501 Creative Writing Prompts: Prompt #5 - Maurice the Mole Finds a Tunnel (creative writing exercise)

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 Prompt #5: Maurice the Mole Finds a Tunnel

Maurice the Mole had made himself a cup of blueberry coffee first thing in the morning. His claws clinked lightly against the ceramic cup as he picked it up off of the Keurig. He measured out a couple of tablespoons of monk fruit (he was watching his triglycerides) and watched them disappear beneath the brown liquid. Then he poured his cream and sipped the bulging surface.

Today, he wanted to meet with his best friend, Margot the Mole. They didn’t have a specific time planned. Just… eventually.

He had used up almost all of the monk fruit, so he had to go down to the basement to refill his jar.

Maurice lived by himself, and it scared him to go down to the basement. You had to go in a way before you could reach the chain that turned the light bulb on and off. He opened the door.

“...Hello?” he called out at the top of the stairs. The whiskers on his snout shook. He wanted to give anybody who was secretly living in the basement the opportunity to be friendly.

He carefully felt his way down the stairs with his slippered foot. He tripped and fell straight into the shelf with the monk fruit at the bottom of the steps.

“Ouch!” he said, rubbing his arm. He glared at the shelf. Then he noticed something odd. He had knocked over a couple bags of rice and beans and shaken the dirt from the wall quite a bit, and behind all of that was the faint outline of a sealed tunnel.

He took the rest of the items off of the shelf and pulled it away from the wall. It was definitely a sealed tunnel.

Digging was Maurice’s favorite pastime, so he dug into the crusty earth with his long claws and reopened the tunnel. 

The tunnel ended up being quite elaborate. It took him up and down and east and west.

Finally, he came to an ending that seemed very abrupt. He decided to keep digging. When he saw the light again, he was in front of something: a small stack of dishes.

“Hello?” he said. “Hello?!”

The door on the cabinet opened.

“Margot!” he exclaimed.

“Maurice! What are you doing in my kitchen cabinet? And so early in the morning!”

“I’ve been meaning to come see you!” he said. “Is this a bad time?”

Margot thought for a moment. “No. But I’m in my pajamas.”

“I don’t mind,” said Maurice. “Actually, so am I!”

“Would you like some lemon cookies?” Margot asked.

“That sounds delightful. I haven’t finished my coffee yet!”

“Well, you can have some here!”

Margot went to another cabinet and placed a small stack of cookies on the plate in front of Maurice. She went to her percolator and measured out the coffee before pouring a pot of water into it.

“What are your plans for the day, Maurice?”

“Well,” he said, between mouthfuls of cookie, “my plan for the day was to come see you! But now that I’ve done this, I suppose I need new plans.”

“Ms. Peeper’s tadpoles just hatched over in the pond. I’ve been meaning to go say hello to the new little ones.” Margot sat down at the kitchen table and began consuming some of the lemon cookies.

“Could I join you?” asked Maurice.

“I was hoping you would!”

I have to decide whether to be a cop or a firefighter. (dream)

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DREAM

I pass by a desk. A cop and a firefighter are relaxing on either side. I have to pick which job I want to have. I pick cop, because fire fighters are too nice to be me. I watch myself as I train, and there's something different about me that makes me stand out among the others. It's in my personality. A depression. But it's a part of me and I see from this outside vantage point that it's endearing. 

I'm watching Paul Blart 2, and there are some pretty cliche scenes. "These movies really follow a formula!" remarks a coworker who majored in film for a while. But I actually like parts of it. In particular, I like this one lady who runs around sleeping with everyone but the balding office dork. She saves the planet by kissing an alien and giving it herpes. 

Then, I'm on a starship with Captain Jean Luc Picard. He's allowed an alien species on his ship, but they've stolen his droids, like R2-D2 and C-3P0. He learns that there's a price to pay for being too open and free with his friendship as he scrambles to get the droids back (and does).

INTERPRETATION

I think the first part of the dream points out how self-esteem can impact where you end up in life. I don't know what to make of the fact that in the dream, my depression was something lovable. Maybe that's connected to the theme of self-esteem. I think it's very easy to feel unloved when you're depressed, but that's not necessarily the fuller picture. 

I liked how in the part with the lady who sleeps around, we're laughing at this nature she has to be very sexual, but it also ends up being the thing that saves us. 

I think there's a similarly mixed message at the very end of the dream. Yes, there's a price to pay for being too trusting too fast, but he also had the inner resources to manage the situation so that everything turned out okay in the end. 

A dream too random to title. (dream)

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I've been having some dreams that I just haven't taken the time to write down right away upon waking up, so I'll typically forget all the details. Some of them had the potential to be pretty cool in written form. There was the dream about Spider-Man in which the twist was that he was a very thin woman. There was the dream that I was on a team which was responsible for training the new Emperor. The new Emperor had spent his whole life on a farm, and he was a humble, hard-working, likable kid in his 20s. And now, he had a lot to learn about being a public figure. And then there was the dream that I went to a gym with the softest leather couches. And we would hold these bath-bomb-like, scented things that had to be electronically charged with an extra-large USB-C outlet as a meditative practice.

But last night's dream is just plain random. I had decided the night before to write down the dream regardless of what it was though, so here it is.

DREAM

I see a boy monkey with a crush on a white, girl monkey in a high school. I wonder what their story would be like if they made it to the cuddling on the couch stage, but no farther. So I put them in that scenario and watch. I can't decide if he should be at her house, or if she should be at his.

I slip out of my bunk bed the next morning and put on some clothes I want to show off on social media.

