Queen Mediocretia of Suburbia

Night terrors

A few nights ago I sat up in bed, yelling. I would say I woke up screaming from a nightmare, only none of those things are true. 

I didn’t wake up: I can’t say I was asleep yet. I was in that twilight state when the baby chickens walk around the bedroom.

It wasn’t a nightmare, it was just an image. Specifically an image of Gary slipping and falling at his mother’s house.

I was yelling, not screaming. Specifically I said “Noooooooooo!’ And then I sat up.

”Yeesh,” I said, “That was awful.” Then I dropped off again. 

This time I was standing in the freezing cold snow outside someone’s front door, and they threw a bucket of cold water on me and I froze. 

This time I didn’t yell, I whimpered. But, somehow I dropped off again.

When it happened one more time I called for Gary. 

I whined, “Gary, I’ve had three night terrors in a row. First you slipped and fell at your mom’s, then someone tried to freeze me to death.”

He said, “What was the third one?”

“... Oh. I just fell against the the whiteboard again.”

And it’s true, I don’t know why my subconscious decided that would be the coda to two near-death experiences. I do know that since then I haven’t had a good night’s sleep.

Life in the Big House: the Miniseries

Gary has a journal.

(He chose this journal because he is a goth tween.)

We had a conversation after it arrived. 

He said, ”I think this has magical powers. I had a headache and then I smelled my grimoire and now my headache is gone.”

”Smelled what?”

”This. My grimoire.” 

”Not a real word.”

”Yes it is! Grimoire.”

I looked it up, fully expecting to see it was coined by J.K. Rowling, but it is a word, and has been a word since the early 1800s, no less. 

He plans to use the journal to document the plots of his very involved dreams, though he refuses to refer to it as a dream journal.

On page one he has written “PLOTS” in large letters. Page two is the first “plot” in which he is driving a car, and it falls into a lake, and when it hits bottom it crashes through to a void. He woke up while he was rallying the other void victims to escape. 

Because he’s a lucid dreamer, his plan is to dream in miniseries style. Before bed he’ll read the latest entry in his grimoire, which will be his “Previously seen on” recap, and then carry on with the dream to see what’s next.

As I always say, this ability he has to control his dreams really freaks me out.

Car Theft

I have been up for two hours now, and I am still mad that the man helping me rearrange the garage essentially stole my car. We agreed on a price of $2,500, he signed the agreement, drove off in the car, and then I looked at the paperwork and he wrote $200, not $2,500. 

None of this happened in reality, of course. I realize that the car he drove off in was a Dodge Dart. I have a Mini. My garage is perfectly organized. It doesn’t need to be rearranged. If it did I could do it myself, not hire someone, and on and on.

I think is all inspired by the stock market news, because in my dream I was going to invest the $2,500 because the market was so low. Every time time the morning news talks about the market I have a little pang of, “If that guy hadn’t - oh wait - he didn’t.” 

I imagine my senility will be just like this. Dreams that turn into hallucinations that I can’t shake. I need to go stand in the garage and look around at reality.

The Big дом Dream

Last Friday, Gary had another of his recurrent Big House dreams. The last one was almost exactly one year ago to the day. (Previous visits to the Big House weren’t on any schedule, though, so I think it’s coincidence.)

As it happens so often in the Big House, it was being invaded. This time the invaders were street urchins who would come in through the windows and then run when you entered the room.

This year’s Big House was in Russia, oddly. Gary was headed back to the Big “Dom” (дом), when our Russian neighbor discovered he couldn’t get in to his Big House and tried to borrow our key. Our key didn’t work, so the neighbor called out “Security!” to summon the neighborhood security force that would let him in. 

Gary also called out “Security!” and noticed an old woman peeling potatoes nearby. She was plainly the security enforcer, because she wouldn’t look him in the eye even when he got down on the floor and looked up into her face. And then, he woke up.

Right before he took the nap that elicited this Big House dream, I told him Russia had been found to have meddled in Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. I suppose an invasion of privacy at the Sanders campaign is what launched this. Big House dreams seems to happen when Gary’s hermit existence is threatened. He must be sympathizing with Bernie’s loss of privacy.

Gary and Reality

Yesterday Gary dreamed he was a spy being beaten in a North Korean prison. I said, “Oh, you had the radio on,” because I imagined NPR could easily infiltrate his subconscious with some expose of Korean work camps.

