Tag Archives: red

Plane Crash in Texas

Cast of characters:

  • Mom
  • Dad

Historical context:

  • Reoccurring dream:  I dream about plane crashes and have for about 18 years.  No fun.
  • The Malaysian Airlines crash a few months ago terrifies me.  It’s hard to believe that, in this day and age, a 777 with a couple hundred people onboard can disappear into thin air.
  • I traveled with my parents to Europe last week and flew on the same plane with them from Paris to Barcelona.  We were not in the back row.
  • I have no particular ties to Texas.

My last dream post was almost 6 months ago.  After my surgery, I had an impossible time trying to sleep for a few months.  And since then, I really haven’t been dreaming.  This weekend, my dreams came back!  I’ve had three that I remember the past few days, and this is the first one.

This was a plane crash dream.  I’ve had them for years, and generally, they follow the same pattern.  It used to be that I was at the airport, knowing that the plane I was about to get on was going to crash.  But someone always forced me to get on the plane anyway.  Once in flight, the plane would start plummeting to the ground, and then I’d wake right up right before it crashed.

These days, my plane crash dreams consist of me being desperately late to the airport.  Sometimes I make my flight in the nick of time; other times, I miss my flight and have to fly the next day.  Once in flight, the plane starts to lose altitude quickly.  The plane flies low above the ground for a long time before finally hitting the ground, sometimes crashing violently, and sometimes landing with damage to the plane.

The dream:

In this dream I was with my parents, and we were late for our flight.  Flash to being on the plane with them, in the middle section of a jumbo jet in the back row of seats.  It was night outside, and the lighting in the plane nearly nonexistent.  There was a reddish-brown glow inside, and it was quiet.  People were moving around in silence.  Flight attendants were serving meals.  Mom was sitting between Dad and me; Dad to her left, me to her right.  All of a sudden, Mom grabbed her head, saying that she had a horrible headache.  She said the plane was going to crash.

Suddenly, I was in the window seat in the back of the right side of the plane.  I opened the shade and could see that we were indeed crashing.  It was light outside, and I could see the ground passing by at lightning speed.  We appeared to be flying only a few stories off the ground.  The wings of our plane were snapping power lines.  The pilot told us to brace ourselves for a crash landing.  We landed hard on an empty interstate highway, but the plane stayed intact, and we all survived.

Flash to not being in the plane any longer and watching the crash landing on TV.  The news showed the plane crash landing on a Texas interstate.  It was a Malaysian Airlines plane that was white on the outside with light green and red pinstripes.

Flash to being back on the plane.  After landing on the interstate, the pilot continued to drive down the road.  The road was very hilly, and we kept going up and down the hills.  Eventually, we made it into a more inhabited area with some houses, utility polls, and power lines on the side of the road.  Everything was gray, white, and tan outside.  We approached an underpass underneath a set of train tracks.  I saw that the plane was going to have to go under the underpass to continue to travel on the road.  I was worried that the underpass wasn’t wide enough to accommodate the plane’s wings.  I was right.  As we drove through, the walls of the underpass ripped the wings off the plane.

The end.

Advertisement

“You Ruined Yellow!”

Cast of characters:

  • Eddie:  My first Chicago roomie who I found on Craigslist 7 years ago.  I don’t see him very often anymore, but he’s one of those friends that will always be there… one of my favs.
  • A full cast of random extras.

Historical context:

  • My favorite color is yellow.
  • My favorite number is 11.
  • I was in Vegas last month.
  • I lived in Chicago for 6 years… a Chicagoan at heart.
  • I die in dreams sometimes, and when I do, it’s always from being shot.  Other locales where I have been shot and died… in an outhouse in rural Spain, in a long, dark blue hallway in the Amsterdam airport, and under an overpass on John Nolan Drive in Madison, WI.

The dream:

This is not a fun one, folks.  I had this dream a few weeks ago.  It is still crystal clear in my mind.