My father and I pile into a car. It looks like we're in a really, really crowded, dystopian urban area. Punks on bikes cross the street rapidly, but I manage to cross the street in my car and not hit anyone.

Pretty soon, the car has a dad (who has switched from being my dad to being one of my professors) seeking to find his lost or kidnapped daughter in it. He exits the car in an alley.

I see that I have an apartment. There's an old lady who says they don't know who's in that apartment, but I know it's me. I don't say anything. The walls are vertically striped in baby blue and pastel pink and there's a tight spiral staircase in the center.

Then we see a diorama of a place. The father bumps into someone in the alley who he says just wants to see his son walk to school from Greenland. He says this with judgment.

We get back in the car and the diorama becomes a music video. I arrange the clips like a midi maker. A guy comes out and tries to sell us his H.R. Giger alien/Barbie/Buddha barbeque diorama accessories. He pitches it like he's making a profound fashion statement. I feel powerful when I decline, but he seems to be handling the news badly. He's confused about why I declined. Now that I see he's hurt, I realize I probably shouldn't have gotten wrapped up in getting annoyed by his audacity. All art needs audacity. Probably all sales too.

INTERPRETATION

You know, I typically see how the events of my real life are reflected in my dreams, but this dream seemed almost completely random. The most I can say about how this dream connects to my real life is that I do feel powerful when I decline offers (and I recently declined a large offer), and I do believe that the professor/father in the dream cares a lot about his daughter in real life, and sometimes when I'm driving, it really does seem like these random pedestrians crossing the street have a death wish and I really need to get where I'm going without hitting them. 

I'm left out of the youth group film project. (dream)

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DREAM

I'm heading into a store. Times are kind of rough in the world. So going into this store feels luxurious, even though it's just a large chain store with that same underlying warehouse feel that chain stores have. There are at least expensive items for anyone to look at and touch, even if they can't afford to buy them. 

I see a display, and I pick up a book about plants and cooking from a small stack of them. I know this is a hot book right now, and I don't think everyone here in this store appreciates what a catch it is. I think rather smugly to myself, The fools! There's no malice in this feeling though. I'd just like to show other people what they're missing. I'm excited. I try to start up a conversation with someone else at the display, but the conversation doesn't go anywhere. 

Then I realize I might have made a mistake. This is last month's hottest new book. Maybe that book over there is this month's. I stop my hubris and take the time to actually check the dates much more carefully. Maybe buying this book isn't as great an idea as I thought it was just a couple of seconds ago. 

I wander out of the store into the mall that it's a part of. I bump into someone who I know is an indie filmmaker. We chat for a little bit. He's filming something today on the upper levels. Then I bump into a group of people from my youth group. We exchange a quick, "Hi," but I notice where they're heading, and I notice that they didn't invite me to join in the fun on the film crew. I'm hurt. 

INTERPRETATION

That pain of being left out is very old, and very familiar. I used to feel left out of my youth group very often when I was a preteen. 

I have been going through something for the past three weeks. Every morning, I wake up to painful feelings in my stomach and a tumble of negative thoughts reminding me of my past mistakes and regrets. Or maybe the negative thoughts are repeatedly telling me that my future is going to be a catastrophe. Or they just tell me that I'm a really bad person. I'm just in a lot of pain these days. I didn't have a relationship go bad. I'm not sick. I'm doing things I would ordinarily like. Nothing significant is going wrong in my life. Yet I'm in the grip of something very dark. So I'm not surprised that these old, painful feelings are being thrown back up in my face in a dream. 

What's more of a mystery to me is the first part of the dream. Could that just be how I always feel like I need to check things a second time? I have been reading code documentation for a library I am not familiar with, so I've definitely had to go over things multiple times recently, checking and rechecking my assumptions. I've also been considering how everyone has a reason for the hurtful things they do. And maybe it's worth trying to go back over those memories to figure it out. If you really understood where they were coming from, wouldn't that lessen the amount of hurt you feel? 

501 Creative Writing Prompts - Prompt #4: The Museum of Love (creative writing exercise)

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Prompt #4: The Museum of Love

Carl had fallen asleep at the wheel and woken up tumbling after the car had fallen off of a winding mountain road. He hovered over his mangled body as an explosion rocked the car. Fire began to consume his body, but it didn’t matter to him. He was watching, and he felt fine. He was dead. There was no other explanation for being free from that body in the burning car.


At first, he was concerned for his teenaged kids, but he was shown that his kids would go on to live a full life without him. And so he let go.


He shot up into the air, up into outer space, and he suddenly found himself in a small outdoor theatre watching the most vivid projections he could imagine. He would end up spending what felt like years reviewing all the mistakes he’d made. Every thought and feeling was replayed and relived. And every time he’d done something that resulted in someone else’s harm, his memory of the event was replayed alongside the memories of the person he’d hurt. He could feel their pain and see them going on to do harm to themselves or others.


In particular, he’d treated a boy very sternly in his classroom, and now he felt all of the anxiety and the trauma he’d caused. The boy felt pain in his stomach whenever he did an assignment in school and the boy would fear the responses he would get from teachers after he was in Carl’s class–all the way into college when his anxiety caused him to drop out.


But all of this embarrassment occurred while he felt the most profound feeling of being loved and cared for–just for existing. There were deceased friends and family beside him watching these mistakes too. But he could allow himself to feel the others’ pain, because he knew that there was love for him in spite of his mistakes. The love in the afterlife was a love unlike anything he’d ever known during his lifetime–even from the people who had cared for him the most. He bathed in it.