”I don’t listen to the radio anymore,” he said huffily, and then I realized that any alarm would come from Alexa and not the radio, and then I realized, “Alarm? Why would a retired man need an alarm?” So unless the Alexa is bored and lonely and begins whispering Prison Camp Facts to him if he isn’t awake by eleven a.m., I can’t see what prompted this dream.

I wasn’t worried at first (sleeping man has dreams, whoa), but then Gary told me that it took him a long time to ge back to reality. According to him, he had to strip down and stand in front of the bathroom mirror for a hour before he concluded he had not been beaten (and, assumably, was not North Korean).

I think everyone’s had the dream that stuck with them all day — some friend betrays you in a dream and you can’t get past it until lunch — but this seems like an advanced case.

He thinks these new hyper-realistic dreams are a result of the medications he’s taking for his thyroid, migraine, and epilepsy. I hope so. I don’t want to have to mount one of those nursing-home signs on his bedroom wall: 

“The day is SATURDAY, Your name is GARY, Your nurse is ELLEN, You are in the UNITED STATES.”

So Maybe I'm Not a Lucid Dreamer, But I've Got My Own Thing Going On

So, I can't count the times I've said to someone, "I need a nap. I just had one of those dreams that you have when you are falling asleep." If they say, "What are you talking about," I usually reply, "Oh you know, how you'll be falling asleep and then you notice the chickens that are walking around your room balancing on two-by-fours, and then you realize you're dreaming and it's probably time you get some sleep."

Sometimes they know what I'm talking about and sometimes they don't.

Well, I was reading about how you only dream druing REM sleep, and REM sleep takes hours before it begins, and I thought, no, that's totally wrong, because I get these falling-asleep preview dreams. So I did a little more research, and discovered that technically I'm hallucinating.

So that led to a fun evening reading all about hypnagogic (pre-sleep) hallucinations. Evidently at least one in four people have them. There was a lot of information on related neurological issues, none of which I have. No narcolepsy, no Parkinsons. (MS isn't mentioned. Besides, they started well before my brain had any issues. I remember when I was eleven or so: I was lulled to sleep by violent tableaus that played out on my wallpaper.)

I presented the findings to Gary, just so he knows I can match him in the dream game, and he scoffed, "Everyone does that."

Gary Mines His Subconscious

As many of you know, my husband Gary is a master of lucid dreaming. I frequently wake him up in the morning, have a conversation with him, and then he goes back to the dream he was in and finishes the dream. I. Find. This. Freaky.

Now, he has decided that instead of surfing his subconscious and riding whatever dream wave that arrives and picking it up again later, he's going to govern what he dreams about, because why not? If you can dictate that you're going to "finish" a dream, why not say that you are going to "start" a dream?

So I imagine he bored himself with sex dreams for a while, and now he's using his freakish dream powers for self-reflection. He has decided that every night he's going to tell himself to dream about his childhood, and see what happens. I assumed that he would dream about things like "that time aliens came to junior high with buckets of KFC,"  and I could laugh at him, but he's actually been remembering things from his childhood. Then he looks at them from an adult perspective and revises his opinions.

It's like a superpower.

Big House Returns

Gary has had so many recurring dreams about a Big House that it rated its own Blog Category. And then - no Big House dream for five and a half years, since he has been retired.  I believed that made the Big House dream analysis easy: Big House = responsibilities. It did tend to surface when he had family or job responsibilities.

It isn’t a pleasant dream, usually the Big House is falling down, or invaded by drifters, or family members have invited themselves and will not leave.

After a hiatus of five and a half years, he had a Big House dream last night, and that it was a pleasant dream. “Way fewer bugs and vandals than usual.”

This time the Big House was like a skyscraper, ten stories tall. It had two types of stories or floors: the decorated floors where he lived alone in the rooms and ... pleasured himself, and the empty run-down floors with no interior walls where an artists’ colony had squatted. 

Every artist floor was devoted to a different “permanent art exhibit: sidewalk chalk, giant rubber balls, dance.” (I do think it’s odd that all the permanent exhibits are temporary art forms.) He was initially unaware the artists were there, but they all knew about him and ate his food. 

He also said he led a tour of his Big House for some rich people, who had found the house on Google maps. They envied him.

So, if the Big House dreams are about responsibility, I suppose this recent dream is about his responsibilities in retired life. Masturbating in decorated rooms, socializing with rich people (me) who envy him, and having artists (me) eat the food he makes. 

