Keeping the dinosaurs out with squirt guns full of thousand island dressing. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

DREAM

It's my first day to start working at a local cafe. It's huge, like a warehouse with a lot of different rooms created with room separators. 

I spend a lot of effort listening to a young barista talk about getting her art in a magazine. She had put it on display in the cafe, which helped her get it in the magazine. 

Then I listen to another young barista's personal beliefs and problems. 

They train me--or I should say, they tell me what to do, but they don't show me. I do my best, but the cafe is like a maze and I get confused. 

I stay late and follow a guy around who makes rat poison to seal the dinosaurs out of the room using thousand island in these very serious-looking black super soakers. 

My parents come to pick me up. 

The next day, I open the cafe alone. Luckily, my old boss from a bar I used to work at pulls in with his sports car and tells me he pays useful people very well, because he makes a lot of money off of them. I feel incentivized. Let's both make some money!

And then he does a much better job of training me how to open. He does every step himself with me right beside him to show me how to do it right.

Then I wake up, pee, and give my cat his 3 a.m. snackies and brushies. 

I go back to sleep, and then I'm manning a booth at a science fair. The scientist hasn't come and set it up yet, but I'm admiring him from afar. 

I really like what's on display in this booth. They're called "biological blankets," and they're quilts that do some kind of cool sciencey thing. I don't know what. I need to look into that after they get the booth set up and I have a minute to read the presentations. But I'm excited to come here to do this. 

Then the scientist arrives! I'm surprised to see that I recognize him. He's Dr. Bruce Greyson, who wrote a book about near death experiences called After. I absolutely loved that book. He's even more impressive than I had thought!

"Can I have fifty bucks?" he asks me. 

Instant disappointment. 

"Uh, yeah!" I give him $50, almost all the money the fair paid me to be here, which wasn't that much, but it had meant a lot to me. I would have stretched it out. 

He goes to work putting up his quilts, and does a good job. But he hits on my assistant running the booth with me. I think he's married. And he says little things here and there that are starting to make me think that he's kind of a douchebag. 

I hate that someone I had admired so much is throwing up so many red flags now that I'm actually getting to know him. 

INTERPRETATION

Hmmm! I'm sure remembering a lot of my dreams lately, although I did have a lengthy dream about hanging out with the Beatles that I forgot. Pity. 

Anyway, I think both of these dreams have something in common: meditations on the way people are hired. 

In the first dream, I'm confident and happy to be at this workplace when they take the time to train me properly. When they just expect me to show up and know everything with a mostly hands-off approach, I'm nervous and am not useful for much other than listening to my coworkers and hanging out with the exterminator. 

In the second dream, this guy clearly isn't hired for his personality. He's hired for how he looks on paper. 

Over time, I have come to be very wary of people who have credentials and look good on paper and don't have a personality type that gets along well with others. 

In my opinion, workplaces these days have it all ass backwards. They should be interviewing and hiring people with good personalities, and then invest heavily in training them. They shouldn't be looking for a certain set of credentials at all. 

Writing on the sky. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

DREAM

I'm on a street on what appears to be a busy space station. I'm watching a young woman. She picks up a street cat that looks like it could use help crossing. I watch her put the cat down. 

Then, something else crops up which makes her want to adopt the cat: it's all alone. I see her cement the decision to adopt in her mind. She seems to feel a need to explain her decision to the people nearby at a desk. 

Then I find myself writing. I'm writing with hundreds of other people in a stadium. I write on the literal open blue sky, on the ceiling of the space station we're on as I lay on my back. The lady beside me notices what I've done and gives me a reassuring nod. My cursive looks like smoke or burnt leaves in the sky.

Then I'm writing on paper. I'm writing about Seven of Nine from Star Trek: Voyager. Seven goes up to the mail clerk and asks for a change of clothing. She bumps into the Doctor, who asks her what she's doing. She replies that she's looking for a change of clothing so she can assimilate it. He says she won't find it there. 