When the review of his mistakes ended, an Asian man walked down an aisle in the back of the garden-theatre. His smile and calm composition radiated compassion. “I’m Mukti,” he said. “Let me take you to the museum I curate,” he said.


They flew through the sky to a building that looked like a library. He entered. They passed several people looking through the shelves. Mukti went up to a computer kiosk with a large screen and passed Carl a headset that floated in the air.


Carl took it. He put the headset over his eyes. A memory played–just like the memories of all the mistakes Carl had made in his lifetime. But this was different. The memories were just as vivid and just as inclusive of others’ memories, but instead of being embarrassing, this was pure bliss.


He heard Mukti say, “This museum includes a collection of all the times you treated people or animals kindly, with love in your heart. You can revisit any of the events of your life, but this is your highlight reel! All you have to do is think of this collection to know how to come here.”


Carl smiled. He played the first memory. His son was excited to come see him after a long day of work. Carl had stopped by the grocery store and while he was there, he bought his son a little Easter present: a yellow plastic chicken that laid eggs. He saw how much joy his son got out of the surprise and knowing that his dad cared about him. He saw all the joyful moments his son had playing with that chicken right up until a leg broke off and he was tired of it and threw it away.


“Are these in any particular order?” asked Carl.


“Just watch. You’ll get used to summoning them in any order you feel like.”


Carl smiled. And just as he had spent many years reliving the harm he had caused, he spent many years reliving the love that he had put into the world. He had a lot to learn in this new life, but one thing was clear. Possessions didn’t matter. Status didn’t matter. Competition didn’t matter. All that had ever mattered was love. And it was eternal. He was at the very start of his journey into eternity.

501 Creative Writing Prompts: Prompt #3 -- The Place Where You Grew Up (creative writing exercise)

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Prompt #3: The Place Where You Grew Up

This is the church where someone betrayed you. Where he kicked you out into your car on the night of a winter’s storm when your father was out of his mind, wide eyed and talking about spaceships that would take him up for 1,000 years. 

This is the parking lot where you slept that night. There’s no public restroom in the store.

This is the pet store where you had shopped 100 times. The manager told you you’re a job hopper and they don’t want an employer-employee relationship with you. 

This is the fast-food restaurant where the drug addicts from Texas worked. One of them threw a hot oil poker like a spear at his most loyal friend–who didn’t want him to be fired afterwards. 

This is the university where they allowed you to drown in hopelessness and anxiety. Where they allowed you to be discriminated against for the mental illness you were self-diagnosed with. 

This is the mental health clinic where they sent you to the hospital against your will, where they trapped you and treated you cruelly, called you names and charged thousands of dollars to not give any help. 

This is the house where your ex-roommate spread rumors about you like she did with everyone else behind their backs. She got you fired from that indie filmmaker’s set. 

This is a place of one bad memory after another. They say you can’t run away from your problems, but leaving this place really set the reset button.

501 Creative Writing Prompts: Prompt #2 - The FBI has my crush. (creative writing exercise)

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Prompt #2: The FBI has my crush.

It was hard to believe that this was their prime suspect: a 5ft tall female in her mid-30s pulling all of this off with no partner. But this was her house. And if there was going to be any evidence connecting her to the murders of forty-one prostitutes whose bodies were dumped along highways in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, they’d find it here. 

Agent Knight was ready for surprises and hidden connections behind pedestrian objects, but he knew what would help the prosecutor: fentanyl, footprints, DNA, and that laptop on the messy desk. And he wanted to help the prosecutor. He wanted to be wrong, but he knew by now that his coworkers were rarely wrong by the time they’d reached this stage. 

He turned on his UV light and pointed it towards the laptop. It lit up immediately. It was time to get out the first chemical test that would detect leftover traces of blood: Luminol. 

***

Duncan had run some water through his hair at the McDonald’s he’d stopped at just before coming to Tiffany’s house, and he felt clean and excited after arriving back home from a case in LA. He’d gotten himself a cheeseburger and Sprite and Tiffany had asked for a salad and an iced coffee. He’d had such a big crush on her from 3rd through 6th grade! He never imagined she would reach out to him on LinkedIn 30 years later. This would be the third time this month they would hang out, and things were going so smoothly. He had been single for a long time and seriously hoped that these hangouts would evolve into official, romantic dates, but so far, they’d spent most of their time reminiscing about elementary school and discussing hypothetical legal situations that were a little outside his scope of expertise as a patent lawyer. They sometimes discussed her job as a freelance life coach for women. 

He supposed that in the back of his mind, he knew that something was probably going very wrong with Tiffany’s life for her to contact him out of the blue the way she had. Freelance life coach didn't stand out to him as a stable job. But when he pulled up to her house and saw several unmarked police cars outside running their lights, his heart sank. 

501 Creative Writing Prompts - Prompt #1: The Shadow (creative writing exercise)

I just bought a book called 5-Minute Daily Writing Prompts: 501 Prompts to Unleash Creativity and Spark Inspiration, and I thought I would try out some of the prompts and post the results. I won't post the actual prompts for copyright reasons--just what I myself type out in response after about 20 minutes of working on it. 

Here's the first one.

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The Shadow

“Meow! Meow!”

Chelsea woke up to the sounds of her cat crying. The crying went on for what felt like a long, long time before the fog of sleep lifted enough for guilt to kick in. The room was pitch black save for the faint, white impression Snowball left. Chelsea stood and the blood rushed from her head, making her dizzy. She reached out blindly and braced herself against the wall. The meowing and little cat gurgles got more excited. She could see Snowball's pale radiance trotting out of the bedroom door. 