Dream Report

Gary's Mom

You know how Gary has the Big House Dreams? He mentioned it to his Mom and she has them too. Big House, usually run-down, often invaded by strangers. I never thought dreams could be genetic, but if neurosis can run in families (trucks!) I suppose dreams could too.

Me

I've never had a pregnancy dream till yesterday. I was wearing a loose dress at a Boeing work event (I'd applied at Boeing) and a pregnant woman asked me when I was due.

"Oh, I'm not pregnant. I just ate too much."

I told my Mom in the dream, who said, "Look at yourself. OF COURSE you're pregnant."

That scared me so much I woke up and went in and told Gary. "I haven't had a period in ... ever. I might be pregnant? WHAT IF I'M PREGNANT?"

Gary reminded me how women get pregnant and I was reassured. I think my subconscious just reminded me I haven't taken my birth control for three weeks in preparation for the Menopause Exam Monday.

It's entirely possible I'm nowhere near menopause. That'd be horrifying. I might be hot just because it's summer.

Oh! Vivid Menopause Dreams? No One Told Me About That.

No estrogen for a week and I am imagining every menopausal symptom and adding some undocumented ones. Are strange dreams a symptom of the 'Pause? In the last few days I have had both the best dream and the worst dream I've ever had.

The Best Dream

Paul McCartney was using The Bookmobile as his tour bus. He drove to my house, and he called my friends, and we all had a tea party. He liked my friends, of course, and then at the end of the day he said he'd write. Then he drove off in The Bookmobile.

I woke up in LOVE with Paul McCartney.

The Worst Dream

I was at work, late for a meeting, and I was not wearing pants. (And, as an aside, I almost never have the No Pants dreams any more. I suppose my subconscious no longer cares that I reveal too much.) It was an episodic dream in which I was put upon, packed into elevators, dismissed, late, insulted, and I found a ratty sweater and a used Blackberry.

Very unsatisfying, especially after Sir Paul.

Big House Dream of the New Order

Gary, as you know, often has Big House Dreams. Sometimes they require extensive analysis. Sometimes the Big House has a giant underground parking garage, or has teenagers running through it.

Tonight Gary woke me up with a Big House Report.

What was special about tonight's Big House?

"You paid for it!"

Even My Subconscious Knows This Blog Is Boring

Last night I dreamed I was contracting in a military lab. A female scientist said I needed to remove my blouse for safety.

After doing so I turned to face the scientist and I felt the cold air on my boobs just as she said, "Why did you take off your bra too?"

And in my dream I thought, "Oh, this is going on the blog."

A Gross Post

I got Gary to agree we would go see Argo this past weekend at the fancy leather-seated five-star cinema, but Friday ... well, I could have just stopped that sentence with "but." Or rather, "butt." Gary's butt. It is unwell.

It became unwell Friday morning, about an hour before we had our yearly physical. Thanks to Gary, I can report the conversation he had with the GP immediately after his prostate exam.

"Geeeeccchh!" the doctor said as he left Prostate Avenue.

Gary said, "Oh yes, sorry. I haven't been too well this morning. It's probably a mess in there."

"Uuurghhk!" the doctored hacked in response, and then I imagine he very daintily plucked off his glove. Then he gave Gary some tissues. "When you are done wiping off, throw it in the RED container." Probably the biohazard container with the sharps and mucus.

Poor doctor. And of course, poor Gary, who had to spend the weekend in the bathroom with the "stomach flu." (You know, people with the "stomach flu" don't appreciate hearing that you can only get influenza in your lungs.)

After a weekend of the fluid poops (band name!) Gary woke up today and said, "I just had a big house dream. YOU removed the toilet in the bathroom! You said it would be more spacious."

"You know I would never do that," I said.

He went on, "And I was all, what else is a bathroom to a man but a toilet? A man doesn't put his makeup on in there. And then you refused to put the toilet back in."

So again I am sleeping in the guest room. I don't want what he has and he's still grumpy that I got rid of the toilet.

 

Big House Dream Revelation

Previously in Life in the Big House: Gary has a recurring dream in which he lives in a very big house. I don't know what provokes these dreams, but I am documenting them.

We woke up today after, I swear to you, fourteen hours of sleep, and Gary rolled over to say he had a Big House Dream.

(His eyes looked exceptionally bright blue. That must be what fourteen hours of sleep do for you.)

