Snow Whales

Tuesday morning, July 1

In the later part of the dream, I wake up in bed with my husband. We are both half asleep. J-, a former coworker, comes into the room, he's all excited and wants me to get up and look at the snow. I groggily get out of bed and look out the window. I am wearing a long nightgown and a scarf. It has indeed snowed, over a foot. He is gleeful and jumping around. It's not clear or addressed how he ended up in our apartment early in the morning, he says he came to tell me this so I don't have to go to work. Out the window I can see that much of the snow however has melted, I don't think the roads will be impassible. I walk towards the other end of the apartment to check in at work on my computer. I pass a room with my lead, S-, in it at her desk. She lives in my building, in my floor (actuallly it looks like she lives in my actual apartment, and that her home consists of a desk, but she doesn't). I wonder how I'm going to be able to call in "snowed in" to work when she's in the same place, it's going to be a giveaway. I go back and try to prod my husband to get up, he is sleepy. I go out to look at the snow, with J- hopping along besides (why is he here?) He points out some whales that have come. There is a large body of water, possibly a river, behind my apartment which is also all snowy, and a number of small black whales. I think they are killer whales at first but he says they are some other kind (I don't remember the kind). They are colored sort of like killer whales though. One of them has two oddly shaped mouths on its belly.

Crossing the Glacier

Wednesday night/Thursday morning - Dream 2

After the previous dream, which was fairly short, I went to a totally different dream. In this dream I think the character who I was was actually being controlled in a game by the real me and my sister, because towards the end we started discussing what shoudl be happening next. I am a woman during some kind of ice age period. I am crossing this huge glacier. The glacier is moving at a pretty good clip, faster than I can walk, which is why I'm taking this route to begin with. But the going is somewhat trecherous, becuase caverns and cracks open and close and fold over each other, and the surface sort of moves in solid, slow waves. I am faster than these and can avoid them but it's still dangerous. There is a bear which is traveling in the same direction; we have an amicable co-existance and are reasonably friendly with each other. We also run into a couple other bears, wolves, and other animals en route. At one point I pass a small shed which is covered with snow. The wolves and other animals are gathered around it, they want me to break it open to see if there is something to eat inside. However, I don't do so because I think there might be people inside who have frozen. Then, as I come out of the glacier into just a cold wintery ground, there are some campers and trailers there with people living in them! This is very incongruous since I thought we were in prehistoric times, and my sister and I start debating if this is possible, she says she wants to keep introducing new things to keep it interesting. The dream breaks down at this point.

Unstable Airplane Pilots

5/23 - Friday morning/Thursday night

I've had dreams pretty much every night between this one and the last one I posted, but since I didn't write down the last one at the time of course I can't remember them now :P getting back in the swing of things again!

I am with my family and we are going somewhere up in the mountains or up north to go skiing. It's a ski resort and we plan to stay there a few days (in the dream, we've been there before, and I can remember what it looks like. It's all snowy at this time of year, I don't know if it's winter in the dream or we are just in a much colder area). We have driven quite a while when we reach a small town from which we will take a private plane to reach the ski area. Time has been running short so we aren't going to actually have that much time at the ski area, but I think we are going to stay overnight once we get there.

We reach the town where we will fly from and we go out to a small house where the pilot lives. It's located on the edge of a large, flat field, surrounded by a lot of trees. They all have their leaves off, it's cold and wintery although there is no snow on the ground in this area. I and my parents unload the van and pack our stuff into the plane with the help of the pilot. She is probably 35-45, somewhat drawn looking, with faded blonde/strawberry blonde hair about down to her shoulders. I think we may have flown with her uneventfully in the past on another trip to the ski place, because we seem to slightly know her, and where everything is. Her husband, who is your typical old, balding, somewhat stout guy, a little surly looking, is also at the house and sees us off.

