It was the prettiest shade of pale green...

A police officer came back to the village office after having been involved in a shooting. Chief Lawrence helped him into the cupboard reserved for such times. The chief prepared a gun with one live bullet and three blanks, and put it into the cupboard with the officer. Jane and I stared. "They always miss the first time, and that's where the real one is," the chief said. The three of us stood in the small room outside the cupboard for a few minutes, and the the chief said, "Well, it takes as long as it takes," and we went out to the hall to talk about the incident. A half hour later the chief went in and cracked the cupboard door. Jane and I tiptoed behind him. Suddenly, the loudest bang in the world and gobbets of blood flying through the air. Then a few police officers came and helped their brother officer out of the cupboard. Nobody was hurt . . . neither the chief nor the officer who'd had the gun . . . but there was blood all over the room and some on my dress.

Next thing I know, I'm driving with three friends. I'm wearing the pink and white sundress with the blood spots on it and we're driving west, coming back from vacation. I decide I need to get a cold drink and stop at a country store. My friend BB moves into the driver's seat in case they have to move the car on the very narrow New England street. I go in the store, which also has some white-clothed tables and glass fronted cupboards of pretty doodads for sale. I ask a waitress to get me a can of Diet Pepsi and while I'm waiting I grab a beautiful pale green handmade ball of soap. The owner begins to show me pretty locally made soap dishes and it's quite a while before I get out of the store. My car and my friends are gone. I have armloads of stuff, including a whole smoked turkey, of which I've taken a bite. I walk up the tiny road and through the shops, thinking that I'll see my car as BB circles the block waiting for me. An hour goes by and still no car, no friends.

Then I woke up.

Waitress anxiety dream #4031

It's full moon time again, kiddies, and we all know what that means: June has her epic nightmares and shares them with you. You might want to keep a half a Xanax handy.
Last time I saw the podiatrist, back when my toe was still broken, he said he'd always wanted to wait tables. 
"It's hard work," I said.
"Well, that's what everybody says, but I don't see what's so hard about it," he answered, the innocent. I wonder if I should share the following with him. It's a dream . . . a nightmare, but its parts are certainly real enough. I worked through many . . . many shifts like this.


Out of clean dishes, although there are plenty of dirty ones in the stacks. The heavy coffee mugs have pieces of food stuck and dried inside them. The dishwasher water heater gave up the ghost last night and nobody on the closing crew left a note so we could call the repair person before the store opened. It'll be washing dishes by hand in the bar sink all shift.
On the floor a pile of potato peels. One of the managers sees it, says, "What the hell?" and goes off, I think, to arrange for removal. But it's busy, he never comes back, so we all just step around it over it on top of it to get done what we need to get done. 


No more pre-measured coffee packets for the Bunn coffeemaker . . . partly used bags of No-Name ground coffee here and there in the waitstation. 
"How much to put into the filter?"
"Just so it looks about right." 
And where is the coffeemaker? Oh. Up there on the shelf an arm's length above my head. A maker but no warmer, so that once the pot is made (brewing while customers grit their teeth and tap their fingertips on the tables waiting for their cups) it sits and loses heat, which it does very quickly, necessitating brewing a new pot. ...if you can find enough raw materials and the few seconds and the room, among the coworkers darting here, reaching there . . . five of us with our trays in a twenty square foot floor space. 


No conversation in the waitstation except 


"Is this still hot?"
"Barely."



"This empty?" 
"More coming."


"What the hell is THIS???" from a waitress staring into a coffee cup with a dried bread ball stick inside it. 
"Mm. They're all like that."

I find one of the white crockery cups with the smallest flake of dried red sauce halfway down the inside, wonder for half a second if, untouched, it might just float off in the hot coffee and go down the customer's gullet unremarked. I chip it off with my thumbnail, and pour a cup of coffee from the half-filled brewing pot. Whoever comes after me will have watery coffee, but I have MY customer's, and I'm off out of the madhouse of the back of the house into the diningroom. White cloths, barely enough space to get between tables without my butt knocking over water glasses. 
The guests have no idea what the back of the house looks like, sounds like, smells like. 
Happy guests.