She flipped on the light switch and something immediately startled her. In the quiet and the calm that followed, she had to think about whether or not she really saw what she thought she did. She thought she saw a copy of her shadow dart away from the wall out the bedroom door. 

Heart thumping, she turned on the lights to the hallway. She saw it again: the copy of her shadow pressed against the wall. But this time, it didn’t run. It snuck very carefully into the living room, merging once again with the dark. 

Chelsea went through the first story of the house, turning on every light switch. When she got to the kitchen, Snowball was anxiously awaiting his midnight snack. But she also saw her shadow on the wall. And it appeared to be holding the hand of another shadow: the distinct outline of a little girl. Her shadow seemed to be having a conversation with it.

Chelsea stood in front of the pair of them. They seemed to ignore her. She moved her own shadow in front of the two of them. When the two shadows locked, she had a warm, falling sensation, and suddenly, she was in a place of white light, experiencing the conversation her shadow was having with... herself as a little girl. Now, with a sudden new download of information, it was as though this conversation had been inevitable. She could see how everything in life had brought them to this point.

Journaling because I feel sad. (rants)

I was feeling down this morning, and my friend encouraged me to do some journaling. I did some journaling in private using pencil and paper and didn't feel as though it was enough. So here's some more journaling (unrelated to dreams). If you want to know what I'm dreaming about, it's related to this song about Sonic:

The following questions are from this Medium article: https://medium.com/bouncin-and-behavin-blogs/20-journal-prompts-for-deep-thinking-and-reflection-503fd5630157 

If I had all the money and time in the world, what would I be doing?

I would be earning a PhD in physics, but I honestly don't know if there's an easy enough program for me to complete it! I would want to have the time to balance that with creative writing and acting classes. What I'm doing right now is going down a similar path, so when I think about it, I guess I'm pretty happy with what I'm doing. I'm just anxious about what I'm doing because I don't have all the time and money in the world.

What do I need to stop doing and start doing?

I need to stop allowing stress to keep my fight or flight systems triggered--especially for long stretches of time. I need to start recognizing stress and responding to it by unclenching my body and taking deep breaths. I did a meditation by Declutter the Mind for anxiety, and it suggested labeling anxious thoughts as a separate entity with its own name. I've started using my imagination to do that exercise. 

What does “success” mean to me?

Success to me means having warm memories to reflect on in the quiet times.

A woman struck by lightning develops a psychic soul tie to a dolphin. (dream)

I fell asleep to this video about a woman being struck by lightning, which must have partly inspired this dream (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQhOb63E_do). 

DREAM

I'm with a small group of friends at an outdoor encampment. One friend is doing the dishes. I don't like what I see. A huge, expensive, copper pot I've brought with me looks deformed as my friend scrubs the exterior. It was perfect when I brought it here. I choose not to say anything. I come back later as she's drying the pot and I see that the metal lid has warped, and there are patches of melted and soldered metal on the bottom. I laugh, in spite of the expense. Because it's my friend. This just seems to be the kind of mess she'd get into.

Then I see a map of four small towns in Alaska. I see roaring, green-gray water in one corner. A patch of fireweed in another.

Then I'm in one of the towns--a town of lavender. I see a field of wildflowers demonstrating the town's natural beauty.

A tall, middle aged woman with brown hair has been struck by lightning. When this happened, it created an intense psychic connection to a big, long, white dolphin who is now like a soulmate. I see the dolphin cut in half alongside the woman.

The woman and her dolphin are in an icy bay. A rope runs from the dolphin's head and drags the woman, who stands on an ice floe in her tank top and shorts.

The dolphin swims up to me with a small, furry, brown animal in its mouth. I get the dolphin to open its mouth, and I pull the animal up onto the snow. It's my cat, Peaches. She's half dead. I can't help but feel that it's the dolphin that almost killed her, and I'm angry at it. But I know the dolphin is a precious, perhaps sacred animal, and I know it is still just an animal itself.

The dolphin returns to the woman across the bay.

I breathe through a fine mesh for a tent, like a mosquito net. It's quiet. Meditative. The mesh doesn't impede my breath. The veil is almost refreshing.


INTERPRETATION

I think there's an acceptance of both the nature of the dolphin and the nature of the friend who warped my pot and injured my cat. I think there's an acceptance of the whole situation of warping and damage and injury.

The state my cat was in in the dream reminded me of just how sick my cat was in real life a couple days before we put her to sleep. I think there's an inclination to cling to every moment with a sick pet or loved one, and in my past, there's been a scrambling to blame others for their deaths--as if it wasn't natural, inevitable, and their time. The hospital gave them pain killers and that hastened their death. The cat would have survived another couple weeks if we'd just kept chasing her down and stabbing her with a needle for subcutaneous fluids while she cried the most confused, pained cries.

I don't just see this tendency in myself. I recently recognized this same exact pattern of desperate searching for causes and blaming and feelings of guilt in a friend who called me about some deaths in her life. I think I want to let go of that inclination towards denial and blame in the face of serious illness and death.

I have a pet right now. The last time I took him to the vet, they called him a senior. I don't want to be as confused and blindsided as I was with Peaches when it's his time. I don't want to be confused and blindsided when it's my own time. Or when my friends and loved ones get sick.

Injury and deformation are a natural part of this life. In the case of my friend deforming the pot, there can even be something joyful in understanding and contemplating the story of it all.