A stack of mail gets knocked over, and sure enough, it's a brown package with a spare uniform inside. The cloth peeks out from the tattered edges. 

I try to write a witty reply from the Doctor, but I'm stuck writing by hand with ragged scrap of rubber or something that degrades with use as I press it against the paper. It hardly makes a mark on the paper, and my handwriting is ridiculously messy. The only way I'm able to get anything on paper is by writing really large and sloppy. I should give up on writing, but I don't. I need to see what happens to Seven and the Doctor. 

Then I watch an interview with the Doctor about why he was so sure she was wrong about being able to get another uniform.

INTERPRETATION

As for the first part of the dream with the girl justifying adopting the street cat, I can explain that by the fact that I am on a weight loss journey. So I watch this YouTube channel of a female bodybuilder who critiques Gorl World. 

I really dislike Gorl World. If you're not familiar with it, it's basically a community that harshly judges fat influencers like Amberlynn Reid and Foodie Beauty for failing to lose weight. They try to throw other rationalizations in there, but that's what it boils down to. 

So I block most of those channels except for this female bodybuilder's, because when I listen to her, she throws in tons of useful knowledge about health and fitness. Plus, her disgust at the neglect of these fat influencers' health is really motivational for getting fit and eating right yourself. 

I learned through one video or another about Gorl World that Foodie Beauty had this big drama because she tried to adopt a kitten straight off the streets, which is illegal in the country she was in. In the dream, there's a need to justify taking the cat off of the space station street.

And then in the writing half of the dream... man, in real life, it's getting hard for me to keep writing. For many years now, I've wanted to put writing down because I just don't see any material benefits from it. It's fun, but it's never made me a substantial amount of money. There are so many other things that seem like a better use of my time. But I just keep writing. It feels good to lie back and write on the sky... to get that approving nod from the people around me. And I need to know what happens next with my characters. But sometimes it's hard to justify how I just keep writing instead of doing more "productive" things. 

How could I have done that? (dream)

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DREAM

I'm in the house I grew up in, but I don't live with my biological family. I live with my stepfather. He's decided to get rid of two tables from my childhood home. I consider this carefully. 

I have emotions attached to those tables, but when I think about whether or not we need them, they really are just clutter. I could write on those tables, and maybe the writing could be amazing! But we have plenty of other surfaces I could write on. 

I let that stuff go and stand outside on the front porch waiting for strangers to come pick them up.

As I watch a man drive up to the neighborhood circle and find a place to park, I reflect on something else I had gotten rid of many years ago: all the venomous snakes I used to keep. I remembered all the adrenaline involved in that hobby. All the near misses from times a snake had struck at me. The anxiety I felt every time I had to feed them or clean their cages. And I thought... how could I have so ignored my inner emotions that I would pick up a hobby like that? Sure, I really like animals, but the way that hobby made me feel was so, so bad. How could I have done that? I remembered the relief I felt when my local pet shop and the local zoo accepted the animals. And I considered how I hadn't stopped feeling better ever since I dropped them off. 

INTERPRETATION

I'm having to get rid of my deceased mom's stuff to make more space in the house, and I've been wrestling with it. I don't think I had peace about the daily picking through her old things and giving them away to charity until I spoke with a counselor who said, "It's just stuff." And it's that simple and that true. 

I've come to think of my "spiritual experience on drugs" on the operating table as a possible near death experience. It had so many similarities with the NDEs that I've seen on YouTube and read about. And I've come to feel that it's very likely that we experience an afterlife. 

I have a good feeling about where my mom is at. I think she's happy. And I wonder if she's watching. Whether there is or isn't an afterlife, surely she is beyond the concerns that consume us in this Earthly world. Although she was really attached to her stuff in her lifetime, if she is watching from an afterlife, I don't think she would be a malicious presence that resents what I'm doing with her leftover stuff. If my NDE was any indicator, we feel immense love and peace and non-judgment in death. But my anxiety conjures up irrational fears about her being angry with me sometimes. I think this dream is asking me to work through those feelings.

