Disturbing Dreams

I had some seriously disturbing dreams last night:

First, I dreamed about getting into Harvard. Not through long study and skill but through a bizarre ping pong competition. I know, I know, but at the time my subconscious overrode my common sense and convinced me that it was all happening. Emotionally I was so happy because then I'd get to live near Ben. It simplified so many things (housing, job, to some extent money) and I just felt so glowingly happy.

My mom was there (in the dream) and we were talking, and she was being her usual practical self, and she was asking me what I wanted to study. I was having a lot of trouble deciding because it seemed obvious to me from the last few years that English was not the way to go.

All the way through this, I was asking myself, could this really be happening? And the answer was "It doesn't seem real, does it? But look around, it's happening!"

I've thought the same thing recently while awake and in a situation that seems unbelievable: with Ben.

What eventually forced me out of my dream was that there was a "scene break" and like an episode of House I asked myself: "How did I get from that room to this hallway? I don't remember covering the intervening space." And then I woke up.

And my happiness about finding solutions to some of my problems disolved.

That was the first disturbing dream.

The second involved me flying. I can sometimes fly in dreams. I don't know what that symbolizes, but to me it isn't a big deal. I like to fly. I'm usually fairly decent at it in my dreams and my mind is good at convincing me that it's real.

In this dream, I was flying by swimming through the air. I realized that I could swim a lot faster and without so much thrashing around if I dolphin kicked through the air. So I was dolphin kicking and slicing through the water and suddenly I am rocked out of the dream by Ben. Ben said something like "You can't do that, you're waking me up." I mumbled something like "I'm dolphin kicking to fly" and he replied "you still can't do it though. I can't sleep." I reluctantly went back to sleep.

In the morning, I asked Ben about it and he gave me a blank look. "I didn't wake you up. You never kicked me."

So this means that in my dream of dolphin kick flying I also dreamed that I was awakened by a dream Ben who scolded me for kicking him.

So I guess I'm having multi-level dreams now.

The third dream somehow involved being upset about the bailout and pointing out that it was mostly a group of farmers that were against the bailout even though economists like Paul Krugman were for it. This was kind of a slur against farmers and I'm not saying that they can't be intelligent, but I thought it was interesting that people trained in economics kept having to fight against the people who did not have active experience or training in the field. I suppose this could have been some sort of Creationist representation: the frustration certainly felt the same.

I was so upset that I wandered over to the bar and had a Sam Adams, which was okay. In the dream it was sort of like drinking a German wheat beer. Yes, I know that they don't actually taste like that, and I've never had one in real life. It was definitely that brand though, in a pint glass. The Sam Adams didn't last long though. I asked the bartender for something else and he gave me three beers off the shelf/out of the cooler and a coke. I tried to push the coke away, and he looked at the Sam Adams and pushed it back saying something like "If you liked that, you're going to need this to dilute the taste. They're awful." One was a Heineken and there were others in green bottles. All of them had specific brand names and no, I haven't had any of them either.

<disturbing image warning. If you're squeamish, don't read the rest.>

Finally the bartender cut me off and because it was his break and I looked like he was in bad shape, he took me for a walk. We walked out to a park in Cambridge (I remember thinking, "Ben's place is just over there.") There were other people in the park and we sat down. After a bit, a dog wandered over. It was a Pug, but it had a huge cancerous growth on the left side of its face. The tumors were tubules and some of them went through the skin and revealed little clear structures that looked like malformed eyes. In a sense, they looked like grubs growing through the skin and bone.

Someone, one of the other people in the park, mentioned that they thought this was "Landis' disease" and passed over a magically present medical textbook with illustrations of a pug. But the pug in the textbook had only a few lumps on his face. The poor dog in front of my had several inches of growths. The text book didn't even imply that the actual aberration could be as serious as it was. In the dream though, I just sat and petted the dog and patted it on the head until I woke up. I still feel sorry for it.

Yes, I patted it on the growth. Yes, normally I'd freak out. No, I don't know why or how I managed to retain my sanity and stay calm.

First, disappointment. Second, weird meta dreams. Third, horror.

All in the same night.

I've had nightmares before but all that on the same night is still unusual. The first one upsets me the most though. All and all, it was a very disturbing night of dreaming.

Totally Weird Dream

I don't have a job yet and it's starting to affect me in strange ways. For example, I had this truly bizarre dream last night about looking for work.