And now here come some disgruntled customers into the waitstation, coming after their coffee. Young men, soft and spoiled looking. 
"What's the problem here? Why have I been waiting for ten minutes for a simple cup of coffee? I'll get my own!" 
I am furious, stern-voiced: "Get out. Get out of here."
They were going, but my hand on one's polo shirted shoulder hurried him along. Part of me wished that his heel would find a drop of water on top of the greasy quarry tile and he'd go down, the pushy arrogant prick.


People at tables outside my station start to wave at me. "Can we get our bill?"  One of my fellow waitresses has left. Her shift is over: she's gone. Never mind her coworkers or her customers. I'm in the diningroom . . . on the stage, as it were, so like a mother bird, I lift my wing and make comforting welcoming noises, gather them underneath. Finding their checks, getting them more . . . what? 
"More coffee? Sure! I'll just whip up a fresh pot for you. It'll take just a few minutes." 
Turning, scanning tables, scanning heads, to see what else I can do on this trip. Anyone close to me would have heard, despite my lips moving not at all, "Oh God. Another flocking pot of flocking coffee."


Somebody orders two entrees and there is only enough left of one of them so that I have to take it out as a side, and lie to make it sound as if the cooks chose to present it that way because of the flavors or aesthetics or something. 
You don't want to admit that you've run out of food, clean dishes, coffee. 
You don't want to say, "We can't find our coffeemaker." 
You want to preserve, for the customers, the image of peace and competence.


And at the end of the shift, you'll go out and have pitchers of beer with your coworkers and laugh and laugh about sliding on a potato peel and nearly cracking your head on the counter edge. Somebody will say, "Why didn't he just go get me a broom so I could stick it up my ass and clean 'em up while I'm pouring drinks!" Laugh so hard you can't breathe . . . about the handle of the full-of-precious-hot-coffee pot coming loose as you reached way up there for it. Laugh about June pushing the customer out of the kitchen: [PUSH]"You can't be back here. [PUSH] We don't want you to [PUSH] get hurt!"

Sometimes, dreams mean absolutely nothing.

I had a dream that I met the Obamas at my office. 

They were seated in theater seats watching some performance while I stood next to them running a postage meter. 

Michelle was beautiful and I stared at her. She smiled back, friendly. I leaned over and whispered, "Can I ask you a question?" 

"Sure," she said. 

"How many pairs of false eyelashes are you wearing?" 

She burst into guffaws. "Twelve!!!!"

Sleep, dream, cat, book, and a good deed

It is October: the Dark Time is closing in. I have begun to indulge my seasonal urge to go to bed very early, knowing that I'll have that first sleep/second sleep break at about this hour. Last night I was in bed by 7:30, ostensibly to read a recently-bought book that I've wanted to read since its 1992 publication.  (When the flood rendered the local library unworkable, I began again to scurry about snatching up used books at ridiculously low prices. I gather the library has reopened now, and I need to return the four books that I've been holding onto since their late August due date. Not only is it a matter of conscience, but the librarian is no longer so taken up with refurbing the building, the shelves, the plumbing and heating systems and the computers, that she cannot take a moment to email an overdue notice. I hadn't wanted to take them back and add to her burden, you see, so I just kept them here . . . but she's onto me. The fines should amount to a generous donation to the rebuilding fund.) Anyway, the book I'm reading is Katharine Hepburn's "Me." I love the Katharine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy movies and general mystique, but it's taking Kate a long time to get to Spencer. I think we're almost there now. I read a few pages, in which she repeats many times how well she and Mr. (Louis B./Metro-Goldwyn-) Mayer like each other, and when I got to where she's just made her first movie with Spencer, "Woman of the Year," I was satisfied that we'd be getting to the good stuff soon, and turned out the light.


