The Ache of Emptiness and Comfort

Wednesday Night/Thursday Morning - Last dream series of the night

I am in college in class. One of the classes I've been attending, which is the one I'm in now, I've been kind of slacking off on. The teacher, who looks sort of like my old math teacher from CC (but the topic is not math, it's something to do with history) plays a movie at each class and at the last class we had a paper to write in class. As I'd totally been spacing out during the previous class and the paper related to the movie, I had done pretty badly.

Now I'm back at the next class, deciding I better start paying attention and taking notes during the movie, since I'm doing pretty badly. There are 3 or 4 other people who show up for class that day, and we are seated around a long table with the far end pointing at the TV where the movie will be shown.

One of guys in class has been really irritating me, he always makes smart aleck remarks at me or acts sarcastic, and it is annoying. This happens at each class. I can't clearly remember much about how he looks now but he had shaggy light brown hair that was several inches long at least and was probably around my age or slightly older. I knew him from the class at the time, and his name, but I can't recall that either. This class I am seated at the very end of the long table, with people scattered on either side, waiting for the teacher to come in. I am slouched down in my chair, with my notebook out, feeling very discouraged and kind of depressed and unhappy, presumably about the class, but really as I've been feeling a lot lately. All signs kind of indicate to stay away from me.

Shaggy hair guy comes in and sits down next to me at the end of the table (not a usual occurrence) and makes one of his "funny" remarks as usual. I am weary, but at some level I appreciate that he does talk to me each time, there's some level of affection there I realize. There is scattered talk about having to pay attention to the movie this time becuase we'll probably have to write about it. The teacher comes in and starts to play the movie, and shaggy hair guy leans against to me very softly and rests his head on top of mine. I lay my head on his shoulder. It feels SO good I almost cry. I feel so comforted in my misery and lean back against him and we stay like that, he rests his hand tenderly on my head or my shoulder and we just lean together for the movie not really paying attention after all, or to any remarks from the teacher or others. I am aching inside with how good it feels to be held like this. The fact that I previously thought he was annoying is completely gone, and that this is wrong doesn't even matter because it touches the pain so much.

Something wakes me up at this point and I feel so empty, and want to go back to that feeling in the dream. I go back to sleep trying to get back to it, and though I end up going back to school again in the continuing dream, I can't get back to that scene or the guy.

In the continuing dream, it's the next quarter starting, first day. I am still hoping to run into him again and recapture the comfort of the previous dream. I am back at my parents house, packing up for school early in the morning, and with my are my sister and either a cousin or my brother, I'm not sure. We all get our stuff together. As we are leaving there's some altercation on the road involving my aunt and uncle and our dog. We go down to see what's going on, apparently they think he was doing something wrong and are yelling at him. He barks and another dog, a female, comes running down the hill at his call. Apparently this is also our dog but relatively new. She is a German Shepard like him, but her coat is actually white with pink vertical stripes, much like a pair of pants I used to have. She has another name but our dog calls her Cornelius. My father comes down to the commotion and I ask her if this is really her name, and he says he guesses it's the right name, as that's what the other dog has been calling her and it seems to fit.

As my father is handling the dog situation, whatever it was, we get into the car and drive into school. It's unclear what college campus this is, really, it sort of morphs between CC and EWU and this other version of EWU that has appeared in some of my other dreams. It's quite early in the morning, about 20 to 7.

My sister and I part ways in a classroom and arrange where we will meet, after some discussion we decide to meet in the "blue classroom with the cartoon characters painted on the walls". Both of us can picture and remember this room but neither of us actually remember exactly where it is, but we are sure we will find it. I can't remember where my first class is, although I know it starts at 7:30. There is an enormous clock on the wall in the classroom I'm in, where my sister and I split up, but I can't tell if it says 6:30 or 7:30. At first I think it's 6:30 but then when I look closer it appears to be 7:30. I finally ask some other people in the room, and they assure me that it is 6:30 but the clock is set wrong. I hope this is true, and I hurry off the the library to print off my schedule so I can find my first class. Hopefully it will have the same guy in it (one of the classes I'm taking is the same class, continuing the previous one, so it should).

I set off for the campus library. I am carrying a very awkward bag of stuff. In addition to my lunch and a pair of very dirty hiking boots, and school stuff, I also have 4 very large and awkward ceramic vases that I made in a previous class. I don't know why I'm hauling them around except that I'm hoping to show them to somebody, but I really am thinking I should have left them at home. I'm afraid they will break and it's very difficult to carry them all. I think I eventually decide to put them back in the van so I don't have to haul them around.

I wake up again before I make it back to the comfort of the shaggy haired guy, and I can still feel that loss in my chest. The emptiness was already there but he made me aware of it by comforting it, so when the comfort is taken away, I feel the ache more strongly.

The Bugs Kept Coming...