3rd dream diary? (news)

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Last night I dreamed that I started going to Harvard for Computer Science. It was already really hard on the very first day!

But I'm not here to talk to you about a dream I had. I'm here to talk to you about a collection of dreams I've had.

I've finally gotten through the first edit of my third dream diary collection. Will it come out in a couple months? Will it come out in a couple years? I don't really know the timeline. But I think there are enough dreams that are interesting enough to release as an eBook on Amazon eventually! But I have a lot of editing to do. So stay tuned. 

I am a soldier because I can't afford my cozy lifestyle. (dream)

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DREAMS

I'm a soldier in a slightly different, slightly futuristic world, and I'm being shipped for deployment. I find a place to sit near the rear opening of the truck. One soldier has to hang out of the back, holding on to bars on the door. 

After driving for a while, a woman who's an officer tells us we need to be extra quiet along this stretch of the trip. (We're passing a Walmart and I assume we need to be quiet because it's respectful.) The guy hanging out the back was causing the most noise with his struggles to stay on the truck! Now he has to stay silent on top of it. His feet morph into metal frog feet that attach securely to the bar on the back. 

We switch vehicles. Now we're in an open jeep with a large truck bed. We sit in there. We go into a tunnel. After a while, I see some bullets spraying from further back in the tunnel. A group of rebel hooligans has broken into the troops' transport system with guns. 

The guy who was hanging out of the back of the truck has a gun, and he fires beside me at the advancing group of rebels, but I don't have a weapon. One of the hooligans is clearly targeting me. My guy fires at him, but green, holographic armor blocks each shot. The hooligan shoots me repeatedly in the stomach. I know I won't survive.

There's a nice funeral for me at the house I used to live in before I became a soldier. It's fall, and there are leaves drifting in the yard. There are friends and neighbors visiting inside. It was very cozy and comfortable living the life I did, but I didn't have the finances to stay there forever. I see how I would have paper doll outfits that I would wear, like trout-patterned dresses. I see how I would have grumpily cared for five german shepherds had I survived into old age in that lifestyle.

Then I wake up. I pee and I give the cat a 3 a.m. snackie. 

Then I'm squatting next to a pond. The person in charge of the pond explains that they're going to solve all of their problems with this: a small tube full of tiny snails. I have a good feeling about this.

Time passes, and I'm attending a church service. And the guest speaker is talking about how the greatest danger of our time is the snail. According to her, we think we're solving all our problems with food by breeding these giant snails for meat, but they completely take over ecosystems and destroy all other aquatic life. I have a feeling of correctness about what she's saying.

But I think back to when I was at the pond. I had the same feeling about what they were doing too. And the current warning here at church doesn't make me think the owner of the pond was doing anything bad. They were doing what they had to to survive. But both can be true at the same time: the pond owner needed the meat, and the snails take over aquatic ecosystems. 

INTERPRETATIONS

The first dream is a metaphor for how I feel like I can't afford to live the life I would prefer to live: staying at home cooking and entertaining guests. Wearing my cute little outfits. But instead, I have to prepare for battle with a ruthless world. And I know good people with struggles of their own will try to help me, but the lifestyle will kill me anyway. 

(I'm sure that this metaphor is an exaggeration of my fears.)

In the second dream, it seems to me like that's just the scenario we're constantly finding ourselves in as we navigate social media and even traditional, legacy media like newspapers. One group of people tries to profit off of the message that there's an awesome new technology and it has the power to revolutionize all of our lives. Another group tries to profit off the the message that we must beware this new technology that "they" are all trying to get us to adopt, because there are consequences that "they" aren't talking about. 

Well, isn't the truth almost always somewhere in the middle? We adopt new technology like new medication because we had a problem that needed solving, but there are usually risks, side effects and possible unforeseen consequences. 

There are too many algorithms that reward hyperbolic, grandiose stories instead of thorough, neutral, accurate teaching.

The stern, Halloween photoshoot. (dream)

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DREAM

I'm looking in a thrift store window at some used clothing on mannequins. Some of the clothing is a little too fancy for me, but then I see a Christmas sweater with a kitten on it and it looks comfortable and cozy and it's in good condition and I love it. So I head to the store. 

I go inside the store, and it's a huge warehouse full of racks of clothing. I look through the racks. Some of this stuff looks too big, but then I move to a different size section and see some jeans that look like they're exactly the right size for me. The design is a little bold and quirky. There's a big, black blob sewn onto one side, and there are tears in the legs. But I think they won't look bad on me at my current size. 

If I were larger, my insecurity about being big would just combine with insecurity about the unconventional style and those insecurities would build on top of each other and amplify each other, like matching frequencies on a negative wave. 

I'm with a group of newer friends, but I feel comfortable hanging out with them all day. We dress in Halloween clothing like witches' hats, capes, bat and cobweb prints, and black and orange. We go out to eat in LA, then we decide that we want to do a photoshoot with a friend of one of the group leaders. We're running around on the street, having fun. We have fun in the car. I see our car trip being expressed as a toy 3D model. Then we arrive at the photographer's house. It's decorated for Halloween. 

I watch a friend twist her head sideways against a pot of witch's brew. The photographer points his digital SLR at her and sternly tells her to keep her head upright with her chin held low. I'm surprised that he's being that severe with us. We're just doing this for fun. I don't think there's any money being exchanged between the two of our parties. 

I watch his assistant put a purple pie on a Halloween poster on the floor, and I'm surprised she's giving us such a nice, professional experience when I, for one, haven't given her any money. 

INTERPRETATION

This dream is a combination of three experiences I've had. 