We all pile into the plane, which is a very little one, and she takes off down the short runway in front of the house. Then she turns the plane around and makes another go at it. I wonder what's going on but decide she must just be taking another run because that one wasn't quite right. The plane takes off. She circles the small field, and comes back again low over the runway (I remember we had to move our van back out of the way where it's parked, and think, this must be why!). Then she turns the plane abruptly upwards. It starts to climb, then flips onto it's back and we do a loop-the-loop in the air. Up until this point I was thinking the weird behavior was just stuff I didn't know about, but at this point I'm a little concerned. The plane drives up and around again, and then it starts falling. Everybody is scrambling. I realize something is definitely wrong.

The others manage to bale out when the plane swoops close to the ground, but I'm still with it, and it's going up again, I fall or jump out. I am not falling straight down, but blowing sideways in my descent, away from the rest of my family and the house. I am going very fast, and I blow past some trees, trying to avoid their branches. The others are yelling that I am still up there. I realize that I am carrying a square of fabric maybe 2-3 feet wide, with strings attached. I don't think it's actually a parachute, but I decide to use it as one as I know I must slow my descent or I will crash either into a tree or into the ground. I throw it up, holding onto the strings, and it poofs out to cushion my fall. Then I drift ever so slowly straight down to the ground, and land on my feet gently.

I run back to wear the rest of my family is. They are now talking with the pilot's husband, who I think is considering flying us instead of her. She has gone down into the basement of the house, and he intimates that she is having some kind of nervous breakdown, which is why she couldn't control the plane. I go into the house and down the stairs, down several levels, and find her there. She is frantic and definitely having some kind of meltdown, and she clutches my arm, trying to tell me what is wrong. She appears to be very frightened as well. I try to determine what the matter is, which is difficult as she can barely talk, just managing to burst out snatches of speech. She finally gives me the cover of a book or journal she was writing in previously. She cannot write now due to whatever condition has seized her, but she wants me to write down what she says to take to my family and warn them.

Her husband is crazy and psychotic, and we should not go with him, she says. He seems normal but he is totally unbalanced, and we have to beware. He is going to ask us, she says, to kill his dog for him (as an example of his unbalanced behavior). We have to get away and not go with him. She has been trapped by him and I gather this led to her nervous breakdown.

I do my best to write down everything she says, but I am having a lot of trouble writing. When I write it comes out like a child's scrawl, I can't keep it in a straight line and it's barely readable. It's worse than writing with my left hand, although it feels a lot like it trying to control the pencil. But I get down as much as I can, and at her urging, I go up the stairs. My family is talking to her husband, but I manage to pull my father away, and show him what she had me write. This isn't very effective so I tell him what she said and that we can't trust him. My father is a little incredulous (especially on the word of the obviously debilitated pilot) but then I say, he is going to ask you to help him kill his dog. Sure enough he does ask that moments later, and my father is alerted to the fact that something is amiss with this guy. We decline him flying us for know and pull away to our vehicle to recoup and discuss the situation.

An Uncomfortable Visit and Other Anxious Situations

4/29/2008
Dream 2

I go out to visit my former riding instructor at her farm, it's rather awkward. We are standing in the barn and I am staring at the side of her face very closely and this is making her uncomfortable and she asks what I am doing. Later I return to my parent's house and go into the FH. When I get upstairs there's some mail on one of the desks. When I look at it I see it is SAT scores and I think they are my brother's. But then, I see my name on them, with my middle name as "TEST" and I groan, there has been some kind of mistake and the wrong name is written in on his tests, so they won't be valid. I sit down on a couch or somewhere (it's not clear in my memory) and realize it has cat pee on it. I despair becuase this means my cat is peeing on stuff again, which I thought was cured, and my husband is going to want to get rid of him, which is depressing. Then a person comes in, who I don't know. He is some kind of investigator. I'm surprised to see him there, but not bothered. He asks me if I've seen a suspicious person around, who looks like John Travolta. I confirm that I have not. I look out the window at the field, it has started snowing lightly. As I watch some of the snowflakes gather into a small swarm like a swarm of insects, which seems strange.

I did go to visit her recently but the weird awkwardness and anxiety which often seems to accompany meetings with her in dreams wasn't there... maybe something leftover from my childhood?