But there's a second half to this dream. I've never kept venomous snakes. But it's a theme in some of my dreams lately. 

I had another dream in which I was a kid and my father had an entire farm of venomous snakes. It kept me in daily terror living on that farm, because snakes are very good at escaping. And I desperately wished my dad would find us a new way of life, but I knew that these venomous snakes were our source of income and no venomous snakes meant no food or shelter. In that dream, the snakes represented the daily yelling and psychological abuse I endured while a child. I had to live with this thing that made me feel horrible every day because there was no other way for me to survive. 

I think the venomous snakes are a similar symbol in this dream with the tables. I had horrible anxiety and pain almost every day for many years in my 20s. Most of that was just the result of untreated mental illness, but that co-mingled with a lot of bad choices--especially choices that I made about who to associate with and how I interacted with them. It's in such stark contrast with the relative peacefulness that's been in my life ever since I got proper medication and social support.  

The girl who will not stop sticking her finger up my butt. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

DREAM

I write a musical, and a local theatre troupe actually decides to stage it. I have a part in the musical too! There's only one problem: one of the actresses will not stop sticking her finger up my butt. I'm clothed, so it's not that gross, but it's still... distressing!

While we're backstage waiting for rehearsal to start, she will sneak her finger up my butt. She thinks it's this adorable, funny joke. I always laugh nervously and walk away. But then, we're in the middle of a big musical number, and she sticks her finger up my butt right there on stage in the middle of the song. Now I'm getting irritated. I'm actually quite embarrassed now. 

INTERPRETATION

People annoy me sometimes. Sometimes, I'm just trying to get through my day, when all of a sudden,  someone does something very inappropriate. 

Paranormal tax preparation. (rant)

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In the first several weeks or months that my mother died, my stepfather was inconsolable at times. He'd cry out, "This wasn't supposed to happen! This wasn't supposed to happen!" He still bursts into tears sometimes at the thought of having lost my mother. But he's slowly processing his grief.

I recently went with my stepfather to do my mother's taxes. The tax preparer, an elderly woman with flamboyant hair, nails, and avant-garde jewelry, asked us what date my mother died on. I didn't remember off of the top of my head. I asked my stepfather if he remembered. He gave the date and burst into tears. Then the tax preparer said, "It wasn't supposed to happen." 

I said, "That's exactly what he used to say when my mom first died. The exact same phrase!" 

She didn't look surprised or say anything more. She just turned and went back to doing our taxes on the computer for a minute before grabbing two boxes of tissues for my stepfather.

I don't know what to make of this. I don't think anything about the way my stepfather was crying would suggest that exact phrase. And she said it right after he burst into tears. I don't think he was mouthing it. I didn't hear or see him mouth or whisper it, and I don't think that's a common thing to say when someone dies. No one said that when my father or grandmother died. No one said that when my pets died. I've never heard anyone use that phrase in the context of someone dying or even use the phrase in general except for my stepfather and this elderly woman in the context of my mother's death. 

I think that's because it's a very bold assumption to make. It's not taking into consideration all of the people who say, "Oh, it's all in God's timing," or the people who think that whatever happens is just the natural course of things. 

I lean towards believing in the simplest, most practical explanations for things, because I know they're typically the true explanation. But I really don't know what the simplest explanation is here. 

Is this some kind of paranormal activity? There are so many possibilities. Is the lady a little bit psychic? Was she picking up on what my stepfather was thinking when my mother died? Or maybe what I saw when my stepfather was bursting into tears? Was there something suspicious about the way my mother died and this is some kind of message to us? It was in the hospital, and she wasn't in great physical condition, but... I dunno! Are we a simulation, and my mother's death wasn't quite typical or expected? Is there some kind of natural or other kind of law that my mother's death broke? I just don't know what this phrase could mean, taking it on face value. 

But this event was very, very odd.