My clothes are getting too big and baggy. I reached my arms up to change the sugar water in my hummingbird feeder, and my pants and my underwear both fell down. I ordered some new clothes online and when I received them, they were all way, way too big. So I shipped those back and went to Walmart where I could use the dressing room. I picked up some jeggings and a flannel shirt that  actually fit me. 

Then I had an experience once with a professional cinematographer who was very stern with me. 

And I'm currently having an experience with a new friend group that I like hanging out with, and we do what feels like a lot together in spite of no money being exchanged for participation in this sort of club. I feel lucky because I mean... they have to charge something eventually!

Going dip net fishing in the back yard. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

DREAM

There's a very artistically-tasteful circus being run on a huge, modern stage by a single mom. Her sons assist (with slightly negative, slightly surly attitudes). But what the circus does is showcase the most beautiful woman in the world. 

The most beautiful woman is very fit, but not overly muscular. She poses on stage in a handstand, demonstrating her strength. She reminds me of Penelope Cruz in terms of the way she looks. 

The single mother is capable of doing exactly the same handstand. And she is just as beautiful and has the same level of fitness. Realistically, she could just as easily be showcased as the most beautiful woman in the world, but she's not. And she's angry and jealous about that while also understanding that it's the other woman that pulls in a crowd and puts dinner on all their tables. So she holds it all in. 

She devises a plan to blow off some steam. She thinks about creating a dip net fishing stream in the back yard. As she wrestles with various ideas, they come to pass. She imagines a deep stream in the yard space between the houses where the rain drips off the roof. She imagines a body of water so large that it's as tall as the ceilings, and we can't see out the windows anymore except to see fish swimming by. She buys a dip net that has a plastic cover over the top--to really seal in those fish. 

A girl who competed on a modeling TV show comes in through the window in hip waders. I wonder if I should buy hip waders when I wake up. The model listens to the jealous mom blow off some steam then says, "I'm going to go now, so I don't stink up the house!" 

I marvel at this sentence, because she dragged a bunch of mud in the house. Does the mud stink? She just seemed to want to leave.

INTERPRETATION

There have been times in my life when I've thought, "Why not me? Why didn't I get selected? Why don't I get a chance to test out what I can really do? Why am I not going far when they are?" This is like the jealousy and anger of the woman who doesn't get to perform on stage in the circus. And I think I compensate for this by... just cruising along, working on projects to amuse and distract myself (the creation of the dip net fishing in the yard). I think I can sense that other people are a little off-put by the negative energy of this kind of jealous mindset (the girl, who is a peer... a model... doesn't want to listen and leaves).

I have more than one opportunity in my real life that brings up these types of feelings right now. I could get my chance to perform and do just as well as the next person, or I could drop the ball. I'm not as confident about my skills in comparison to others in real life. There's often a very good reason why I'm not picked in reality. 

PewDiePie takes care of my cat (and loses him). (dream)

Image by Midjourney

DREAM

I go across town with my mother. We're traveling together in a strange land. It looks like British Columbia. There are lots of quaint local restaurants, and it's a small to medium-sized town. 

Then I'm on my own. I wind up spending the night at a suburb with a lot of condos with PewDiePie as my neighbor. I go over to his house. He lives in a large house with about four or five other guys. He's about 23 and utterly charming. And very impulsive. Everything he does seems so unpremeditated and and wild. I leave my cat in his care. I have very conflicted feelings about this decision. He seems really trustworthy while also seeming like he just does the first thing that pops into his head.

He drives off (very, very slowly) in a jeep with his friends, and immediately loses the cat. The cat jumps out of the vehicle. PewDiePie doesn't go back for the cat, but the cat voluntarily makes his way back to him. PewDiePie has got some kind of magic to him such that nothing bad happens to him no matter what he does (or doesn't do).

INTERPRETATION

I've been considering trying to make videos for YouTube again. I've tried making book reviews before, and I've also tried making math and physics videos. I recently picked up three ebooks about social media crafting for $0.49-$0.99 each. I've been learning some interesting stuff. 

The Guide to Going Viral by Brendan Kane emphasizes that it's the "effect on viewer" that's one of the most important metrics to evaluate when considering what factors made a video perform better than other videos. What emotion did you intend for the viewer to experience? This is very different from what I've learned in a college about making legacy forms of artistic expression. It doesn't conflict with what I learned, but it just wasn't a part of what I was taught. 

What I learned in theatre classes lets me know why PewDiePie was successful. He's completely in the moment. He's running completely on impulse without going up into his head in his videos. It feels completely natural to watch. It's like we're just watching someone without an agenda in the privacy of their own world. Impulsivity isn't exactly a great trait in real life though. We associate that with reckless choices and irresponsibility (losing the cat). But PewDiePie is more than just unpremeditated on camera. He has a good sense of agreeableness and what is going to be tolerated by a crowd and what isn't. I think that's the sense of magic protection in the dream.

Personally, my favorite videos are by the creators who are fun to watch because they react really impulsively without thinking. I enjoy feeling like I'm playing video games with my best friends and we're having the time of our lives. (I mentioned my penchant for let's plays to a creative writing professor and she asked if they make me feel less lonely. I do think so.) I think that the book I'm reading by Brendan Kane is more about creating videos like Mr. Beast's or Veritasium's, where the effect on the viewer is highly calculated. And that tactic is extremely successful, even though it's not my first preference as a viewer.

So I think this dream is just me trying to process some of the new information I'm getting about why some people get numbers while doing YouTube and some don't. I do think it's more than luck, but I'm not sure everyone has what it takes. (And by "everyone" having what it takes, I mean me.)