I entered a fancy hotel in Las Vegas with my fellow assassins.  I don’t know if we were good or bad, just assassins.  I was with a handful of men, all dressed in black suits and wearing black sunglasses.  I was also wearing a black suit coat, skirt, and sunglasses.  I had on a black wig… a bob.  The hotel lobby was cozy and dimly lit and had dark red velvet curtains lining the walls.  The chairs and couches in the lobby were also dark red velvet with gold rivets.  The carpet was a deep red paisley.  There were people lounging around the lobby, both sitting and standing.  We walked through the lobby to check in at reception.  We knew that we had to be very careful during check in so that no one became suspicious about who we were and why we were there.  The group of men (5 or 6 of them) checked in first.  They were all going to be staying in a suite.  They checked in with no problem and without eliciting suspicion.  They walked away to the right, and then it was my turn to check in.  I was staying in a standard room next to their suite.  The man checking me in was tall and thin, with short sandy blonde hair.  He was wearing a button-up white shirt with a pin-striped vest and black pants.  I also checked in with no problem, until the very end.  When the man handed me my key card and told me my room number, he looked me in the eye, and I knew that he knew we were up to something.  I was so nervous that I had been detected as an assassin, but I tried to brush it off as nothing.  I turned to my right and walked to the elevator.

All of a sudden we, my fellow male assassins and I, were in a ballroom upstairs.  It was a very bland and large ballroom… white walls and ceiling with beige swirly carpet.  There were several round tables with white table cloths set up at the other end of the ballroom.  It was as if all the round tables were pushed against the back wall to create a big empty space in the middle of the room.  There were several metal and beige chairs sitting around the tables.  The ballroom was set up to hold a conference of a few thousand people.  Behind us, there were a few long tables against the wall, covered with white table cloths, with a few leftover appetizers… little sandwiches on silver colored plastic trays with white doilies.  My fellow assassins and I were standing in front of the long tables, relaxing and talking.  We were all dressed casually… the men were wearing white t-shirts and jeans.  I don’t know what I was wearing, but it wasn’t my fancy suit.  We were waiting to carry out or mission… the assassination of a lot of people.  All of a sudden, the room was “full” of people, and by full, I mean that there were about a dozen other men milling around the long tables along with us.  We were chatting and making small talk, when one of my fellow assassins screamed “DOWN!” and all the assassins hit the floor.  All of a sudden, the guns that we had hidden in the fake trees on the other side of the now much-smaller room started shooting the other men in the room.  We all knew that, after we heard the eleventh gun shot, all the other men in the room should be dead.  I laid on my stomach next to one of my fellow assassins who had short brown hair.  He and I looked at each other as the eleven shots went off, counting each one silently together, one by one.  After the eleventh shot,  we all looked around at our fellow assassins, before slowly standing up to assess the situation.  All the assassins had survived the shooting, and it appeared that all of the other men in the room were now dead, as planned.  As we became more comfortable in our belief that all the other men were dead, we started talking in normal voices about how to get rid of the bodies.  That’s when I turned around, and then everything moved in slow motion.  One of the bleeding men on the ground was not dead, and when I turned around, he was standing there holding a pistol, pointing it at me from about 5 feet away.  He was a small, middle-aged man with brown spiky hair and pale skin.  We was wearing a bright yellow t-shirt with some sort of red emblem on it.  He was bullet-ridden on the left side of his body and held the gun with his right hand.  As he began to collapse back to the ground, he screamed at me, “YOU RUINED YELLOW!” and then shot me six times on the left side of my torso.  I fell back and stared at the white ceiling, speechless, as I started to bleed to death.  All of my fellow assassins were standing above me, screaming at me, trying to save me, when I closed my eyes.

When I opened my eyes, I was sitting in the front seat of the right side of a bus against a window.  It was pitch black outside, and we were driving down an endless street in Chicago.  The bus driver was just driving straight, with no reason to stop.  There were no street lights or any signs of life outside, just blackness.  The front of the inside of the bus was bright red, and the side walls of the bus were bright yellow.  The bus was well lit inside.  Next to me, in the aisle seat, a woman sat.  She was my friend.  I was wrapped tightly in white gauze, but my gunshot wounds were bleeding through the gauze.  I was dying.  The woman and I were so sad, but we had come to terms with the fact that I was close to death.  I looked across the aisle and saw that Eddie was sitting in the aisle seat on the left side of the bus.  I walked over to him and sat in the window seat next to him.  I leaned over and laid in his lap.  He put his left arm over me, and we both started sobbing.  The sadness we felt was overwhelming.  After a few moments, I died.

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!

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!

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.

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!