3/11/2008
Last night's dream (Tuesday morning/Monday night)

I only remember the last part of this, which was creepy and gross. I had a small wooden toy sort of like a threadspool with holes in it that was sitting on the bedside table. I was in bed, it was morning but I hadn't gotten up yet. It was some kind of cat toy, I think. As I was fiddling with it, I suddenly realized that there were some kind of bugs inside, they looked like a cross between a centipede and an earwig, and had long wavy antennas. One of them came out of one of the holes and started crawling around; it dropped on the bed and I jumped up and knocked it away, but then I couldn't see where it had gone. My husband asked what I was doing. I said there had been a centipede, but it was gone now, nothing to worry about. I knew there were more in the toy but I didn't' want to alarm him, also my skin was crawling already. He looked at the toy though, and said he thought there were more inside. One had crawled down to the entrance of the hole and was waving its antenna around. It dropped out and landed on the floor, and as it ran across the floor it started to grow until it was an lobster, several times larger than actual lobster size. My husband jumped out of bed and ran after it, hitting it with a shoe until he killed it. He dropped it in the kitchen garbage, asking me first (joking) if i wanted to eat it. I said it wasn't really a lobster, but a centipede, it just looked like one, and I didn't care more for lobster anyway.

I asked him what we should do about the toy to get rid of the bugs... could we submerge it and drown them? or burn it? Then I was in my parents house, but I still had it. Another centipede came out, this one was very long, and it was running quickly across the floor. I wanted to kill it before it went into a crack in the floor, but my feet were bare. I stepped on it and the middle of it squished, but it kept running and disappeared into a crack. Another one squirmed out, also very long, and ran under a corner of carpet; I pulled it up but couldn't find it again. Another one came out and started running towards my sister's room door, I finally found a shoe and went after it trying to squish it. I was creeped out by all the centipedes squirming around and disappearing into corners of the house, my skin was crawling.

Then my father came out, he had the other shoe. I thought he was going to kill the remaining centipedes, but he had two cats instead and said he had to kill them. One was a brownish orange tomcat, who I don't remember the name of, and the other was a female with white and yellow splotches, who was called Lemon Cream. Both had short hair, and were not actual cats that I know. He killed them both by hitting them with the shoe. I was upset but he was strangely cheerful afterwards. I picked up a section of newspaper and read an article about it where he was joking about putting them in soup. I was mad and yelled about it, but it didn't phase him.

A mysterious teacher and a gifted girl

9/13/2007 - Last night's dream ( Wednesday Night)
Dream 1
A young teacher returns to a place that she taught before, in order to pay special attention to one student in particular. This student is a small girl between 7 and 10. She has short black hair cut about to mid ear all the way around, and has much potential. But, she has been difficult for teachers to work with and is now labeled as a problem student, and possibly delayed a level.

The young woman who has returned is probably about my age, also dark haired. She remembers the girl from teaching here for two years or quarters, etc when she was much younger. The teacher has some sort of special abilities herself, in a mary poppins sort of way, and will pull this girl into her full potential.

She only tells the girl that she is here to be the new teacher, and tells her she used to teach her when she was much younger. The girl doesn't say anything, somewhat shyly. Not sure if she remembers this woman (but she likes her already). She goes to play with the other few students in the school. It is set in a somewhat remote area in the woods.

The new teacher observes them playing outside, and begins to formulate her lesson plan. She will be teaching all subjects. Rather than teaching each one for an hour or so each day, she devotes a different day to each subject (or most of the day).

The girl is fascinated by two large old airplanes that are landed in the clearing. They seem to be antique, and are very huge and heavy flying machines (not built like typical airplanes here, but on a large X shape). She is fascinated by them and filled with longing to fly in them, climbing on them and gazing at them.

The teacher watches all this, smiling to herself. When she goes into her cabin that evening, she places a small bowl of simmering green liquid, like a candle, in the corner of her cabin on a small table by the bed. A local man with sandy brown hair, who is smitten by the new teacher, watches this and asks her about it. She explains that this will make the little girl comfortable here. The liquid smells like the wet outdoors and the airplanes, and fills the cabin with this smell. When the little girl stops by to talk to her, while the teacher is formulating her plans, she does smell it but doesn't know where it's coming from. This is some of the teacher's magic.

That morning the little girl and the teacher awaken to the sound of chainsaws. The girl looks out her window to see that the large stump outside is being cut into pieces. There is also another stump at the next house which is being cut up. The view is blocked by the first stump, but she can see pieces of it roll out. The problem is, the stump blocked the view of the toilet. As she goes to sit on it, she can see that once the stump is gone, the toilet will be visible from the next house. It's not an outside toilet, it's part of the house, but it doesn't have walls all around it.

I am "inside" the heads of both the girl and teacher in this dream, like they are characters in a story I'm writing. I felt very attached to it in the same way, as well, although once I woke up (as is often the case) the storyline seemed less coherent than it had in the dream

Dream 2
This one is quite a bit murkier in my memory...

There are some shoes and a tree, or branches of a tree, that I carry and put on a bed, which has a light pink bedspread. I am spending a lot of time there, either in the bed or just in that room. They are branches of a sensitive plant (mimosa), and I have picked them from a larger version of it. I am explaining to someone, a boy around my age, that you have to be careful of the vicious thorns in these branches (true!), but the ones I am carrying don't seem to have many of these. They look more like they are off one of the tree relatives than the actual sensitive plants. I think that I may be in this room because I am sick with something. I think that I enlist the boy to sneak more things up to me, which he doesn't follow very well.