Audacious customer asks for a 90% discount... maybe. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

DREAM

I'm trying to shoot a short film. This is for love. It's not for an assignment. Somehow, I rope a family I don't really know into playing the parts. They're confused about what's happening though. I haven't really sold my project to them, and it's visible in how aimless they feel about playing their parts. There's no drive or ambition. But they do surprisingly well anyway, and I'm thankful to them. I even feel like they're my new friends now. 

Years later, one of the girls in the family finds a job at a pet store. I go into the store and prepare to ask her and her family for another favor. 

I hear the phone ring. The phone is a very old-fashioned landline. It looks like something from the 1940s. I pick up. The person on the other end wants to purchase something for like... around $40. I don't know exactly what she said she wants to buy though, so I just write down my understanding of what she said on a sticky note. I take the message to the manager, who is wrestling an octopus away from a squid in one of the aquariums. The octopus is the aggressor. It looks like it wants to kill and eat the squid. They're about the same size. I note that the octopus is a pinkish color and say, "Oh! I wonder if the person on the phone wanted to buy the octopus!" 

I look up the price of the octopus in the store's price list, and it's something around $200-$400. I cringe. It's yet another unlikable customer trying to garage sale their way through life. Such a lowball offer that would be! Then I see a small box with 6-packs of pink sparkling water and wonder if I've misjudged the situation, and the drinks are what the customer was actually asking for.

The manager gets the octopus untangled from the squid, and puts it on the counter. Then she puts it in a separate aquarium. 

I try to persuade the girl and call her family members on the phone to do another film with me. They are, once again, very neutral. But they seem to feel well enough towards me to indicate that they'd feel good about doing it again. It's a huge relief.

INTERPRETATION

I think this dream deals with rather subtle emotions arising out of situations that I am still not comfortable with even 20 years later. Everyone in the dream was confused. These are emotions that can confuse and stun me and the people I partner with. 

These are the situations the dream simulated:

1) Being the one and only leader of a team for an independent project, like a film crew. In the dream, I was very anxious for everyone to like me. I was also pretty aimless. I have been a manager and a group project leader many times before, but I had the backing of the organization (and I had accountability to the organization). And the desperation to be liked always simmers beneath the surface. The fear of being unable to depend on anyone else to back me up or bounce ideas off of has never left me. 

2) Being the one to have to approach people for partnerships. When I was a child, I loved roping other kids into playing my "let's pretend" type of games. I don't know what happened as an adult. Now, it's scary. I think I've had several bad collaborations since growing older and trying to get more serious about artistic and business projects. That's put some anxiety into me about partnering with others as an adult. 

3) Selling things to people. I absolutely hate when people try to argue with me about pricing to get a discount. There's a type of person who will sell their likability and trustworthiness to argue for a ten percent discount on a $20 meal, and I just find it appalling. 

Those are the main uncomfortable feelings from this dream, but there are a lot of other uncomfortable feelings I haven't resolved in the dream. Talking to someone on the phone and not hearing or understanding what they have to say. Passing along an incorrect message. Getting an order incorrect. The girl in the pet store was someone I asked in real life to stay in contact after our class ended, and she declined. Even sparkling water tastes just a little bit uncomfortable. 

Gen Alpha tears down the existing structure. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

DREAM

I'm with a friend who's an elementary school teacher. He's sick of what he's been seeing in the world. So he goes into the bowels of the school--narrow passage ways, to protest. I join him. 

After winding through the black curtains and narrow halls, I emerge at a desk that's still in the bowels of the school. A former child is with me. He's a young man now. His education was stunted because of all the political upheaval surrounding undocumented immigrants. So he has to start his education now that a lot of time has been lost. I feel bad for him, and I also think that it's such a waste of potential. How much further along in life would he be if he could've just concentrated on educating himself when he was younger? I start a new round of my education now as well. We write in pencil on black paper. Someone comes to take the papers.

Then I get up to try to find my friend further in the bowels. I hadn't meant to come this far or for so long. For me, this was supposed to be temporary. I'm going to tell my friend that I'm leaving soon. I can't find him, so I follow some other people who are disenfranchised with the system. Suddenly, we're outdoors in a crowd with a ton of Gen Alphas. They're going to tear down a balcony where someone is being oppressed. 

They find the balcony and tear it down with their bare hands. A mother says angrily, "What did you kids do?! When I buy you a house, Ashley..." She says it in warning tones. The kids don't care at all. Their work is done, and they go back to school. A parent in the crowd--a woman who looks like she's from the 1980s says. "I'm a sigma!" Over and over again. "Don't mess with me. I'm a sigma." But she's very sad when she makes this declaration. 

Then, I'm back in the narrow passageway of the school. I could get caught at any time, and being here makes me feel nervous. I decide to take a left turn. It takes me into a pitch black area. Finally, it opens into the music concert stage. Orchestral music plays. I see the head of the music department. I walk, trying to blend in. Trying to hide. My friend is taking the opposite tactic. He's smiling at the head of the music department like he's just seen a celebrity. He wants to be seen and acknowledged, so he can notify her of his protest, but I don't trust that going through her will help anything.

