Dreams

Last week, I had a dream in which I lived in my parents’ house and had my old bedroom and the house looked much like it did in real life. My bed was made and had rows and rows of stuffed toy animals at the head of the bed, as though I were a kid.

I had at least two windows, and I noticed floating through the bright blue sky outside… a log. It was a few feet long and almost a foot wide, and it was gliding through the sky during a heavy wind. It was surreal the way it floated, like stuff going by during the tornado scene in The Wizard of Oz (the film). As I watched, it passed the first window and went around, really close to the house, and it came through a window directly over my bed and landed on the bed. This was odd, because the head of the bed was against what in real life was an internal wall facing the hallway and hall closet.

I left the room (the door was in the same place) and went down the hallway and into the living room, where my parents were… and there may have been a little more, but that’s all I remember.

 

This morning, I woke from a vivid dream in which I was shopping at an antique store.

I was mesmerized by many antique dolls, mostly tiny porcelain antique dolls, 19^th and maybe early 20^th century. I especially remember one that was about two inches tall, jointed at hips and shoulders, and wearing a pale blue dress. I was picking out dolls I was thinking I’d probably buy and lined them up on a glass shelf… or on the floor in front of the glass display case and behind something larger, like a teddy bear or rocking horse.

There was a dollhouse, and I also found myself arranging dolls and miniatures inside the dollhouse. On an upper floor, I placed two little girl dolls that each held a violin and bow. I set them on little chairs and noticed that beyond them were a couple of adult dolls, perhaps larger than the scale of the dollhouse, sitting at … desks maybe. I found that it was awkward moving miniatures around with my fingers, and I managed to accidentally knock something down, maybe one of the violins. I thought that maybe I should arrange dollhouse miniatures with tweezers.

I’m not even sure if this was the same dream.

I was in a corner of the antique store where there were utility shelves and I was surrounded by old clothes. I got a fairly large, square box full of antique and more or less traditional Russian clothing.

At another point, I was in a smallish room and came across a bunch of Tibetan Buddhist traditional garb, including a red brocade robe, a robe that was predominantly yellow brocade but also included some other materials (but had sleeves, unlike a Tibetan panel coat), and there was one other traditional Tibetan robe—I forget the details of that one. I stood and slipped on the yellow brocade robe and was thinking I’d like to get all this Tibetan clothing and use the Folkwear pattern for the Tibetan chupa to make a burgundy chupa like those worn by monastics. I liked the idea of dressing like a Tibetan Buddhist nun and meditating in my meditation room… even though I wasn’t planning on becoming a nun.

While I was wearing the yellow brocade robe, a Tibetan man who worked at the store (possibly the owner) noticed and recommended hanging it up carefully, far apart from other garments. I thought about that, decided I’d better not put it in my bedroom closet, since it contains lots of clothing. I stood and turned a bit to look at the back of the garment and was dismayed to observe that some of the panels of this jacket/robe were made of fur—it looked like real off-white animal fur. But I was already so set on getting it, anyway, and I wasn’t up to changing my mind.

Drag Queens and Ghosts

I dreamed that I was one of numerous people gathered for a performance, I think a drag performance in someone’s back yard.

Later, people who didn’t attend found out about it and it turned out that someone secretly recorded it and the drag queen performing was actually one of those horrible Repugnantcans—or maybe not, but I think he was someone famous.

So for a screening of this performance, people gathered in what looked much like a basement, with various mismatched chairs lined up. Most of the audience were drag queens, and one had a little dog in her lap, I think a Yorkshire terrier. That person was gleeful, asking people if they’d seen it live, etc. Introducing the film.

Once the film started, at least the beginning wasn’t the performance I saw before. It was a black and white documentary about a drag queen’s life, at least childhood.

In the documentary, the kid grew up with a pair of gay men, at least one of whom was stern and strict. The last image I remember is the kid sitting on a couch with one of his two dads.

 

I kept having creepy dreams and ghost dreams….

 

I dreamed that I was with some people who start talking about ghosts, so I talked about some of my ghostly encounters.

Nightmares during a Pandemic

I dreamed that I lived in a large Victorian Queen Anne house in a fairly rural area. The house had a wrap-around porch and a stone foundation with a basement. Because the house was built on a slope, the basement had an exterior side door.

At some point I had a visitor who was a friend.

Toward the end of the dream, I heard people on the front porch. I was in the basement and didn’t want to talk to them. I wanted to hide. I slipped out of the basement side door without locking it and ended up… where? Under the front porch? On the porch? It seems like I ended up on the wrap-around porch, which doesn’t make sense if I was trying to avoid people whom I thought were at the front door.

Wherever I was, I witnessed a group of about six people slip in through the basement door I left open! They were breaking into my house.

Enraged, I went after them.