I responded to a Craigslist ad and got an immediate response asking me if i could come to an interview right now. So I rushed out and down one of the avenues to meet the woman at her house.

She's explaining the job and it has two parts. The first part is walking her daughter to school in the morning, getting to her house at seven and then walking her four or five blocks to her school. And then the rest of it was walking down to where the mother worked, some sort of book museum with about four shelves of books (mostly children's books from what I remember of the covers).

The mother and her boss showed me around and it was a nice place. There were some tables where people could sit. It was airy and expansive, which I thought was very nice for NYC.

Then they sort of just gave me a piece of cloth, as though they wanted to see what I would do with it, and I started to dust the shelves and the desks. I remember the mother nodded as though I'd just passed a huge test. She looked relieved.

I asked when she wanted me to start and she said "Right now!" explaining that tomorrow I would need to start.

Then she asked me if I had any other questions. I pulled her to the side, not wanting to advertise my greed, and asked her about compensation. Yes, I used that word in the dream for some specific reason.

But her response was priceless. She scrunched up her face a bit and said, "Well, the Museum has an admission price of $15, and I figured that we could waive it for you."

So, walking your daughter to school and cleaning the museum and all she was prepared to give me was free admission?

In the dream, at this point, I thought to myself that I'd take the job if she would give me five bucks a day for it and immediately chastised myself for being so stupid. That was her answer though. "I'll give you $5 a day."

I didn't take the job. I just stood there, sort of expecting another offer, but maybe some realistic figure, but it never came. Instead, her boss wandered over and suggested to her that maybe she'd better make it clear that there was no pay in the next craigslist ad, and he suggested text: "Hard working Asian willing to work for nothing needed to work for . . ."

Right, that was the other thing. She'd made passing references to being Asian throughout the course of the dream, including in the original job description, except that neither she nor her daughter was Asian. And I wasn't Asian in the dream either, so I was assuming that she was just trying to fill in for someone else and until I heard the manager put that in as a condition for the next ad I hadn't realized that they were really looking only for Asians but were willing to settle for me.

So finally I said something like "I'm sorry we can't come to some arrangement," and then I woke up.

And you know what, even though in real life I'm desperate, I'm still glad that I didn't take that job in the dream.

The Strangest Dream

Okay, I had the weirdest dream last night.

I was in this house, and it wasn't my house or any of the houses that I've ever lived in. It was a traditional wood frame house, probably more like the house that Calvin (from Calvin and Hobbs) grew up in than the one that I grew up in. There were slanted roofs with shingles and big windows.

I don't remember how I ended up there, but I certainly remember that it felt like home to me.

And then the Tyrannosaurus Rex appeared.

I'm not kidding, there was a Tyrannosaurus Rex in my dream, and it was relatively friendly. True, it was a little chatty and I couldn't get it to shut up, but not unfriendly.

At least, until it got ticked at me. I think it was because I told it that it couldn't come inside. It seemed to think that this was an intentional slight, and so it got angry.

I ran into the house and it started attacking the house to get at me. I remember at one point it was in the backyard and it smashed through the large window to get at me. Throughout all of this though, I couldn't help but to remember that this wasn't some random and mindless dinosaur attack but a personal vendetta against me.

If only I hadn't ticked off that carnivorous thunder lizard.

The funny thing was that eventually I got tired of running around the house trying to avoid the Tyrannosaurus head smashing through the walls, gave up and let him catch me.

So he pulls me out through the wall, chews on me, but I don't get hurt. I expected it, but the sharp teeth simply don't connect with me for some inexplicable reason. Or perhaps, as it crushed my bones, I simply didn't feel what's going on with my body.

Finally he gets annoyed and one of my faceless compatriots uses a shrink ray to shrink the Tyrannosaurus down to the size of a large mouse. The Tyrannosaurus is shocked by this outcome for a bit, but then realizes that now he can come in the house and that everything's okay.

I opened the door for him, and the little dinosaur wanders into the sun room.

And that's about the point that I woke up.

To me, the oddest point of the whole dream was that the Tyrannosaurus Rex was never just destroying things mindlessly, like the one from Jurassic Park. He was personally upset with me. It isn't like I cavort with Tyrannosaurs Rexes on a regular basis, so I have no idea why my mind decided to make up a dinosaur with a personal grudge.