Worried about dying in my sleep. (rant)

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Lately, I have been worried about dying in my sleep. That's probably my preferred choice for how to die, but I am still a little nervous when it's bedtime now. 

I have really severe sleep apnea. But because I can't sleep with a BiPAP machine most of the time, I'm only being treated for it in minimally-invasive, minimally-effective ways. My health insurance won't cover the recommended operations to help me breathe while I sleep, so this is the best I can do. 

For the last couple of nights, I'll have dreams in which I stop breathing. 

In one, there was a pretty elaborate set up in the dream for why I stopped breathing. The set up seemed to take a while to unfold, which makes me wonder how time works as far as how long it takes for the brain to create a dream versus how one experiences the dream. My brain probably only had seconds to create a logical reason in the dream narrative to stop breathing. But it felt quite a bit longer in the dream than the couple of seconds in which I stopped breathing. 

But then, in a subsequent dream, I was shopping and then someone in the dream was just like, "There you go!" And that was the signal in the dream that I had stopped breathing. There was no logical lead up to it. 

It started to feel as though I was drowning. I think I'm really lucky that I don't get sleep paralysis demons on top of it. My mother used to get them, and it sounded terrifying. But my dreams about why I stopped breathing weren't scary. Only the sudden thought that I might suffocate to death was scary. 

The roadtrip to Markiplier's house. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

DREAM

I'm about to start to go on a winter road trip with my parents. We're just about to kick off the trip and drive to our first site when my dad stops at a local Safeway and orders a platter of cheese, which he eats very, very slowly. Just when I think he's done and we can move on, he orders a different platter of cheese. This delaying of the exciting stuff that makes life worth living feels so typical of him, and I'm pissed off. 

Then we get on the road and we stop when we reach a frozen lake. We walk onto the lake. I'm very concerned about the thickness of the ice. I can see where it's not frozen. There are water bubbles that form under the ice when I walk on it. However, I don't see any fish or other animals, and it really surprises me. I wonder if the lake is sick if there's no wildlife. I think to myself that if this was California, there would surely be visible fish in the water. Then I see a large fish speed by. And I see another large fish. I love that they're here.

I look back at my parents and realize I've only worried about myself this whole time. I haven't been worried if they'd fall in. I've only been wondering about what I would do if the ice cracked under me and I fell in.

Then we start driving towards a relative's house, and my father just... veers into the left lane of traffic and off the road entirely into another lake that isn't frozen over. Everything is in slow motion as the car's trajectory gets farther and farther off of the correct path. I get a sense that this is something very fated and inevitable as he drives us to our watery doom. It's like I knew he was going to do this eventually, and it's a relief to stop worrying about it and having so many anxious fantasies about it and just know with concrete experience what it's like to actually have it happen. 

The car turns upside down in the lake, but we all manage to escape. We arrive at my relative, Markiplier's, yellowish house--drenched. 

INTERPRETATION

I went on a couple horrible road trips with my parents as an older child. It angered me that my father would refuse to plan these trips. He would say that there's no point in planning anything because we could never know what would happen in life--a wild exaggeration of the lack of control we have over where we go and what we do on a vacation, or life in general, in my opinion. But perhaps his mental illness influenced that attitude about trip planning. 

How could he ever know if psychosis or a horrible, black mood would strike him down? I'm sure it shaped many of his major life decisions. My own life story has an abruptly-changing quality to it that would have been much smoother had I not been mentally ill. 

Walking on the dangerous, frozen lake reminds me of how when I was younger, I had a habit of wanting to wander away from my parents on our outings. Something about it gave me a feeling of wanting to be close enough for the comfort of having parents, but not wanting to have anything to do with them. 

And then my dad steers us way off-course in the car. He often had really bad ideas based on a mix of conspiracy theories and fundamentalist Christianity. It felt really frightening and unstable. He didn't take care of either his physical or his mental health, so I always felt prepared to lose him. So when he died, there was a a little bit of surprise and gratitude that he had lasted as long as he had.