At midnight *ping!* eyes wide open. The pleasant fuzzy, warm, sinking-back-to-sleep feeling receded like the tide going out. Fifteen minutes later I thought about having a lovely toasted  bagel, so I turned on the light and sat up on the edge of the bed. The dark makes perfect mirrors of the unshaded bedroom windows. I looked at my reflection in the black window and thought, "Oh good God, I look like that toy!" 

I spent an uncomfortably long minute at my image, finally thought, "Well, if I'm that far gone, one more middle-of-the-night bagel won't make much difference," got up and bumbled down the stairs. 


What woke me up was a dream. Naturally. It was something about updating a framed photograph at work. All the previous photographs were still in the frame so that it made a sort of historical archive, and the new one, a picture of a young woman, was to go in front of all of the old ones. I had the job all done, was ready to hang it back on the lobby wall, when somebody came in and asked what I was doing. I took it all apart to illustrate the history contained within the photo frame, and dropped the entire collection of pictures on the floor . . . and could not find the newest photo that was supposed to be displayed. I continued to look, with no success, so I woke up instead. If my dreams take me to another dimension, people there with whom I interact must be continually surprised at my disappearance when stressed. "She was here a minute ago . . . where'd she go?!?!"


When I got home last night, there was a black cat crouched in the sunny, wind-blown tall grass along the driveway. I stopped the car and we looked at each other. I opened the window on his side of the car and said softly, "Kittykittykitty?" He looked at me. Thinking to myself, "What are you doing???" I got out of the car with a plan to approach him, knowing that if I touched him I'd have crossed a line which should not be crossed. Fortunately for me, for MiMau and the rest of the household, as soon as he saw that I was coming to him, he turned and ran away as fast as ever I have seen a cat run. He's a pretty cat with emerald eyes. A little ratty, as you might expect. He's living a wild life, not the Best of All Possible Worlds life that fluffy soft MiMau leads. Apparently he prefers it to human companionship and care. Husband said, when I told him the story, that he'd seen the same cat as he came home. The cat was three quarters of a mile away. Big territory: good for him!
10/22/2011 ~ Early this afternoon I saw the little cat again, even farther from here. Between the two sightings is a nice barn full of warm cows, so I think I will not worry about the little cat during the cold winter. 


I can afford this little mid-sleep break tonight because I need not rise early for work. I'm taking a vacation day to ferry a friend to and from her colonoscopy. A Good Deed . . . and a day off from work to begin the weekend.

Now this: This was a nightmare.

I'm at work, temporarily answering phones while the regular receptionist is out for an afternoon.
A man calls and says he wants to talk to the Chancellor or he'll send in a bomb.
I can't transfer the call because I don't know the Chancellor's extension.
The Chancellor himself calls me on an internal line, tells me, "If the man calls again, send him to me at extension 247."
"247 . . . 247 . . . 247 . . ." I mutter to myself nervously while I wait for the man to phone again. When he does, I try to transfer the call to extension 237, which does not exist. Now I have to deal with embarrassment as well as a real threat of true violence.
The security doorbell buzzes. I get up from the desk, go down the stairs, and open the door. A man puts into my arms a full-grown German Shepherd, "Here's Bob. He's loaded." The man leaves quickly, and horrified, I carry the beautiful black and silver dog back up the six stairs to the lobby, noting that he feels as if he has valises under his skin. In fact, he has explosives sewn under his skin; he is armed as a living bomb. I'm in fear for all our lives, not least the beautiful dog's. I'm on the floor, trying not to weep, trying to comfort the nervous dog, who in turn is trying to comfort me, when the Chancellor comes into the lobby and sits down at the receptionist's desk to manage the situation. With kind urgency, he dismisses me, and as I push open the heavy steel door to leave, a young and handsome dark-haired man grasps the edge of the door. 
"Who are you!" I shriek.
He's frantic. "I'm Bob's dog!" he shouts. "I mean . . . Bob is my dog!" The Chancellor comes to the top of the stairs and tells me, "Let him in."
I leave the building and wander through the campus with tears rolling down my face, expecting at any moment to hear a loud explosion. 
Sirens in the distance...