And then he announced, "I know now what all the Big House Dreams are about."

"Really? What?"

"They are about .. it's ... I can't think of the word."

Then he started to fall asleep again. No! I insisted he tell me. He still couldn't think of the word, but he revealed ...

"It's never a big house. It's a commune."

"But it's usually an empty house, unless outsiders invade it."

"That's right." [Pause for Drama.] "They aren't invaders. That's the commune. And we are the heads of the commune. And sometimes no one joins the commune, but this time they all did. Some people had fishing skills, some people could build, and everyone went to work."

I quizzed him some details about the house, and it was a huge house made of wood, reminiscent of a farmhouse he stayed in once with his parents. There were bugs, and none of the doors closed correctly, and there was no electricity. (Evidently none of our followers were electricians.)

I asked if he received any sexual benefits from being the head of the commune, and he confessed a young girl came on to him, but he had to say no. Because he is a very principled commune leader. Oh, and his entire family was there.

Then he began to fall asleep again, and briefly rambled on about how really our house is a big house. (No. It is not. 1400 square feet is not big, at least not by suburban standards.) I disagreed, and he said, but "it's a house where we control everything that happens in it."

I am thinking this must be precipitated from the lack of control he feels during my Birthday Month.

(By the way, I am freezing chocolate now. All cakes and cookies are in the freezer. We shallhave a substantial cache of chocolate to take us into the winter.)

SuperMoon

In case you haven't heard, "Thanks to a fluke of orbital mechanics that brings the moon closer to Earth than that it has been in more than 18 years, the biggest full moon of 2011 will occur on Saturday, leading some observers to dub it a 'supermoon.'"

I tried to see the waxing supermoon last night, and though the sky was cloudy some of the supermoon rays were able to break through the clouds. Then I went back to sleep and had an incredibly long complex dream.

When I woke up I had this twitter exchange:

This your chance to take part in a worldwide science experiment. The true supermoon in Saturday night. Pay attention to your dreams and report back in the comments.

Yet Another Post By A Blogger About Inception

... and just like every other post I say, "Go see this movie now."

However, I promise I won't put in any spoilers. It was too long by a few minutes - just enough for me to go Mystery Science Theater 3000 on it and make connections with Citizen Kane and Twilight Zone. (I really thought the kids would have pig snouts. That's not a spoiler, is it?)

The oddest thing was that on the way out, I kept thinking, "Didn't I just see a movie with Ellen Page in it - OR did I?" Of course, I'd just seen Whip It over the weekend. Also, this weekend I had a dream in which a set of prosthetic gums kept trying to talk to me, and the gums just kept babbling until one day I understood they were quoting classic rock lyrics, then they began quoting old movies, and then the FBI tried to kidnap them.

(There was a paragraph here. I deleted it. It would have spoiled one thing for you. Shhh.)

I don't know that I needed to see it on the big screen, I just needed to see it so I could avoiding anything that might spoil it for me. Now I have to go back to your blogs and see what you said, because I've been skipping everything you wrote about it. The only one I'm sure I remember is the one at Blogography. If you wrote about it let me know in the comments.

Return of the Big House Dream

(If you don't know, Gary has a recurring dream in which he lives in a big house. I keep track in the category "Life in the Big House." Sometimes, they're obvious, sometimes not. Last night's was obvious.)

Gary said when he woke up, "Oh, I had a Big House dream last night!"

"Oh, good. It's been a long time since you've had the Big House dream."

"This time, we owned this big house and you sold it out from under me because there was this little bungalow you wanted. You didn't ask, you just sold it."

I thought, "Yeah probably because I had to clean the big house." I said, "Well, I like bungalows."

He went on, "You were all excited because this new house was a French Bungalow and there was a hammock in one of the rooms."

==================================

I KNOW. Why didn't he just say I sold the Big House to the Travelocity Gnome?

Weirdest Dream Ever

Gary has the Simultaneous PukeCoughPee Virus now, only his pee has farther to travel and, as you know, he pukes only once a decade. One distinguishing characteristic of the Virus is, I surmise, that you breathe very shallowly when you sleep so not to cough, this starves your brain of oxygen and you have insanely vivid and base lizard-brain dreams.