I find a friend amidst a hostile homeland and prepare for a secret mission

Wednesday 2/13/2008 - Last night's dream.
After many tired nights of fitful sleep, not conducive to dreaming, I actually got to sleep last night. I was still totally exhausted upon waking.

After getting to sleep, I "woke up" again in the dream when I heard the washing machine running. I looked over to the side of the bed where there had been a pile of dirty clothes when I had gone to sleep, and it was diminished. I tiptoed out into the living room and saw that in fact, the washing machine was going, and my husband had come home. The light was on in the study. He had not come to bed. I was sad and crept back to bed (note: this didn't actually happen, the whole waking up scenario was part of the dream, as with the next one. When I woke up in real life he wasn't there and the clothes were still unwashed). I slept for a while longer and when I woke up again, it was early morning (of today, Wednesday, but still in the dream). I walked into the living room and looked out, it had snowed in the night and the tree branches outside the window and the porch were all covered with a fine perfect coating of snow. I was a little surprised that it had snowed as it had been warming up a bit and I hadn't been expecting any more snow this year. My husband was up and he asked me if I was going to stay in because of the snow.

I looked out again, it was only about 1/2 to 1 inch of snow, and I was not going to work today but to visit my parents. I told him that I was still going to go, it wasn't much snow.

Skip ahead to H- Valley, I am arrived to visit for a few days (there's no snow there). It seems like it's been a while since I've been home. My cousin K- is also there. As I walk up to our grandma's house, I meet him and we walk together. He has been home for a while. The lawn in front of her house is no longer a lawn, it's all stripped bare and mounded up in hills, and it's dry and sandy (rocky sand, not beach sand) and dark reddish brown like clay. I am suprised by this. As we walk over the sand hills, I see a small perfect seashell about the size of a wonton, reddish yellow, laying on the sand (it's one of the spiral snail kinds). I pick it up with an exclamation of delight. I see another one of a different kind and pick it up, but it's not as nice so I drop it again. My cousin is not impressed by the find, he tells me it's been like this for a while and there are lots of shells. It seems it has been excavated and the area was once underwater. I get the impression that my grandmother may have past on a while ago and not live there anymore (this isn't new news to me in the dream, and it's not really addressed, there's just that feeling).

Later my cousin, myself, and some other people (my siblings and/or other cousin) go out for a walk across the logging roads. A new neighbor has apparently moved in somewhere between two of our other neighbors on the road, and according to my cousin they are somewhat hostile. My impression is that we kids haven't been home for some time so they don't really know who we are. We walk down to the bottom of a logged area where the trees start again, and there is a small bridge over a creek and we can see a trail continuing on. We start across but a man appears, he has black hair and a beard and outdoorsy clothes, and doesn't look like anyone I know. He yells at us to get out of the area. It's clear that he thinks we are trespassers who are dumping trash on the logging road or hunting or something, not neighbors. We protest but he is gone without understanding.

I end up finishing the walk by myself (I think my cousin went down the trail the guy told us not to). I end up on the road and I am walking past another neighbor's house on the way home (the E-'s). I see Bob and say hello as I pass, he talks to me about something but now I don't remember what. When I get about halfway home, by a bend in the road and creek, I stop. There is a bunch of dumped junk by the side of the road, all sorts of equipment and computer stuff. It's mine and I have to stow it here looking like junk so nobody takes it, becaues I need to pick it up later. The creek is high. I muck about nearby, suspending things over the bank, and I see a kid. He has black hair and looks kind of like a fictional character I used to have called RH. He's younger than me by a few years, and smaller, and he is one of the hostile neighbors. I call out a greeting. At first he is suspicous of me and wants me to get out of there, but I try to calm him down. I tell him I live her but have been away, I'm one of the family that lives up the road, and I describe where my grandma lives (or used to live) on the other side of the logging area. He has heard of the family and is suprised that I'm one of them but he seems to accept this. As we talk I get the idea that he's had trouble with strangers trespassing around the area, and that he's also run into my cousin and gotten a negative impression from him (which doesn't suprise me, since my cousin wasn't exactly trying to proceed softly with the other guy). The kid's name is Riley, and we both take a liking to each other. They live across the creek from the E's, he says. We talk about the other neighbors on the road and who lives there. Although nothing else has really changed from when I used to live there, I really feel like an outsider come home here, like the environment no longer feels I belong (the others of my generation are also affected this way).

