screamed and screamed and screamed.  I just sat in the long grass with the dead brother wailing for a lifetime.  I’ve never felt so sad in a dream.

Scene 6:  I was standing in a dark room, alone, with only the faintest brown light.  All of these scenes had been manipulated by some supreme power.  This was the Hunger Games.

The end.

PS – I had the aforementioned sequence of dreams three nights ago.  This morning, I woke up from a dream thinking, “I am a mall rat.”  That’s all I remember. ???

 

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!