Taekwon-do & chicken yard part 2, and me as a guy on drugs

Last night's dream: Wednesday Night 9/5/2007
In the first dream I was up at my parents house. Some relatives, possibly aunts, drove up in a car. My best friend from childhood, S-, was there, but she was only 8 or 10 years old. My sister had painted S-'s face blue and was trying to make sure that she didn't touch it and get it on her Taekwon-do suit.

I went down to the chicken-yard, my father was there cleaning it up. One side had been disked and plowed to make it all flat (this is beginning to sound like a strange sequel to this dream... maybe it is?). The sidewalks and inside were all clean, and the chicken's were enjoying pecking the tilled up earth. On the other side of the yard, I helped him move some boards against the bottom of the fence, which had been moved to cut down weeds and grass growing there.

Then I went to Taekwon-do with my sister, as we used to do when I was younger. By the time we got there it was absolutely pouring with rain, although I was not wet. We went inside and took our shoes off, I was wearing my black wooden clogs. When I took off my shoes, I discovered that the socks I was wearing were filthy, and I rolled them up with the clean cuff on the outside and stuck them into the shoes, feeling ashamed. My teacher came up and we bowed several times, she seemed happy to see me (although not ecstatic). Then she told my sister some kind of joke about God (I think it involved God's gender) which they both laughed about. I did not think it was funny and felt uncomfortable.


In the second dream, which sort of overlapped, I was a young man about my age who was addicted to (and on) drugs. My girlfriend was also addicted to drugs, including cocaine and heroine, and she disappeared and was found in the woods... dead in one version, and alive in another. In the ending in which she died, I did not feel sad or shocked, just sort of complacent and accepting of it. This faded back into the end of the other dream, with the pouring rain.

It was not pouring rain at all when I woke up, which was a little disappointing, although it's probably what allowed me to still get to work on time.

You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave...

I was visiting a far-away city, somewhere to the east and south in the U.S. (it was somewhat cold and wintry there). I had received as a gift 2-nights stay in a hotel there, and it was now Sunday afternoon and time to go home. I had also booked another hotel starting a day or two previous to the paid-for days (La Quinta), apparently because I’d arrived before the gift stay started. Both hotels were in a long mall block with individual storefronts like the mall in Tig--.

Time was running out and I had to check out of the hotel I had the gift pass for, and also I suddenly remembered I hadn't checked out of the other hotel I'd booked originally (why I had booked the stay in La Quinta through the stay in the free hotel, I do not know). I had to check out of La Quinta by 4 or also pay for another day. And I had to leave as soon as possible afterwards in order to make it back home before I needed to go to work the next day.

However, I wasn’t actually at either hotel when I realized all this, I was in the mall in a shoe store. I had just returned from some peculiar side-trip, possibly to another dimension. It involved archery with large colorful bows. I had discarded the pants I had been wearing on the bow trip (pale blue pantaloons), because they were bloody, and was trying to buy a pair of all black clogs with straps. There was a whole other part of the dream about this side trip, but when I appeared back in the shoe store it was all vague and I couldn’t remember the details of what I had been doing. I found one of them and waited for some time for a salesperson (getting antsy about getting back to the hotel in time to check out) only to discover that they only had the one clog on display, not a pair. I then discovered I had lost the sandals I was wearing (my real-life slip-on Danske sandals). I backtracked in the mall and found my sandals on the floor, and put them on. I kept losing them (or finding that I was shoeless, at any rate) throughout the rest of the dream.

I then hurried over to the counter for the first hotel, to check out. I had the keys, but the lady was taking her time to process my check-out. There were an additional 20 dollars or so I had to pay (reminiscent of our recent gift stay at another real-life hotel, which didn't look anything like this but mimicked its description, a trend I’ve noticed in many of my dreams recently. The situation will sound like something that happened in real life if you describe it, but it's actually totally different).

My mother came up beside me at the counter and said not to worry, she would take care of paying the difference. I was very grateful because it was only about 20 minutes until checkout in the other hotel, and I still had to actually get there, and get my stuff out of the room. But when I asked if I could go now, the lady at the counter said no, not until the room was actually paid for. Then it turned out that my mother was paying by signing over a pile of checks that hadn't been cashed yet, instead of using her credit card. Interminable! Finally, it was done and I tore for the door. My car was parked just outside. But my sandals were missing again. I found them (my husband was there now and helped) and put them on and dashed out to the car. Then I realized, by asking a passerby for directions (I didn't know where anything was in this city or how to get to the other hotel), that the La Quinta hotel was in the same mall, further down. I went back inside instead of driving and finally made it there, got my stuff out of the room, and checked out before the time limit.

During most of the dream my alarm kept going off every 15 minutes and I kept hitting snooze on it so I could go back to the dream and make sure that I finished the whole checking out business within the required time frame. It all worked out well in the end.