Laura

...especially when you almost never HAVE nightmares, you know it's grim. (Icon in honor of this stupid cold.)

Last night I dreamed that I had some sort of eye surgery, I forget what (I knew in the dream, darnit!), on my right eye. Then I had car trouble just after I left and walked back because, well, it was somewhere to be.

Partway there I realized something was wrong, closed my left eye, and there was nothing but a flat grey. I could see with my left eye, but not my right. Cue panic. I walked by a mirror and thought I could see a dark circle completely around the white of my eye, near the edge of the eye (lots of space to the iris), like it was separating. The eye started to throb and hurt and I could also see a misshapen lump below it.

I frantically called the doctor who'd done my surgery. He immediately came to check, and said he needed to check some things, please wait in this waiting room. While he was gone, I realized that the vision was coming back in that eye (my brain does NOT do nightmares very well, it tends to "fix" them, lol) and eventually I could see fine, but it still hurt like whoah.

The doctor hadn't made it back by the end of the dream, but my friends and I surmised that the vision loss was caused by pressure on the ocular nerve from the swelling from the irritation from the surgery. Which had eased off enough to let me see again, although I still had a throbbing headache. (By then, I'd completely forgotten seeing that ring around the white, and only remembered it after I woke up.)

Guess who woke up lying on her right side, with horrible painful sinus pressure, more localized there than on the left?

I'm not sure I can claim this thing CAUSED the nightmare, since it appears to have started with the vision loss and only later warped to include the pain, but still.

I dreamed last night. ( A carnival, my first cat, and mother. )

And every time I woke, the wind was blowing by the corner of the house so I could hear it, and I thought I could hear the faint tick-tick of rain on the windows (which it did prove to be raining when I got up). I love a good bit of wind and rain as long as they do no harm, and Mom loved a good storm, though she did prefer the thunder-and-lightning sort.

I slept well enough last night, but my dreams were odd. Wait, let me explain, this time I think I know where they came from: last night, I was playing around with photo editors, tweaking colors, not to fix things but just to amuse myself (such as giving myself lime-green hair). Needless to say, I didn't save these creations, but it was fun.

In my dreams, I could change the colors of things, just by touching them and concentrating on them. I wore an orange plaid flannel shirt, and someone took my pictures in it a lot. I got to keep it, but I didn't really like the orange-brown color scheme, so I turned it to pale and dark blues - replacing color by color, of course. At this point I seemed to be at my parents' house, because I accidentally lightened their door, turning it from a deep wood color to a diseased orange. I put it back.

I'm missing all the connectors that explain how I went from part to part of the dream (if they even existed, and it wasn't just sudden-transition; who knows?). But then I was in some sort of fantasy realm, and a princess was loaning me some of her jewelry. She had it labelled according to value, and I only got the cheapest; I looked at the values on the more expensive stuff, but not the stuff itself. The cheap stuff was not unlike the beads I love to make stuff with - imagine that - including some rounded balls of fake (or real, perhaps, but I doubt it) amber.

I took a few, already planning to make them look like something else.

And then we were travelling - where or why I don't remember, but it was urgent.

And then I woke up.

Oh, yeah. Almost forgot to share this. WEIRD dream. Earthquake dream. I know it started in the dream, but I don't remember what was happening before the earthquake. There were a bunch of us in a room, just standing there and bracing, and the earthquake went on and on. A real strong one; the room was rocking and rippling hard, and you really did need to hang on to stay up. (I live in Oregon; I've been through two earthquakes in my life; I haven't any clue how much resemblance this one bears to a strong one, having never been in one of those, and I hope I never know.)

The building kept tipping, so you'd be staring down-at-an-angle when you looked out the window, but it never fell over; it would rock back to vertical. And THAT is when I realized I was standing right in front of these big windows, and it suddenly occurred to me that they could shatter.

I didn't like that, so the woman nearest me and I went out into the hallway. I knew her, but I no longer recall how. It wasn't negative, but I don't know if we were friends, or what. Not anyone I know when I'm waking. The door was right near a perfect right-turn in the hallway.

We braced in little nooks - facing down the same hallway, I think - there was a table in front of us, the sort of a quick-setup sort with dark "wood" top and fold-down (sturdy) metal legs. And we stood there through a few more rolls of the earthquake (which was still being the Energizer Earthquake - it kept going, and ....).

And then I saw it. Something coming toward us. Toward her - it was going to miss me. Rolling. A book cart! I shouted "Look Out", turned, looked, and saw that she wasn't going to move in time.

Scene-skip. I don't think I closed my eyes, but maybe I did. No sound, feeling, sight of the actual impact. Look down. Book cart sitting there, body in two pieces, no blood, just the outline of two halves, as if cut perfectly down the middle. Look away, go back into previous room.