And, thank God, then I woke up.
If this doesn't stop soon, I might have to stop sleeping.

Hell hath no fury like the dreams of a woman taking Chantix

Carolynn's comment about violent dreams reminded me of a dream I had a few weeks ago. 

Or so. 

It doesn't matter when, really, although I do think it preceded the Tropical Storm Irene inundation...

...and the Labor Day inundation.

I think of the dream . . . and it felt like a dream, not a nightmare, despite the way it rolled out of my id . . . in relation to the storms only because I wonder . . . was I reacting somehow to the unsteadiness in the atmosphere? Or was it just one of the famous Vividly Violent Chantix Dreams? I can hardly believe that most dreams only last three to five seconds (something I read recently) because this one seemed to go on for weeks. 

Anyway...

There were two of us in the dream: a man, familiar to dreaming me and unknown to my waking self, and me. He and I were close. Not lovers, not friends, but somewhere on the edge between the two. Throughout the dream, over and over again, I would begin to trust him and his good will . . . and then he would do something or make a remark that would cut me, humiliate me, leave me not knowing what to say, how to react. 

At last, my hurt feelings turned to cold rage. He had one more chance. I knew he'd blow it and he did. He made yet another barbed joke at my expense.

I turned and drove a long two-tined barbecue fork into his throat even as he still smirked at me. I could feel the tines' sharp points passing through resisting tissues. He fell backward onto the floor and lay staring at me in shock, struggling only feebly. I was strong; I would not let him free. 

I woke up, leaving my dream self holding him pinned to the floor by his neck.

BBQ fork by ~princess-distracto 

Aren't you glad you don't live in my head?

Last night's dream

I dreamt that I was a cat, the youngest in a colony of cats who all looked very much like me.
We were all pretty cats: black and gray tabby with white bib and paws and lips. 
It seems as if the dream went on and on. There was lots of conversation among us, along the lines of: We are cats and may do as we please, whenever and wherever we please.
In the final scene of this dream, we were all gathered in a diner, all sitting like humans in booths.
It was a meeting of some type, and our patriarch said: "We are cats. We have no kings. Except humans, but that goes without saying, since humans rule everything...."
He went on with his speech, or announcement, but I was shocked.
It had never occurred to me that We the Cats had any superiors, least of all . . . humans.


In a scrap tacked onto this dream, there were a few Helpful Household Hints.
One of them was to use a curling iron to iron ribbons.


I don't know where my brain gets this stuff.

Nightmare: Fear of Failure

At 3:00am I woke up, breathing hard, heart pounding hard enough that I could hear it through my pillows, in full flight from a nightmare.

Jane had left me alone in the office with stern warnings to close out the month, and NOT to leave the office until everything was tallied.  I was trying to make sure receipts got written for every payment, and the correct copies made of everything. I kept getting interrupted with more payments coming in, and people wanting to chat about changing the insurance coverage on their businesses.

From the To Do pile I picked up a piece of mail from a woman named Rita, a complaint of sexual harassment.  Her complaint had been submitted on a piece of tissue-y yellow invoice paper with a letterhead logo, a caricature of herself that was all hair and lips and long long legs. If I could draw I would reproduce it for you here. It was in the style of Tim Sheaffer's sketches in Vanity Fair's The Coaster Correspondence, except it was a female and not Ed Coaster. She was suing Small Pond (or the insurance company that employed me . . . at this point in the nightmare a few of my jobs had become intertwined) for $100,000. She came in while I was tallying up the month's receipts, saw the photocopy of her complaint and, flash-eyed and pinch-lipped, asked what that picture was on her complaint, as if someone had ridiculed her by drawing on it. She was furious with a tight, stiff, full-of-threat heat that always scares me worse than somebody screaming in my face.
I said, "It's the picture YOU sent."


Then she was gone and I was no longer in the office, but outdoors and heading back to to finish the work. It was cold and dark and I was walking on ice, crossing a four-lane highway at a traffic light. The light changed and I was still trying to get across the first two lanes. I fell and crawled.  Every foot I gained was lost with the next movement.