Gary and I have begun a competition. We wake up and compare dreams. Yesterday he reported we had been participating in an orgy in his dream. I had just gotten out of a dream in which I got lingerie and French kissing from a fat Italian woman and her grandfather. "My dream sucked," I complained, "Tomorrow night I'm having an orgy."

Here's what I dreamed instead.  In short, I was a professor in a college town who held "salons" while in a bubble bath. And I was much admired. However, one day I impulsively decided to drive to Jefferson City, and by the time I got there I was lost, didn't know where I had initially been headed, and confused about who I was. I went about asking people if they recognized me and got more and more amnesiac and distressed. Eventually all I remembered was that my mother had drowned in the river. I found the place she had drowned, and crawled on my hands and knees down the mossy levee and into the green water. To die! The end. (Pirouettes and bows.)

I have never had such a dream before. In every dream I am there, I am the victim or the hero or usually the innocent bystander, I might change how I look or what people call me, but never have I lost who I was while dreaming.

So. Has anyone else had a dream of losing ones identity resulting in suicide? It really shook me.

T-Minus 4

Gary's Dream

Sometimes on the weekend I'll wake Gary up and he'll say "Lemme alone. I wanna finish my dream." Then he emerges from the bedroom three hours later and gives me wild details of the dream he just finished. Pirates and action-adventures, usually.

I've always been suspicious of this. I say things like, "Those are called fantasies, Gary." He insists he's able to wake up and then go back to a dream. Someone suggested I look into lucid dreaming and I suppose that explains it.

However, Gary said this a few days ago: "I started having a Big House dream, but then I woke up. I got as far as seeing the bottom half of the house, but I didn't look up to see the rest of it. But, it was surrounded by water, not a moat, more like a lake. Of course, as usual, there were squatters, and we were visiting our own house. But this was new, the guy who paddled us across the lake didn't recognize us. Then I woke up."

"Well, that's not much of a dream."

"That's okay. I'll finish it later this week."

Yes, my Matrix - Philip K Dick - Alice in Wonderland obsessed husband is able to dream in installments. "Oh, I've always been able to do that. You don't do that?" No, you freak. He says that he'll be back to the Big House (specifically, back to the very same Big Stone House on the Lake) this week. I think this one is easy. The Rock House on the big body of water? That's pretty obviously the BNL cruise.

My Dream

While Gary's out there watching dream re-runs, I dreamed a dream with two unreal events in it.

First thing, I ran in to one of my college boyfriends, Dave, and decided I was going to have a affair with him. I have never had an affair even in a fantasy, much less a dream. I always do Gary the courtesy of at least killing him off. This time, though, I made quite the conscious decision to cheat on him with Dave the college boyfriend.

However, Dave was not in luck, because as the sex with Dave started, I became aroused, and glanced down to see that I had grown an erect penis above my vagina. I thought perhaps I could pass it off as a clitoris, but when it curved up to my navel I realized I should honestly call Dave's attention to it.

"That's okay," said Dave (It happens to everyone), "I was almost done anyway." And then he was, by his own hand, done.

First of all, and this was odd, the whole sexual experience took less than two minutes, and second, it seems my old friend Dave ejaculates something that looks like cappuccino foam with raw egg whites beaten in*. Oh, and I had a penis. I really don't know what this means.

* I AM allergic to raw egg whites. Freudian?

AdventureGary

Gary came in tonight from work and said, "I passed a big house tonight on the way home."

(Gary, if you don't know, routinely dreams at night about having a Big House. I never ever dream about Big Houses. I dream about being a fat snaggle-toothed old cougar. Hm. What could that mean?)

He continued, "And I thought, 'I'll never have a house like that. My House-Buying Days are over.'"

"You know, Gary, if you really want - "

"No, wait! Then I thought, 'But my Adventure Days are just beginning!' It just popped into my head!"

"A positive thought just popped into your head?"

"Yeah!"

I imagine this stemmed from the Segway tour we took this weekend (I'm just waiting for the tour photos) or from the way the Wii Fit convinced me I would be GREAT at skiing, or the helicopter ride I'm planning over Niagara Falls, perhaps on the same day as we do this.

Poor guy thought he was going to spend his retirement playing the drums in the basement...

Big Car Dream

Today when I came home, Gary was already there since he'd spent the day at home with the flu.

"One good thing about the flu," he said, "It gives you the coolest dreams. I had my recurring car dream again."

"What? There's  a recurring car dream? I thought the only recurring dream you have is the Big House dream." (See Life in the Big House.)