We arrange to meet later; as I have to get home for some kind of dinner party, and I have to come back later and get this stuff. I have been assigned a secret mission that involves the equipment, and will be leaving directly after we come back to collect it. Riley wants to come with me on the secret mission and I agree.

I go home to my parent's house and am preparing for some kind of dinner with lots of people coming over. It's unclear exactly when this happens in the timeframe of the rest of the dream. I start making vast quantities of tea and looking for various pots to store it all in, and I am concerned that it will go bitter before the guests arrive. There are other preparations as well but I don't recall them all exactly. I'm stressed about it.

The actual party is skimmed over. Next thing I am out walking again, back down the road from the same walk before. I am wearing a poncho and pants, but nothing else on top and the poncho is flung back over my shoulders. I see a guy and I think it's Bob. He greets me. When I get closer I realize it is not Bob but some other guy (who doesn't even look like him, and is kind of creepy). I pull the poncho down to where it belongs, to cover yourself. The guy seems to want to talk with me, making complimentary but creepy remarks, but I hasten past with few words.

I end up at the bend in the creek again. The equipment is still there, and I start the laborious process of hauling it all out of hiding and folding it up. Parts are suspended over or submerged in the creek, or hidden in an old desk, and there are also cables plugging various bits together. I am working fast becuase I need to leave soon on the secret mission, and I don't want anyone to drive by and see me or get suspicious. My cousin and siblings show up and want to know what I'm doing. I don't want to talk about the secret mission becuase I can't explain it here, of course. They are persistent and purposefully annoying with their questions, trying to get me to explain. Riley shows up as planned. He is angry to see my cousin there (having previously run into him) but I quickly explain to my family that I know who Riley is and he is one of the new neighbors, and is coming with me, and I explain to him that my cousins aren't really intruders.

Once they hear that Riley is going with me, of course, they want to come too. I am irritated but finally I tell them it's a secret mission and they insist that they want to come, so I give in. But I won't tell them any of the details now. I get all of the stuff hauled up and am ready to go when another kid shows up. He is small and pale, with buzz cut blond hair, and seems to be slightly mentally disabled. He tells me he wants to go on the secret mission to. He has a toothpick which he is playing with. He pokes me with it. I ask him about something to do with the toothpick, (like, does he want to take it with him) and use his response as a reason why he can't come. I feel a little mean about this but it's impossible to reason with him. He's unhappy but accepts the explanation. He ends up breaking the toothpick in half by accident. The rest of us are all set to leave on the Secret Mission, but then I wake up for real this time.

The overall feeling in the dream is somewhat despondent and depressive, although it has good moments like finding the shell and Riley, who I enjoy being with. I am having trouble sleeping even in the dream world. Also I am irritated a lot and stressed by preparing for things, like the party and the secret mission, and the other people except Riley annoy me very easily.

Me as an irresponsible TV character

Jan 28^th (Monday morning’s dream).

At one point I am the character "Charlie" from "two and a half men," but I am also myself. The kid, Jake, is also there and I'm his uncle, but I'm also me. At one point I call my sister on my cell phone (who is my sister in the dream too). We arrange to meet up somewhere; she is coming down to visit me. I think we are going to go on a drive somewhere scenic, possibly up the Gorge. I start traveling up a rocky mountain road the kid. I accidentally let him fall into a huge crevasse where he hurts himself, but I really don't feel guilty enough about it, and I think I leave him there for a bit until someone compels me to go back and get him. Somehow I end up in an altercation with somebody who I don't really know, I think an older woman, in red. I try to elude her but she keeps coming after me, yelling at me about some bad thing I've done. She keeps popping up as the dream continues on and I'm with my sister on our excursion.