INTERPRETATION

I don't usually like to get political, but this is kind of a political dream. I am very concerned with what I see in my corner of the world (the United States). The "Big, Beautiful Bill" just passed, and I've looked at comments from both the left and the right. I lean left, but I'm willing to listen. Frankly, I do not believe that this is a measure that's going to benefit everyone who works a job--as if that would excuse wishing ill for people who are too sick or elderly to work a job. And I don't believe there's this massive group of people who could work a job, but would rather play video games all day, so they pretend to need disability and live this comfortable, easy life. 1) You're not going to live comfortably on disability. It might not even pay the rent. 2) That's just not human nature. People aren't built to want to do nothing. If you're young and able bodied, yet sit around playing video games all day and don't have some sense of purpose in your day to day life, you probably do have depression or some kind of mental illness.  

Also, people have a bias towards thinking they work harder than average when that's not what objective measures show. 

Also, I don't know if you've noticed, but there just isn't as big of a need for workers as there used to be even when I was young. And advancements in AI will probably only exaggerate this more and more. A lot of Gen Z and new graduates can't even get a foot in the door to entry level jobs. That's one way I can see an able bodied/sound minded person giving up and playing video games all day: if it just becomes very obvious that they're not going to get anywhere no matter what they do to try to break in to the workforce. We're not doing anything to address this issue with our policies, and it's starting to disturb me.

Ultimately, I think this is a bill that makes life even more difficult for people who were barely hanging on. There is no spiritual justification for allowing this to happen. I don't think that the goodness of God shouldn't work through the government, and should only work through the Christian church. I think the loving nature of the universe can and should express itself through the everyday actions we all take, including what we do collectively as a group. 

I have chronic illness myself, and I depend on a lot of societal support to get by. Trust me, just on a practical level, you do not want a bunch of homeless schizophrenics who cannot get access to their medication or therapists running around. You should want them to sit at home writing silly short stories, cleaning the toilet, and learning new algorithms in Python. It's quite a step up from running around on the streets in a panic accusing random people of doing horrible things to me (which, I'm very sorry to say, was exactly what I was doing before I got help).

In the dream, I'm reeducating myself. I think that because of the way I was raised (and also due to the fact that education is expensive here and there was no health insurance for waitresses when I was young), I wasn't given a good head start in life. It impacts me even into middle age. I can only imagine how much worse it would be for someone whose parents have been detained by ICE and sent to prison in another country. 

I just wonder when some of these barriers to all people having a good quality of life are going to be taken down. Because I don't see a lot of technical reasons for these barriers. I mainly see a beliefs and opinions reason for these barriers. 

I listen to an astrologer on YouTube who goes by Astrolada. I can't remember which of her videos I saw this in, but I remember watching a video in which she thought that Gen Alpha is going to be the generation to fix this mess we've gotten ourselves into in which our core social systems are basically sociopathic. In the dream, the mob of Gen Alpha operates based on humanitarianism. And they don't care what the older generations have to say about it. Something about the Age of Aquarius. 

That would be nice. I am very skeptical of horoscopes while loving to listen to them at the same time though. I listen to them because they're often so optimistic that I wish they were true. It makes me hope that something good is around the corner. So even if they're not true, they motivate me to keep working on my hopes and dreams--even though I so rarely see any kind of payoff. My horoscopes are extremely optimistic this month. So we'll see.

Frustrating.

I don't even want the Declaration of Independence anymore. (dream)

Image by Midjourney

DREAM

I have an actress friend, and she's desperate to land a role. I've written a movie. She wants us to perform the two main roles for a casting director or an agent (someone important she's met). For the audition, I'll play the dumb hot guy/comedic relief, and she wants to play the role she might realistically get: the "everyman" and hot chick. 

Just before this, I was someone completely different. I went to a museum that let me in for free and would give me a free gift because they were having a special Trump promotion that I saw an ad for. I wore a purple Trump shirt and I had a degree while visiting this museum, and that entitled me to free admission and the gift. 

I kept thinking the place would be swarming with MAGA people and that I'd be mocked for having a theatre master's degree if I mentioned it. But no one harassed me--the topic didn't even come up. 

I started from the top of a large Colosseum or Parthenon and descended the very steep, crumbling stone stairs in pairs of 2 or even 3. And there were ants everywhere, crawling up on my bare feet. But I made it down the stairs to my reward. A woman was holding out of a copy of the Declaration of Independence or a similar piece of paper with US history on it for me. But I didn't even want the gift anymore. The experience was enough. 

So this actress puts me in her car and I complain that she didn't even give me time to get dressed up and shave my legs. I'm in a white tee shirt dress with my hairy legs sticking out. She replies that we're all given the same amount of time in a day, and we do what we want with that time. 

"Fair enough," I reply. She's not going to be distracted from getting to the audition promptly.

We rehearse as she drives, and she is surprised when I keep telling her that the character I'm playing (the boy) is a dumb, selfish guy, and nothing will change that, no matter how much hope she has that he's not. And it seems like she, personally has that wish for the script to be written so that he'll change. She's not using that yearning as her motivation for the scenes between us, which I think would be the best thing for her to do, not to rewrite the characters and plot.

INTERPRETATION

The Trump promotional special actually has more to do with my master's degree program than politics. I've ended up not needing the certification (the piece of paper) I got. I've never used it. It's been years now. But perhaps the experience was worthwhile, even though there was pain, effort, and irritation involved (biting ants, worry about politics, and the exertion of going down steep steps). 

With the actress scenario, it seems to me as though the actress and me are both versions of a kind of wisdom that the other needed. The actress can set material goals and accomplish them (shaving the legs and driving us to the audition), but the comedian had wisdom and insight into human nature that the actress needed. She'll only get so far with just taking action without that insight. So it seems like a call to balance those parts of the brain out. 

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)

Image by Midjourney

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)

Image by Midjourney

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.