Now I'm back at the door, fumbling with a keyring of a hundred keys. A well-dressed and sophisticated man and a woman come and stand behind me. They want to get into the building but have no key.
I don't know who they are and they hang over me impatiently while I try to find the right key.
I know that whatever I do will be wrong: if I let them in there will be trouble for me in the future; if I don't let them in, they will give me immediate trouble.

I'm back in the office, trying to keep track of the separate piles of things to do, and in comes Afternoon Boss Bill. He sees my shaking hands and tells me to calm down, it isn't worth getting so upset. I want to scream at him to get out and let me get done what I have to get done, but he's my only friend and he's trying to be a comfort, so I swallow that urge.

Then he was gone and I was almost finished. It would be allowed for me to leave neatly arranged piles of receipts and long strips of adding machine tape for Jane, and I was almost there. Then I realized that in my frenzy I had moved the furniture slightly and Jane wouldn't like that, would surely make a comment about how I must have been truly out of control and frantic to have left the office in such disarray. So I had to move all the furniture back and I couldn't get it all perfectly aligned.

It went on and on. ...and on...

Upon waking I immediately remembered Rita, a woman with whom I worked when I was twenty-five. I remember her laughing at something I wore. Every time I passed her desk, she would put her face in her hands and laugh helplessly. Thirty-five years later I'm still having nightmares about her.

Dad?

I like dreaming . . . and I'm good at it. I get colors and feelings of warmth, cold, breezes . . . all of it. Dreams give my mind something to do while I'm sleeping, like watching movies made especially for me. Sometimes my dreams are exceptionally vivid, and it's clear that some of them are my brain's efforts to work things out to a comfortable conclusion. 


Jan 24 2011 
I had a dream about my father. In the dream, he was in his mid-forties, a few years younger than when he died. I was younger too, but not ten as I was when he died . . . I was in my early thirties.
I saw him across the room at an AA meeting. I saw him across the big circle of folding metal chairs, and thought he looked familiar. Then I looked in his eyes, my teetotaler father's eyes, and saw wariness and regret, and apology, and I knew it was him. I got up and spoke about how my father had died when I was very young, my mother had been crazy and how I'd been pretty mad about all that ever since. I paced and cried and stormed and told the whole story, but I never said, pointing, "And there he is!"
When I wore down, cried out, I sat down.
Then he got up and said he had faked his own death and left two young girls with their crazy mother and he was sorry for that.
The AA people's eyes grew big and round as they realized the story that was being revealed to them.
I wondered if people saw a resemblance between us, and they said they did: our long arms and legs and the way we walked, and the way we held our faces in certain expressions, eyebrows raised, lips slightly pursed.


He and I talked afterwards. I kept asking him, HOW COULD YOU LEAVE US???

He hadn't known what else to do, he said. 

I saw you in the casket! You were dead!

I had pneumonia . . . was awful awful sick . . . and I had a thing in my side.

Did other people know? Did the undertaker know?

Yes, he knew.

He held me and I cried in his neck like the woebegone little girl he had left, but I didn't want to spend the time crying. I wanted to spend all the time I had smelling him.  I wanted to smell his hair and touch his shoulders and look in his eyes. I didn't want to look away from him.

I was so angry at him, and so hurt, but I was so glad to have him back.

He had me stay with him and his replacement wife in their hotel room. They had two little kids, who were staying elsewhere, but there was a child size trundle bed.

I eyed the little bed. Does he expect me to sleep in that? Does he think I'm still as young as I was when he "died"?

But there was a rollaway bed too, and that would be mine to use.

The new wife was brunette, and pretty. She had a boy from an earlier marriage.

Oh my god, I thought. I have become part of a blended family.

At the end of the dream, there was some kind of treasure hunt. Clues led me to beautiful heirloom items in my cousin's house, but she wouldn't let me have them.

Then I woke up, a little moisture in the corner of one eye.
I was not quite present in this universe until noon.