"Oh, really?" He shrugged. "I can't believe I've never told you about that. I have the Cool Car dream all the time."

So, I pressed for details.

In the Cool Car Dream:

• Gary buys a cool car, usually a Corvette,  but for some reason today it was a Ferrari. I do have a new job, so I suppose he upgraded.

• One the same day he buys said car -
  

  - He loses control of the car because of the handling, or
  - The car is stolen, or
  - The car is dismantled in garage of our house (not the big house of his dreams, but our current house) and left entirely in pieces, with significant pieces missing.

• Gary's response to the loss of the car is to shrug it off and go back to the same dealer and buy a cheaper car from the same manufacturer.

I'm just as baffled about this dream as I am about the Big House Dreams. I don't know what he's responding to. He did just get his yearly review. Maybe the car symbolizes his status in life? Maybe he's worried about losing the raise he got? And more important, why don't I have recurring dreams?

Speaking of my dreams:

You know, we've had a big influx of people here from the Lush site, and the MS people from the MS carnival and the Great Blog Link Experiment, so you old-timers know what this means.  This means I am compelled by forces beyond my control to confess something inappropriate.

But, what to do? Nothing even interesting happened to me yesterday, much less inappropriate, and I know that was a great disappointment to those of you who remember the Brazilian adventure after the Ships and Dippers crowd visited.

Well, my subconscious rectified the situation last night by giving me the most horribly, horribly inappropriate dream ever. So horrible I woke up and said, "Oh ... oh no one will ever hear about that one." And that just made it worse, because first: "Hi! New People! Gotta Humiliate Self!" followed by: "Keeping a Secret! Gotta Humiliate Self!"

So, I just want to say if anyone else has had a dream involving a three-way among themselves, a young Bruce Willis, and their seventy-one year old mother I want you to feel comfortable sharing.

Don't leave! Hear me out! Sure, a sex dream involving my Mom (Jesus what is wrong with me) is perverted on so many many levels. Still, I want to assure everyone (especially you, Mom, and Good Morning) that I did not have contact with Mom during the sex. Bruce Willis and I were having sex, and Mom decided to strip down and participate. She was focusing on Bruce, not me (because THAT, THAT would be sick), and I had just the most satisfying time.

Then I woke up and gouged my eyes out. The End. God, how I wish I were making this up.

Gary's Big House O'Fun

I suppose Valentine's Day inspired Gary to have another of the freaky Big House dreams. He was once again the owner of a Big House, and again strangers were milling around.

Gary reported this house was even larger than most houses in the Big House series of dreams. (Coming soon on DVD!)  So large he hadn't been in every room. One room he did visit was decorated like the inside of a pinball game. I asked if people were being run down by giant silver balls. Gary said no, but that there were targets that would pop up and we could shoot at them.

And oh, he mentioned, I left him for another couple.

"Couple?" I giggled, "Hey, thank you!"
"You just took off with them."
"Well sure. What did they look like?"
"The guy was kind of baby-faced with blond hair. The woman was young and brunette."
"Were you sad?"
"I punched the guy in the face."

Now, I confess the other Big House dreams have me perplexed, but this one is as clear as my conscience. Gary must be a little concerned that youth will lure me away from his fifty-three year-old self. Awwwww. I must make it a point to do something codgeresque this weekend. Well, after I go to another Girl's Night Out.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Damn creepy UPDATE:
I just checked. Last year on Valentine's Day? He had a big house dream. A dream in which our dog Doug (who in truth was not long for this world) was dead. A premonition? And this dream coming at the same time, on Feb. 15th. Spooky.

Big Summer House

Big House Returns! Gary had another installment in the series of Big House Dreams.

Gary dreamed that we had a house: a house so big you could play golf in the hallways. There were plants and water features in the hallways, which made them particularly conducive to golf.

Evidently there was a big airport shutdown. Many many wealthy people were stranded at the airport and Gary invited them over to play golf in our hallways. I thought this was great and I encouraged Gary to turn our home into a vacation spot. Gary did not agree.

Finally, we had a big tractor. I don't know the significance of this. 

Gary's Good Dream

Gary reported a dream, not a Big House dream but one so unusual it deserved notice:

He had one of those "I'm taking an exam and I don't know any answers" dreams, but it didn't end with the cold sweat or the failing grade. His professor handed him back the paper and said, "I know this is an F, Gary, but we all like you so much it really doesn't matter." Then Gary was puzzled and the other students gathered round and said "We all love you Gary, you're just so great, we don't care about your grades."

