Lately I've been having incredibly vivid dreams. So I decided to put them in an ongoing journal entry. Feel free to interpret or comment. Thanks go to Lucinda for this idea.

Specific dreams follow, chronologically, with most recent at top:

6/18/08
This one was REALLY strange, and REALLY disturbing, so if you are faint of heart, don't read. I don't know why I had this dream, because my birthday was relaxed and enjoyable. I didn't realize this stuff was still so obsessively in my unconscious mind. But anyway...

We were in the home I grew up in, but it was merged oddly with our current house, and there was a hospital wing off the end of it, like a full ER, and it was...a morgue too. Everything had an eerie green glow. It was like we were in a movie at the same time as "real" life, I somehow knew this, that we were being watched by an audience. The premise basically was that my grandma kept dying and coming back to life, sicker and sicker each time. She would die and they'd wheel her into the hospital/morgue, which was on the second floor where she had lived in my childhood home, and then she'd come right back. She didn't totally look like herself. She was much thinner than my actual grandma ever was when I knew her. And parts of her body were...rotting...and one of her eyes was totally clouded with a cararact. My mom and I kept begging her to "go rest for good" but she kept coming BACK and yelling that she wasn't going anywhere. She kept sitting on an organ bench, or trying to hug me. My mom kept coming to me too and begigng me to somehow make it stop, saying how much harder it was everytime grandma "died." I started crying because I had no idea how to make it stop.

Then went into the kitchen and I spilled water on the stove. Somehow, I have no idea why, this caused it to light on fire. And then smoke filled the house. Reall thick black smoke. I couldn't see. I had to force mom out of the house because she wanted to get upstairs to save grandma. I somehow knew she had died for good this time. I got mom and the dog out, but not the cat, who is very old. I heard the cat screaming in pain inside the house being burned alive. Then I woke up.

I am so shaken up by this dream.

6/15/08

I think some of these motifs have to do with it being Father's Day, my least favorite holiday of the year. Dreamt I was a man, an average nondescript looking thin guy with sandy hair and glasses, and I had an Asian daughter. I believe I was a scientist of some sort, a biology professor...and I took my daughter to school, a new middle school, and gave her a metal lunchbox, and kissed her goodbye. Then I got in my car, a beat up old blue Toyota, and there were these evil guys from some gang chasing me. I led them away from my daughter's school and to once again that old farmhouse in southwest Ohio where my (like my, Amber for real, lol) family's lifetime friends live. I found a rifle and shot at them even though they had much more efficient automatics lol. They were like these Italian mafia gangsters, so weird. I think they shot me like in the leg but it didn't hurt at all even though I bled a lot. And then it turned into a video game, lol >>; Like Pac Man or something.

What struck me about this dream was how real was this man that I was. I had never seen him before but he had such a vitality. He was no one I had ever seen in a movie or real life. I don't know where he came from. I've been dreaming a lot about these really vivid male characters whom I've never seen before, but somehow feel I haven't made up. Odd, eh?

6/12/08

I'm in this dormitory that's also a university class building (based heavily on one haunted Peabody Hall from my undergrad university). I am in my underwear. I run into my dorm room in the middle of class (it's always a math class and I don't get it, even though I got math out of the way with AP Calculus in high school, lol) to put on a skirt and tank, because it's the middle of summer. The professor is this creepy lecherous old man. His TA is a hot young man, in his early 30's, dark haired with glasses and with a goatee. He is very striking and familiar, even though I've never seen him before. There is an air of allure and danger to him at once. I think he's English. When I come out of my dorm after class is out, he's the only one left. The prof and students have let out. He asks me if anyone is waiting for me outside the building. I look out the window and it's suddenly winter and snowing. I say yes, my mother is waiting for me, because I'm not sure this guy is safe. He says "walk out with me, then?" I agree to. He's staring intensely at me all the while. We get outside and I am walking barefoot in the snow but it doesn't feel cold. He asks me "do you like men?" Still staring. I say "yes, I'm a single consenting straight woman," as if it's some clinical diagnosis, lol. Then I go "and I have a question for you, why do you ask?" And I turn around, and he's already gone. I go to my car, and I wake up. The lingering feeling of both danger and pleasantness. Disturbing, but I almost want to meet him again in another dream. Weird.

6/2/08:
More grandma dreams. Half-memories really. She was about 7 years younger again. This time we were driving a main drag in Ross, Ohio, where I went to high school. She was driving, per typical with one left hand, rather cavalierly, as was her style. I was eating nachos from Taco Bell. I suddenly realized neither of us had been paying attention to where we were going, it was getting dark, and the road was slick from rain. I said, "we'll get lost," and she said, "no you won't." I woke up. About 4:30 am.

Next dream. We were all back home at the house where I grew up. Mom was watering plants she'd bought at a local store like Meijer or Walmart or something. She was much younger and yelling at me for not helping. Mom and I rarely fight so this alone was enough to disconcert me in the dream. I kept having low bloodsugar and telling her I couldn't come out onto the back covered patio and help her until I had eaten. I was much younger myself...something like a high school freshman. And for some reason my hair was straight (I hate how my hair looks straight). There were snakes and huge millipedes in the house and under the patio bricks and it was revolting but somehow no one was worried about it. It was a very hot summer day.

Suddenly the person watering the plants...and the concrete, for some pointless reason, was the actor who plays Peter Pevensie in CoN--except he was neither Peter nor the actor himself, but like...an older version that looked a tad like Prince William. For some reason I knew I was in love with him but he mistakenly thought I was his sister, and I couldn't prove to him otherwise no matter how much evidence I gave. So I gave up talking to him for a minute and walked inside.

