Tag Archives: white

A Day in Guadalajara

Cast of characters:

  • Cardinal Jessica – One of my BFFs who I met about 12 years ago. She was the door girl at the best bar in the world, the Cardinal Bar, in Madison, WI, where I spent a large portion of my time in the mid-2000s. We both then moved to Chicago. She now lives in Minneapolis.
  • Nacho – The definition of pure awesomeness.  My girls and I met Nacho and his friends in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, while on vacation in 2013.  He’s one of the nicest people on the planet, and he lives in Guadalajara.  We’re friends to this day, and he helps me practice my Spanish and keeps me laughing. 🙂
  • Nacho’s “friends” (not any that I met)
  • Me

Historical context:

  • I still use CDs in my car’s CD changer (I’m old school).  I have several deep house compilations from DJs at the Cardinal Bar from way back in the day.
  • I like the Green Bay Packers.
  • I love Mexico, but have never been to Guadalajara.
  • I was with Cardinal Jessica when we met Nacho.
  • Nacho drove us around Playa with his friends in a white SUV while on vacation.
  • Cardinal Jessica and I (and our other girls!) are going back to Playa next month.

The dream:

Last night’s dream started with Cardinal Jessica and I in Chicago, flying to Guadalajara for the day.  We arrived at the airport in Guadalajara, and Nacho and his friends picked us up in a shiny new white Suburban.  Nacho was wearing a Green Bay Packers sweatshirt… it was green with yellow writing and a yellow collar.  Nacho’s friend was really tall and big, and he was also wearing a green Packers sweatshirt, along with a green, satin Packers coat.  There were a bunch of other nondescript friends around.  I remember looking to the left and seeing a large US-style water tower.  Jessica and I got into the back of the Suburban… Jess on the right and I on the left.  Nacho got into the passenger seat, and his big friend got into the driver’s seat.  The other friends all piled into the middle seats.  There were probably 8 of us total in the Suburban.  We told them that we had to return to the airport for a 5:30pm flight back to Chicago in order to catch our flight down to Playa del Carmen.  Nacho and his friend said that they would have us back to the airport at 5:00pm, which would give us plenty of time to check in.  Jessica and I said we’d probably need more time than that.  Once we were all in the Suburban, we just started driving all around Guadalajara, which was actually more of a village than a city.  The colors outside were very bright greens and yellows and rich browns.  All of a sudden, I had a CD case in my hands, full of all of my old deep house compilations from the Cardinal Bar.  I pulled one out and handed it up for Nacho to throw into the CD changer in the Suburban.  Then I handed up another and another.  We just listened to my CDs as we drove around.  It came time for the boys to drop us off at the airport.  We got out of the Suburban and said our thank yous and goodbyes to them.  Then Jessica and I entered the airport, and the boys drove off.  Then I realized that I had left my precious CDs in the CD changer.  Oh man!

The end.

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Tent Hopping and a Honduran Gangster

Cast of characters:

  • Me
  • A Honduran gangster

Historical context:

  • I don’t like sleeping in tents.  It’s just kind of gross.  All I can think of is condensation on the bottom side of my sleeping bag and the smell of stale Doritos.  I’d be more apt to sleep in a tent if it was cold outside.
  • I don’t own a tent.
  • When I was 11, I bought my very first Panasonic boom box for $88.  It had a double tape deck!  It still exists and is swimming around my parents’ house somewhere…
  • I don’t know any Hondurans that I can think of, and I have never been to Honduras.

The dream:

This dream was weird, and I’ll do my best to try to describe it.  I was sitting on a large grassy hill facing north.  The hill was absolutely expansive, and I was sitting high over a lake so large that it was more like a sea.  The grass was yellow green, and there were dark green forests far away to the east and west.  The lake was slate gray.  There were a few people around… kids playing, adults at picnic tables.  It seemed that we were in a park of some sort, and it was absolutely silent.  Suddenly, I was sitting inside a royal blue, 4-person tent far to the east near the forest.  It was my tent, and I had dirty clothes sprawled upon the floor of the tent.  My black boom box was along the back wall.  I was sitting among the dirty clothes, when I realized that I wanted to move the tent further west towards the center of the park and along the major road that ran along the south side of the park.  My tent was magically meant to move on its own, with me inside, but all of the dirty clothes weighed it down too much, so my magic tent was having a hard time moving.  It just shuddered when it tried to move.  So I picked up the dirty clothes and put them in a mesh laundry bag.  So now, there was a laundry bag full of dirty clothes, my boom box, and me in the tent.  With this arrangement, with the clothes placed in a laundry bag, the tent was able to move on its own.  We slid across the grass until we were in the center of the park, about 10 feet from the busy road at the southern end.  I unzipped the door of the tent to look out over the traffic.  My line of vision was at about the same level as a big, gray, steel guard rail, but I could see the cars whizzing by in both directions.  I could hear the loud traffic.