Dream ends. I -think- the earthquake may have been over at the very end there. Not sure. Very disturbing, odd little dream. My mind is strange.

You gotta be kidding me. I remembered this, but I make no claims to understanding it well enough to somehow title it. I slept, and I woke, and I'd dreamt. Two segments that stick in my mind.



At the first one, I was staying over at someone's house. It wasn't very houselike - it was large, and I was sitting in a seat not too unlike one at the movie theater, in a row of other such seats. I'd tucked my books and journals which I had with me (a fair number!) under the seat in front of me. My parents were there as well; I got up and walked back to where they were. I knew it was almost time for dinner; other people who were there were talking about which restaurants to go to.

I went back to my seat. My books were gone. People started filtering out to go eat, but all that mattered to me (mostly) was my books. I thought I could maybe order pizza in instead, but mostly I wanted to find my books. I knew my parents wouldn't go to dinner unless (a) I did or (b) I told them I was getting pizza. Instead I went over to one wall - left of me, more or less - where there were lots of bookshelves. The books on them were placed so that covers faced forward, and the book stood up (ie, "stacked" front-to-back). And they were sorted, gods help us all, by the dominant color of the cover.

Oranges. I found my Santiago. It now had a price tag of $4 in front of the cover, and I became irritated. Reds. I found my journal (I don't currently have a journal in this vivid shade in use, actually). I opened it to look for a price but was distracted by a far worse desecration: a full-page sticker over one of the entries, sort of like a huge book-plate, but with nothing that I can recall written on it. And then I began to notice that there were comments in blue ink - one or two words - on each page. I didn't read them, I just got steamed.

The more of my books I collected, the more I saw this same pattern: journals had 1 page covered with a full-page bookplate, and commentary. Regular books had prices pencilled in. After I had about six books (two journals), I saw someone I knew belonged to the house and went to confront her. She was dusting something, but the scene - except for her and my books! - was vague to me by the time I woke. She apologized, and said she'd put the books away, but that there shouldn't be prices or any of the other stuff.

I think I went back to talk to my parents, but I'm not sure. I don't know if I gathered all my books. The dream, or its memory, fades after this.



Going somewhere with my parents (a possible continuation of the "get me out of here" feeling from the last dream?). I think Mom was driving, but maybe it was Dad. It was NOT me. I was in the front passenger seat and I was busy being scared. Because we were going up. And up. A very steep tunnel. Steep as in, almost vertical. With curves, so that often all I saw was the twisted, natural, not-braced wall of the tunnel. Mostly brown, here and there marked with white deposits or the glitter of fool's gold, it twisted and turned away before us as we (slowly, thank heavens!) climbed.

The worst part was, I knew we had to come back the next day, which meant going DOWN. And I also knew, if this side of the tunnel was that steep, that the other side would be as well - only down. So both days we had to go down.

And with that realization we crested the top, rocked over, and started an almost vertical descent. I folded myself forward into the foot space so that my head was aimed almost straight down, so that I wouldn't have to look, and all the blood rushed to my head. It went on and on, so that I felt like I would pass out, and all the while I was scared, even though the car wasn't even slipping. It was a very slow descent, just as it had been a very slow ascent, and I spent it scared and hiding in the footwell. (Incidentally, while my memory suggests my mom was driving - because I think I saw her there in this dream - if she was, she was still in control and calm in this part. I don't remember ANYONE screaming, or saying anything, including me. I just folded down and weathered it. Which is odd; my mother is quite afraid of heights and drop-offs, in real life.)

Then it levelled out and I was so relieved. We'd made it. I sat up and we were in a natural cavern, with a house carved of stone (and far smoother than the cavern walls) before us. I jumped out of the car and walked forward, never looking back toward the way we'd came.

The floor was smooth stone where I walked, carved to a floor - carved to stairs and pathways around the house - but beyond it there was an underground lake. (Underground? The light here was perfectly good - and I don't actually remember a ceiling - only walls.) The lake had a number of rocky formations that formed very tiny pools, which I knew connected to the main body of the lake on their bottom, but which were surrounded by the rocks on the top.

I knew they connected because their were dolphins shoving their noses up through them and trying to look cute for the tourists. These weren't normal dolphns; they were probably not much larger than a large housecat. I wondered how long it had taken to train them to appear in those spaces.

I walked around the side of the house toward a set of stairs that led into the house and some of the dolphins disappeared from their holes, reappeared in the lake proper, and followed me. By the time I reached the stairs, they were only "sort of" dolphins (even though they'd looked quite like miniature, chubby dolphins until that time, from every angle-- chibi-style dolphins??), because they had front legs instead of flippers.