It's all very disjointed, possible because I'm sick. I keep waking up over and over in the night and have a hard time going back to sleep. A snowbank enters the picture after I realize it's snowed a little bit in the night.

Don't Rent From Your Aunt

When it started I was with some family members looking at an older house. It was big, bigger than any house I've lived in but not a mansion, and very nice, roomy interesting rooms and well built, but with a number of repair problems. The master bedroom, which was on the ground floor, was a large octagonal or round room. There was a door to the outside which was no longer in use, and which was closed with a chain against it, set into the wall directly behind the headboard.

We explored the house. My aunt N- had bought it or decided to do so at that point, and later on she offered to rent it to me. Warning signs went off in my head, but I really liked it and wanted to live there, so I agreed to rent it. I paid her some of the money then (possibly prorated rent for the month, and after a couple of weeks I sent her a check for the current month's rent. There were some things that needed to be fixed, and when I called her about them, she said to just go ahead and have them repaired, and she would pay me back. This wasn't my preferred method, but I did so.

Later, I went back to visit my parents. There was a building that was like a bookstore there, with a kind of museum exhibit within it. I don't remember what it was exhibiting, but some sort of recent history anthropological artifacts. The inside was sort of like Powell's, but smaller. I milled around there and there were a number of family members there, enjoying some occasion. My aunt was there with her family, and I wanted to ask her about the check, but I didn't want to bring up a money in a group setting. I did pass her the bill info, and she gave me a check, but I didn't look at it at the time.

Later, when I looked at it, I discovered that it was for $305, when it was supposed to be like $717. I had feared something like this would happen. I went over to her house later and asked about it, treating it at first as if it had been a mistake. She said that no, it was correct, she'd subtracted one of the rent payments which I hadn't sent her. I reminded her that I had sent her both, one in person, and one mailed. In fact, as I pointed out, she had cashed them. She said no, she'd never gotten them. I offered to show her my checkbook, and she asked what kind of proof I had. I had carbon checks. She said that people who used carbon checks always irritated her becuase they would whip them out to "win" and they were easily modified after the fact. I was getting increasingly uncomfortable and she was clearly angry and trying to avoid paying me back. I got out the check carbons and showed her, but I couldn't find one of them, although I found a note she had written at the time about how much I'd paid in that installment. She didn't make any response of giving me more money, so I said, "I can get records from the bank if you want." She said she guessed I'd better do that then. Thoroughly uncomfortable and also pissed off, I left and went back over to my parents house.

I puttered around their house doing normal things, and some hours later I looked out the window and realized it had snowed a couple of inches. I decided to go for a walk. I walked down the hill, taking the dog with me. When I got to the bottom, I realized that there was a car parked in the driveway, a red truck. My aunt N- and uncle were in it, with another dog which was smaller and black, belonging to them. I asked what they were doing there and my aunt got mad, and said they could be there if they wanted to. She also said that nobody knew I was there, right now (implying that if I mysteriously disappeared, nobody would know where I'd gone, in a threatening way).

At that moment, my mother and father and sister appeared walking down the driveway. My aunt told them that I'd told them they couldn't be there, and demanded to know what they were doing there. Also she suggested that I'd been threatening them or their dog with the dog I was walking. I protested that this was not what I'd said, and repeated what had happened. My father was not fooled by their attempts to incriminate me. He said that he'd heard her say that nobody knew I was there, suggesting that he was in on her plot. After general unpleasantness they departed. I was upset. My mother took me up in the field continuing the walk, and trying to make me feel better about the encounter.

She had a tub of ice cream. It was filled with little samples of many different flavors, in small containers the size of those plastic ketchup cups they have at restaurants. This bucket was introducing a new flavor, called Love NZ for the planet Venus or Neptune (I think Venus, but I kept calling it Neptune). We walked along tasting the different flavors. There was a picture on the outside of all the different flavors within, but they weren't labeled, so you had to identify them by the picture. We tasted one which was like ice cream but had many particulates in it, like bits of cheese, which were detrimental to the overall texture. The remaining ice cream flavors we tasted were not like ice cream at all, they were more like jello. The Venus one was bright lime green and tasted like melted jello, but much sweeter. There were several other ones which were bright blue and jelly like, with various-size sparkles in them. None of them were very good. We were trying to tell them apart from the pictures on the tub, but couldn't be sure which were which.