I went into the basement and grabbed a long piece of wood leaning against a wall and, yelling, “Get out of my house!” or something like that, charged at one man. A struggle ensued, with me pushing his throat and him against the wall while the others watched (or ran away?).

A male friend or acquaintance of mine came up behind me and tried to be the voice of reason, I guess. He said, “Don’t kill him! You’d end up in prison!” I just felt angrier.

 

I dreamed that my brother and I were in a car in a parking lot. We were having a conversation… and we may have been talking about the past, when we lived in Indiana.

He said something about Britney Spears. Confused, I knit my brow and said, “But… I don’t think Britney Spears was around in the 80s.”

Completely out of the blue, he yelled at me—how typical—I don’t remember what. His rage made no sense and creeped me out (what else is new?). He got out of the car.

I recovered from my shock enough—only after the asshole got out of the car—to become enraged and, giving him the finger with both hands and yelling repeatedly… well, something very vituperative that I won’t repeat hear. He ignored me

 

(Last night I was revising one of those autobiographical novels inspired by toxic people. That could well have triggered that dream, even though it was a different perpetual playground  bully. I am so sick of empathy-challenged perpetual playground bullies who harbor a bizarre delusion that they’re entitled to use me as their doormat/verbal and psychological punching bag and that it’s somehow magically my duty to be their doormat/punching bag. I was sick of them before the 1980s ended.

Cloister Monkey

I dreamed that I lived in a ranch house in which I had a doll collection so extensive that I had dolls in just about every room. I was showing this collection to someone female… who at some point I realized was Evil Aunt Ethel.

There was a small shelf covered with small dolls in one room, maybe a bathroom. The earlier rooms aren’t as clear in my head now.

Many of the dolls were similar to those I saw in the Cinema Manuel exhibit in the basement of the Hult Center. New-looking porcelain dolls covered several shelves (in the exhibit)—the dolls that were set up so that they could move and seemingly watch you.

Anyway, the dolls in the dream weren’t moving… but neither were they anywhere near as interesting as my real doll collection, never mind that there were more of them. (None looked antique, and there weren’t any Japanese dolls or anything Asian or foreign-looking.)

There was a dining room with a utility shelf or row of utility shelves, on which one large section was covered with a row of porcelain dolls with doll stands. The dolls were all about the same size.

On a wooden shelf, I had rows of dolls, some porcelain (including two very different black girl dolls in a row—and one was a couple inches shorter than the other, one wore red plaid—but they were both porcelain). This bookcase also had a few ceramic figurines, including at least one frog; and I pointed these out and said, “My mother made these.”

That’s when my guest turned into Evil Aunt Ethel. She said (condescending, sing-songy), “You could make ceramics like those, too.”

I felt nervous when she said that. It was like when I mentioned that I didn’t know how to upholster furniture and two aunts ganged up on me, smugly gloating because of this one thing I didn’t know how to do, and they said I could learn how. That was one of those countless occasions when aunts were eager to ignore things I’m good at and blow out of proportion something I’m not good at, trying to make me feel like shit for not being perfect or for not being their weird notion of perfect.

I think that’s when the dream ended.

 

It’s not surprising that I’d have a dream involving my aunts’ delight in this continual inclination to focus on the negative and come up with bizarre excuses to criticize me in attempts to make me feel like shit and hate myself—that was a very common experience around aunts. And it didn’t feel good.

You could say it was part of their gaslighting. Since I wasn’t an expert on every single craft and domestic skill, I was a piece of shit to ridicule. It didn’t matter that unlike them, I can write, draw, paint, sculpt, etc. But of course, nothing I was good at mattered—only what I was bad at or allegedly bad at (“You’re not as good at history as your brother”) or what I didn’t know how to do.

You can expect that sort of behavior if you associate with narcissists and narcissistic sociopaths.

 

I had another dream in which I was thinking about the above dream and described myself as a “wandering cloister monkey” or a “self-possessed cloister monkey.”

Last Night’s Dreams

I dreamed I was in a large Asian imports and antiques store. I was mesmerized by a group of porcelain antiques: four little figurines, a few inches long (at least two were reclining) on a structure that looked like a branch or stylized log. The little people–I guess Chinese children–were painted in lovely colors, and the branch was beige. They were all from about the turn of the century. Each figurine was labeled $97.99, and the branch was labeled $16.99 (from a sticker gun).

I looked at some other, tinier items—little Greek goddess heads and the like—but what I described about was fixed in my head… and I decided to buy them.

When I was checking out, I was shocked to be charged $699. Then I suddenly had a friend with me who noticed they overcharged me and looked over the handwritten list of items and complained. I would have just walked off overpaying.

 

I recall repeatedly dreaming about the word “coronavirus” in New Times Roman 24 point, with a capital “C.”