record my dreams here

I start having some really crazy dreams. I had one Friday night that I can’t recall enough of to make a coherent story but last night I dreamt that Todd and I were in a truck, he was driving, and he went into some kind of, apparently, suicidal trance. I could tell he was going to drive straight into a wall, right through several parked cars. In the dream, I was yelling and grabbing his arm and trying to crawl across the seat to slam on the brakes and control the wheel. But here is where it is weird. Because normally in a dream, you’d wake up just before impact, right? Well, I didn’t. I didn’t dream the impact, though, but the dream switched “scenes” just before, when I was fumbling with trying to get control of the car and suddenly I was standing next to a swimming pool with Nadine. Children were cavorting happily in the water and she and I were standing there talking about our husbands. They were both dead as her husband had done the same thing mine had…Attack of the Stepford Husbands? As we stood there talking, trying to find some reason in it, a teenage girl jumped into the water and was obviously struggling at the bottom of the pool. A lifeguard pulled her out and she sat and cried about her hurt arm. So the dream ended with less than a bang, really, as that’s all I recall. But I did get the feeling that it was all somehow related…the girl and the husbands and bright sunny day at the pool…
I woke up with no feeling of sadness or hopelessness at all…

Just before my eyes were automatically opened by that internal alarm clock waking me at 5:25 for my morning walk, I was having a dream…the bits and pieces of it were my whole family…and a dog?
Yes! I was at home in Ohio with Sophie and Will and some other child? and a dog (my brother’s ex-wife is always dropping off annoying dogs at his house) followed us into town. But when we got to town, it was really my mom’s house out in the country again…and I walked in the dining room with that stupid dog hiding under a blanket and was so delighted to see my whole family there including my brother. And we were all laughing…

I dreamed about my dad last night. He went to a doctor to have brain surgery. When he came home, he stood in the doorway of my bedroom and told me about it. I asked him what color the brains were and then I said, “Do you feel better now, Dad?” and he said, “Yes, because there’s nothing in the way,” and he gestured in a waving circle around his head.
I was just happy he was well and grateful that that was all it really took to make him well. Instead of what really happened.
But it was just a dream.

This is the second night in a row that I have had a dream that feels like it should be sad but wasn’t…
In this one we were in the basement of some building (church?) and cleaning out old storage boxes or something. We found all these old film reels and books and loads of other things but I somehow became in charge of the film reels so that’s what I remember most. They were covered in dust and dirt so I started cleaning them up and then we were going to feed them into a projector to see if the actual film was still ok. They were old reels of The Sound of Music.
A man who was there seemed to doubt that I would do a good job but when I showed him that I had already cleaned one up thoroughly, he relaxed.
This made me think of my dad. He was very protective of his old home movies and it is something I worry about frequently, preserving the quality of those old movie reels.

this dream bit by bit throughout the day and now it is dwindling away again…
I was at home, summer day, just after rain. Looking up, I could see that the back part of my mom’s house was open to the elements, some sort of car moving across the floor up there. My brother had somehow cleared out his old room and made it into a mini roller coaster. The weird part was that no one seemed to care. None of us ever rode it but we knew it was up there, drawing visitors, making him money, I guess.
In real life, my brother is always coming up with wacky schemes that he never follows through on. One of the ones I can remember is how he wanted to take the back fields on the farm and turn them into a golf course and then sell adjacent house lots for big bucks. Everyone wants to live next to a golf course, he said. He wanted my sisters and me to buy up the best lots right then. Fortunately, of course, this never came to fruition. He’s like me: he has good ideas, he just rarely carries them out. Sometimes, that’s ok. Anyway, I think that might be where this dream originated…

At a family get-together, I wanted to take a picture of Sophie and Grace and Cecilia all together but the girls were sick of sitting still and kept running off. Sophie squeezed through the railings along the second floor porch where we stood and jumped to the ground below, all of us screaming at her to, “Wait! Stop! Sophie you can’t do that!” But when I looked down at her, I could see her right leg broken and I turned and started running for the stairs to get to her, crying the whole time. Then I woke up, thank God. And thank God it was just a dream!

That’s me.
I dreamed last night that I was the American Idol but it was no big deal to me. I was with a group of people on some kind of tour (to Las Vegas?) and we kept being shuttled around because someone had made some sort of mistake? Anyway, I saw a family I used to know when I worked at the library and I went up to them. The dad was so excited. He said he just loves me and he taped all the shows I was on. I felt like I had to explain why I never cut an album or cashed in on my celebrity, why I just came back to Ohio and lived my life. I just didn’t see myself as a Kelly Clarkson type.

For some reason, this made me wake up thinking about my wedding…

I looked back over the entries here because I thought I had had a dream about bears before and, sure enough, I had.
In this one, we were walking across fields and into grottoes, always wary of being attacked by bears. Finally, we hit one small valley where there was a black bear and a brown one and we knew this was it: they were deadly, mean bears…who gradually started looking more like men than bears. They attacked me and just when I thought I was a goner, the person who was with me (WN? my sister Sarah? Jodi?) came up behind him and cut off his arms with a chainsaw. Then she did one arm of the other bear and off we ran!

Sophie told me that her dream last night was of being inside a whale’s mouth. Our whole house was in the whale’s mouth…

I had the strangest dreams I’ve had in months in the first week I was here in Japan and they were mostly about people I wouldn’t think twice about in normal life. But in one, 2 friends in Ohio and I were having a picnic and I was ravenous and kept eating the potatoes and grits (grits! yum! with cheese and butter!) off her plate…

Emily, Sarah and I are living here in this house, seemingly without any husbands or children (nice!). One morning, the doorbell rings at 6am. I answer the door and it’s my parents’ old neighbor, Ed (who’s now 80+ and uses a walker) and his son. Ed is without his walker. They come right in and start making breakfast. It is chaos in my tiny kitchen. I try to make coffee but somehow, the coffee pot has disappeared (I find it the next morning and someone has used it to make grape kool-aid). Despite the early hour and the craziness, this dream leaves me with a sense of happiness.