Dealing in the Desert with a Disappearance in the Snow

Last night's dream

My husband had gone on a walk in a mountainous park. It was snowy there. He didn't come back and I and my family and rescue people went out to look for him, but didn't find him. It was a forested area high in the hills, which looked kind of like where I used to live. It snowed again that night and he did not come back. I came to the realization over the next days that people did not think he was coming back, and he might be dead.

My mother, who had been staying there with me, took me back home, and we were going up to my grandma's house to visit when we saw a sign board with a brown poster on it, and my sister started crying and was very upset. At first I thought it was bad news about my husband, but it was actually a notice about a wake for an old friend of hers who had died a few months ago (in the waking world as well). I was surprised to see her so upset, because she'd already known of his death at the time it happened and had seemed sad then but not so upset. Something had happened to her boyfriend around this time as well, he was sick I think in a life-threatening way. It seemed odd that all three of them were in peril around the same time. It was when she got upset over the sign that I realized that everybody else already thought my husband was probably dead by now, since he hadn't been found.

I was sad, and worried, but not inconsolable or as upset as my sister had been about the sign, because it didn't seem real to accept the fact that he was actually dead, so I kept waiting and hoping. I drove back near the mountain area, wanting to stay nearby and not to return home until he was found, also leaving my work indefinitely to wait and find out.

I started walking alone and found myself in a deserty area, very dry and dusty, with some sage brush and desert plants. I ran into a guy about my age, taller and bigger than me, but very friendly, and I followed him back to a small town, where he lived. He was native american, and it was a native american town, but it was in a somewhat old-fashioned architecture style. The buildings were of the type covered with baked clay, with rounded edges, like in the southwest, but modern and comfortable inside. They were sandy colored on the outside and matched the desert around. I felt a little out of place walking through the town, but he and his family who lived there invited me in and I stayed and talked with them. They knew already who I was, it seemed, and that my husband was lost in the snowy mountain area (it had a name, but I don't remember which mountain it was). They were very nice and sympathetic to me. I stayed for a while, and watched TV with them, there were some issues with reception and we kept getting strange channels.

The guy I met offered for me to spend the night there, as I wanted to stay in the area and I had nowhere to go. He was very nice to me and as I got to know him, I realized that he liked me and was interested in me. I told him that I was very grateful of the offer (I was, and I kind of wanted to stay there), but I reminded him that I was married (I don't know if I said married, or engaged to be married). He said that he knew that (in other words, was not trying to get anywhere with me right now), and he looked sympathetic and it occurred to me that none of them thought my husband was coming back, they were just waiting for me to come to that conclusion as well, and provide comfort for me when I did. He wanted me to know that he wanted to be there for me when I understood that, but he wasn't going to pressure me, although he didn't say this, just showed it by his actions.

I realized that if my husband was really not coming back, I would keep hoping for a long time, and how long would it take before I accepted it? I never accept things, just keep hoping whenever something bad happened or I lost someone. This brought to mind the guy I had loved years before I met my husband, who hadn't been interested in me the same way. I had kept hoping he would change his mind, but it hadn't changed, and eventually I'd forced myself to move on. Looking back I knew it wouldn't have worked out but it had taken a long time to realize that. The nice guy who was helping me reminded me of him in some ways, but more gentle and nice to me.

I tried to think about how it would be and what I would do if it turned out I was a widow, but I couldn't get it to sink in. I spent a lot of time wandering around the area and thinking about it, and wondering if my husband would be found, as the nice guy who'd offered me a place to stay while waiting showed me around the town and the garden and such, and tried to make me comfortable.

The overall feelings of the dream were of sadness, thoughtfulness, the unreal feeling caused by shock, and also a sort of comfort, as if everything was going to keep going and be okay. When I awoke I still felt this and then I also felt guilty about it and about not being more distraught.