Flash to a vision on a black and white TV of a Honduran gangster.  It was his mugshot, and we was wearing a black shirt with white writing.  He was short and round, and he had a round head with black hair about an inch long.  There was news commentary in the background about the gangster wanting to shave his head.  His dad didn’t want him to shave his head.  Flash to the Honduran gangster’s knuckles being  directly in front of my face in real life.  He showed me both sets of knuckles, across which “True Bloods” was tattooed in black ink.  That was the name of his gang.

The end.

A Snake in My Pants

Cast of characters:

  • Amy P. – I met Amy my freshman year of college at the UW-Madison in 1996.  I lived with her for two years during college, and she’s been one of my best friends ever since.  She currently lives in Madison.  Miss her!
  • Random dude driving a brown VW Rabbit
  • Lil BUB – Celebrity cat… awesome!
  • Copperhead snake

Historical context:

  • I am absolutely petrified of snakes.
  • I love Lil BUB!
  • My dad drove a brown VW Rabbit when I was very little in the early 1980s.  I saw one driving down East Wash when I was in Madison last week… hadn’t seen one in a good 30 years.
  • I was in Spain in June.
  • I’m not particularly fond of khakis.

The dream:

This was surely an anxiety-ridden dream, verging on a nightmare.  I woke up in a panic.

I was walking through a small village in Spain with Amy.  We were walking over cobblestones, all the buildings were made of tan-colored stone, and it was a bright, sunny, blue-sky day.  While we were walking, a random guy drove up in an early 1980’s brown VW Rabbit.  He opened the passenger door and offered us a ride.  We seemed to know him and decided to go with him.  There were bench seats covered in white vinyl in both the front and back of the car.  It was a four-door, and Amy got into the back seat, while I got into the front passenger seat.  After closing the door, I looked down at my khaki shorts, and a copperhead snake slithered up from the right side of the seat, over my hip, and onto my lap.  I started screaming, but I couldn’t move to get it off of me.  He was angry and baring his fangs and kept lunging at my right thigh to bite me.  But he couldn’t bite me through my shorts.  I knew that, if my shorts were only an inch shorter, he would be sinking his fangs into my thigh each time.  Each time he lunged at my leg to bite me, he shot venom onto my bare knee.  I had a ton of venom running from my knee down my shin.  He just kept lunging and lunging while I was screaming… I’m not sure if Amy and the guy were even still in the car at that point.  All of a sudden, the snake stopped trying to bite me and slithered down my thigh, over my knee, down my shin, onto the floor, and through a hole under the dash and into the engine.  He was about 4-6 feet long.  Once he made his way entirely through the hole and into the engine, I felt some relief.

Suddenly, I was standing outside the car in the same village, but now in the town square, standing on wide tan-colored paving stones.  It was still bright and sunny, and I was still surrounded by tan, stone buildings.  I was now wearing khaki pants instead of shorts.  I looked down to my feet, and all of a sudden the snake started slithering out of my bottom, right pant leg and onto the ground.  The snake was in my pants!  I was so disgusted and freaked out.  I started screaming and jumping around trying to get him out of my pants.  He slowly slithered all the way out of my pants.  Once he was fully on the ground, he coiled up, and I knew that we was going to shortly lunge at me to kill me.  I looked all around me to see what I could do.  To my left, Amy and the guy were now standing outside the car watching me.  Behind me, I saw a church about 100 yards away.  I knew that, if I could get into the front door of the church, I could close the door and escape the snake.  I turned around and started to run full speed toward the church.  The snake immediately started slithering after me, gaining speed every second.  I ran for what seemed like forever, when I realized that Lil BUB was running behind me, also trying to escape the snake.  She was running as fast as her tiny legs could take her, but I was afraid the snake was going to get her.  I screamed, “Come on, BUB… BUB, come on!!!”  I kept trying to get her to run faster.  I finally made it into the church and started to close the huge wooden door behind me.  I peeked out and saw that BUB was only about 10 feet in front of the snake.  She finally ran in the door, and I slammed it shut behind her.  The snake lunged at the door to get us but slammed right into the closed church door instead.  BUB and I survived!

The end.

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. ???

 

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.

“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!

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!