My mom was sitting in the front room arguing with my grandma, who was NOT younger and healthier this time, but rather in very bad shape, and sitting on the organ bench where she often stopped to catch her breath after coming down the stairs to go out. She was wearing a dirtied old night gown but had her purse and shoes on, and was insisting upon going out. Somehow she had been released from the nursing home and her death had all been a hoax: she was still alive, but would only be for a couple of days, and she wanted to make the most of them. Mom told her she couldn't drive anymore and to stay put. I pulled mom outside and told her to let grandma do whatever she wanted. Mom just told me to go help "the boy" water the plants. So I went back to the William/Peter boy. In the back yard, for no explicable reason, are several of my favorite cartoon characters, including Xelloss from Slayers and Sesshomaru from Inuyasha. They're just standing there, giving me sad and empathetic looks, but mute and unable to come and embrace me. I feel hurt and disappointed. Then I turn back to William/Peter boy.

For some reason he was upset, and I told him "I know it's hard," and I hugged him. I got wet because we were both wet from the hose spraying on us. I kissed his neck and said "I love you." And then I woke up. About 6:30 am.

Next dream. I am back at the Gushurst farm. The Sesshomaru character is there but again unable to reach or touch me, so he goes to sleep sitting on a tree stump. The Rin character, his adoptive daughter, is sleeping in his lap. I ignore them. My bloodsugar is going low and I am sweaty, but there is an enormous tree that comes to life (not unlike an Ent in the LotR movies/books). It's a he, and it has a beard, and it has many bare branches. It tells me " you must go deep deep into the forest near the farmhouse, and seek the thing you are seeking. There you will find a blemish, a great gorgon, which you must smash. (here the tree took this big ugly boil thing out of the grass. The thing turned into a tarantula spider.) "You must pursue and destroy it at all costs, and then you will find what you seek. Now see through the gorgon's eyes." Here the tree offered the spider to me and it bit me on the face. I yelped and stepped back, and fell over. Everything started turning these neon bright colors. Then I woke up. It was really late, 11:30 am. That part was so weird. What part of my subconscious is instructing me to do things like that? What might the spider and the tree and the woods be representing?

5/31/08:
I was herding a bunch of wild dogs, sweet but hyper, out of a vaguely recognizable farmhouse in southwest Ohio. It was a conglomerate house of my childhood home, my current home, and something else I knew I loved but couldn't quite peg, as well as my undergraduate art studio. My mom was helping me. We got the dogs out the back door. I looked at the stretch of green farmland and retired crop fields, followed by dense forest, before me, that I was at the Gushurst farm, a place that was a second home to me all through my childhood, owned by the best friends of my maternal grandparents.

Mom disappeared--I don't know if she went inside the white farmhouse or around the corner of it. There was a group of people, all living, sitting on the picnic bench by the tire swing that is behind the farmhouse. My grandma was sitting on it too. Only she was behind everyone else on the picnic bench, sitting off by herself. She looked about 5-7 years younger than she was when she died last month. Still old, but much healthier. I walked up to her because I was so stunned to see her.

She beamed at me and said "Did you call me today?" I felt a wave of guilt because in her last weeks alive, I had not called her at the nursing home as much as I should have, because I was both ill and buried under in PhD homework. I told her "yes," a white lie to make her happy. And then she hugged me. And it felt. SO. Real. It felt PHYSICAL. Not just like in a dream, but like someone was really embracing me. I started sobbing, and I said over and over "But you're dead, you're dead. You're not here." And she said something conciliatory, I can't even remember what it was, I just remember that her voice was warm and comforting.

And I woke up crying very hard. It was around 9 am.

A dream I had two days before grandma died which, now that I think about it, proves I was on some level expecting her to go. In that dream from about a month or so ago, I was walking grandma out to ..I don't know if it was the ocean or Lake Michigan. The latter makes more sense as we've been there before, but it seemed too vast, ominous, dark, deep for that. She said "I want to go in." I told her that her legs were too weak and she'd drown. She repeated her request and I walked her in till we were up to our necks. She kept nodding off to sleep, her mouth and nose going into the water. This is signifcant because she had COPD, which basically is where your lungs get so full of fluid that you drown. Anyway, I kept pulling her head out of the water. Thank God that dream didn't last very long. Two days later in the middle of the night we were awakened with the phone call telling us she had died.)

Frequent motifs in my dreams for the past about 3 years:
--The basement of my undergraduate art studio, with lots of pipes and air ducts in the ceiling, and me crawling through them to get away from some dangerous unknown male presence.
--Tornadoes and no one knows they are coming but me.
--Enormous snakes in a domestic space eating pets and trying to eat people.
--Wolves--sometimes ordinary, sometimes the prehistoric Dire Wolf--ambivalent presence. It's like they're there for me, but they find the presence of others offensive, and want to kill them off. I feel that the "killing" is symbolic, though, of distance or change.
--A large opaque body of water, either a lake or an ocean, infiltrating an interior space, or me having to cross it, and usually sinking into it. The water floods one of several interior spaces: an airport, a department store, a rapid transit train station, or my home.
--Dead people being alive and healthy and conversing only with me in a crowd of many.
--A beach.
--Driving on an unknown road and getting lost or ending up in the woods somewhere.
--Some kind of boy/man who is in love with me, but whom I have never met before.
--The complete absence of all of my closest friends, as if they have died or never existed in the first place. This is very disturbing.

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IRL friends whom I (and who are DAMN good artists too): , , , ,

Online friends whom I (and who are DAMN good artists too):