He is eight years my senior, so now I can't wait for eight years from now when I can have my "you failed and we love you anyway" dream.

Baby Teeth

So, evidently dreams can be contagious. I didn't have Catherine's teeth falling out dream, but Gary did. And get this - in the dream:

1) He and I had a baby.
2) The Baby's teeth all fell out.
3) He made a guitar pick for me out of the baby's teeth. (Hey, not my dream, but I'm still getting stuff. And you know I would so love a guitar pick made of baby teeth.)

Then, in the dream, his mother asked "What's the baby's name?" and he replied, "Dunno. We might not keep it." She pointed out the baby was old enough to have lost all its teeth and we couldn't give it back now.

I can't even start muddling through what all this means. The dream site Catherine referenced doesn't mention my understanding of teeth falling out (losing ones children). Which in this case would mean our baby had had children, which I suppose is a dream complaining we won't have grandchildren (but we will have guitar picks). Then again, her site also mentioned control issues (which makes me wonder why all S_____s don't have this dream every night) or loss of innocence. This would make sense and probably be spurred by our niece's determination to grow up entirely just in her Sophomore high school  year.

I don't want dreams like this. I want my subconscious to send me PowerPoint slides with bullets.

Big House 2/14

Gary reported a Big House Dream this morning. He reported it because it was still haunting him. Doug, Mac, Gary and I were in the Big House, and the Big House in this particular dream had many rooms and doors that connected, and each room had a window that showed the adjacent rooms as well as doors. Gary said Mac and I were there but we were not in danger, but he was. Doug was not himself in danger but he was walking all through the hallways and starirways of the big dark empty house, in a ghostly fashion, as Gary grew increasingly sure something was stalking him. So Gary started locking all the doors, to escape the vague thing that was after him and no one else. He reported the creepiest thing was the way Doug kept emerging in the hallways and Gary could see Doug, but that Doug was oblivious to the horror in the house.

What happened on this day to provoke this dream? Well, it was Valentine's Day. Gary called his Mom, and she couldn't believe we had spent 23 Valentine's Days together. Plus, one of the higher-ups at work was fired for the failure of a project that Gary was going to be responsible for. He said all he had at work now was responsibility.

Gary fears something that the dogs and I cannot be harmed by. Monogamy? Age? Responsibility? Or perhaps illness, since Doug is our sickly dog.

The Big House

Gary has a recurring dream. It is the "Big House" dream, and I thought I might track it. He's been having it in some form all through our twenty-year marriage. I'll think I have it figured out, and then he'll come up with "The Big House - version 2001" which blows all my theories. There is only one thing completely consistent about the dream: we live in a Big House in various states of repair and occupancy. But always, always, always Big.  In previous versions of the dream:

Big House Occupied by Teenagers. Big House was part of an amusement park we had for ourselves, but then we got short on cash and opened it for a profit. However, teenagers got in and squatted in the house.

Big House with a Big Garage. Big House perched on top an enormous underground garage filled with cars.

Big House On Tour. Even though we were aristocrats, we were forced by financial necessity to rent the big house out for tours.  People who walked through tried to ignore us as we wandered around in our tatty bathrobes.

Big House from the Outside. Gary reported walking across an empty golf course trying to get to our Big House. It was empty, because I was lying on the grass by a small pond. A butler came out and served us lemonade. In this dream Gary never made it in the Big House but knows it was empty.

And the latest, Big House with a Piano in Every Room. Gary said "It was like the house in that Robert Redford movie." Mr. Redford is considered by many to be a well-known actor, and thus busy, which narrowed it down to only (...checking IMDB...) about sixty. "The Great Gatsby?" I guessed, not knowing of any other Redford movies in which he has a house. Yes, he said, and there was a perfectly tuned piano in every room. This one is obvious, right? I pick up the guitar and the Big House fills up with music (perfectly tuned, may I add).

Clearly Gary's dreams have little nuance; anyone should be able to figure out what they mean. Previously, some kind of S_____ family phone call has precipitated the Big House dream, but not this time. Therefore, I have decided to track of the Big House dream. Did he dream Big House Occupied by Teenagers when Arzaana-fay was visiting? Big House With a Big a Garage when we were car shopping? Clearly I need a database of some kind.