They pulled themselves up onto the lowest stair, looking at me beseechingly, and I knew that this - like all the other things - was an effort to get me to toss them coin, which the owner would later retrieve from the lake. I lingered, tempted, but never with a coin in my hand....

...and then I woke.

Woke early this morning: about a half hour before the alarm. It had been hot last night, so I went to sleep with the window open, cooling the room. I actually went to sleep later than normal, but I think this made me sleep better, because when I woke, it wasn't that awful feeling (where did my sleep go???) but that I was really awake.

How odd. So I got up (after about five minutes to fix at least parts of my dream in my mind). Guess I'll go to work a bit early today.

The dream? I was walking through...some building. A walk-through zoo? I'm really not sure. I don't remember (though I knew in the dream, and when I first woke) what came before or after. But there was a section with snakes. There were lots of employees there working with the snakes, but guests had to walk right through where they were to get to the next section.

And I knew it was dangerous: the idea was to go slow, not do anything to startle the snakes, admire them, and come out the other side unbitten. I think they were poisonous, or at least I thought so at the time.

Naturally, of course, one of them bit me. Oh, first, a couple went past me, around my ankles, or reared up to study me then went away. But then I startled one, and it reared up, and then it lunged for my left hand and sank its fangs in deep. Poisonous? I don't know, but it ripped my hand up but good: inch-long quarter-inch-wide furrows. (Which, oddly, my mind was quite graphic about the look of torn flesh - and had plenty of room to be, because there wasn't any blood.... I don't think I want to know what it thought I was.)

I started screaming (only fair: that's what I'd do RL if I'd been stupid enough to get in that situation!) and the employees were very sympathetic, sent me back out the way I'd come to a waiting area, but the doctor who could treat it was on the next shift of employees. I had to wait 5-10 minutes for her to show up, then she did some extended scan of the injury.

That was really bizarre. This thing stuck up through the table, and she had me put my hand next to it and hold perfectly still. And the table and my chair moved around, rotating, so that it could get the whole hand. Really odd. When she was done she seemed satisfied - I don't remember any actual treatment - and headed in to work with the snakes. Oddly, I was satisfied too, no longer worried about the hand (and I don't remember seeing it again the in the dream to see if it was fixed, bandaged, what).

I do remember apologizing, as she headed in, for having spilled a container of snake-food. I don't remember the container but it was either on that odd table or some nearby surface, because I spilled it near the chair. (And it looked, oddly, like giant flakes of tropical fish food....)

Weird. Good morning.

So I wake this morning at 3:30 to the alarm. Eep. And, as usual when my sleep cycle is interrupted, I remember my dreams especially well. One stands out (enough that I can still remember it as I type):

I was visiting my parents, just a casual visit for a few days, and we had to go do something so we got in the car. I was sitting next to Dad. Dad was driving. We were in the back seat. Yes, the back seat. I knew this in the dream, knew it was odd, knew Dad liked to drive from there. He was commenting on how easy it was to handle backing out and stuff like that, just turn around in the seat (don't ask, I don't know!). I'd swear Mom was there but I didn't see her in the front seat when I was peering around the seats.

Finally, I noticed he had a hard plastic steering wheel attached to the (soft vinyl) back of the driver's seat in front of him. I commented on it - I was surprised to register that, even though he was driving in the back, he had gone to the effort of putting a wheel there. (I suppose I thought he would reach all the way to the front seat? Urk?)

Weird. And I guess my mind stayed in dream logic land when I woke up. 'Cause since my boyfriend isn't going to the funeral, and has work today, I had to get up pretty quickly. And efficiently. So, as you sometimes do for these moments, I had prepared my outfit for the day so that I could grab it easily and go change.

And I actually had track of all the elements: pants, shirt, underwear, socks. (This is important. Preparing for a busy day, I have been known to forget one or another of these, much to my dismay on the busy day.) So I grabbed the hanger and went down to the bathroom to actually change. Underwear, check. Socks. I was VERY surprised when, as I was dealing with the socks, the pants fell off their hanger and slumped to the floor.

I find this very amusing now, because I had stored the socks with the rest of the ensemble by the expedient of clipping them in the same clips that held the bottom cuffs of the pants to their hanger.... I distinctly remember being dismayed and wondering why the pants fell off, because I had only unclipped the socks (that being all I was interested in).

Apparently the pants were just supposed to float there until the clips closed again. (When the first one released, and the whole thing tilted to the other side, I thought, wow, it's really sensitive to the weight of the socks in its balance.)

I'm glad they didn't. Now that I'm more awake, I don't think I could deal with floating pants today.