Category: Dreams

The Fortune Teller Dream

The dream began in a small house. It seemed (these things are not always spelled out in dreams) that the house belonged to a family member. I was staying with them, along with my wife, as part of a visit. Not a large house, it was crowded with people, but the atmosphere was pleasant. The dream took place in the living room, which had green shag carpeting.

We were preparing for a visit, or inspection. I’m not certain which. A woman was present who was a councilor or adviser; I wasn’t certain of her role, but she was authoritarian.

This was happening in the morning. The inspections were due in hours. Someone unfamiliar was asleep on the sofa under a blue sleeping bag. I could only see the dark hair on top of their head.

We were all wondering in soft tones, “Who is that?” And answering, “I don’t know. I’ve never seen them before. They arrived last night.” Coming into the room and hearing us, the woman finally explained that it was son. “Don’t mind him. He needed a place to sleep for the night.”

Oh, okay. We all accepted that without question. A young ginger cat was running in and out, bringing in mulch and leaves after it rolled on the ground or something. Talking with the others, I said that I was going to vacuum the cat and get the dirt off of it. After I caught the cat, I started vacuuming him. He tried to run away, but then he started enjoying the process. I thought that he had realized that I was cleaning him as he turned to let me access different places with the vacuum nozzle.

The woman’s son awoke. Vague introductions were made. Tall and unshaven with short black hair, he looked liked he’d been living rough. He had some appointment, he said, and would be leaving soon. He seemed withdrawn and subdued. He and I spoke, small, friendly exchanges. I was curious about him, pumping him for more details. He finally, hesitantly, attempted to explain. He would do it with cards.

He said he was a fortune teller. He drew cards out of his pocket. They were made of torn newspaper. “I’m not allowed to have real cards,” he said.

Why? I had to ask. “It’s complicated,” he replied.

Meanwhile, he’d dealt the cards into three piles. I was a little bewildered, because I thought I only saw three cards. They didn’t have markings, but newspaper columns and ads. “No, there are more,” he said. “You can’t see them.”

Sure, I thought, humoring him. I said, “Oh, is this three card Monte?”

“No,” he said. “I do fortunes. I read fortunes in cards.”

I went to pick up a card to examine it, asking him if I could as I reached for it. “No,” he replied, putting a hand out to stop me. “You can’t touch the cards or bet on them. That’s against my terms.”

“Your terms?” I was trying to understand what he meant.

He seemed embarrassed. “The terms of my sentencing, and parole. I’m not allowed to have real cards, bet on cards, or let others bet on them. Nobody can touch my cards, because that would make them real cards. That would…” He seemed to search for words. “That would give me. Power.”

I was like, “What’s that mean? What’d you do? What happened?”

He said, “I’m going to tell you your fortune.” He picked up a flimsy newspaper card and looked at it.

The dream ended.

0

The Writer Dream

I dreamed I was with another writer. He never came into focus for me so I can’t provide a description.

We were in a small, long room with cinder block walls that were painted light green. He and a few others were seated at a long folding table that’d been set up. They were sitting on metal folding chairs. I was across from them. The writer been published after long years of effort. His first published book was a bestseller, so now, suddenly, they wanted more of his work to publish.

Several people were present, helping him, but I remained a spectator. He had cardboard boxes of stuff. First, he pulled out novels that he’d written that were printed out on computer fan-fold paper using a dot-matrix printer. After making three stacks of those, he added another stack of printed standard paper. Then he drew out stacks of black five and a quarter floppy discs and made a neat collection of those. Last, he drew out colorful three and a half inch floppies and made another tall deck. This was his work, which made me laugh. I wanted to say, hey, I have all those at home, too.

A blonde woman who’d been sitting by and helping said, “Okay, now we need to get these out to people. How’re we going to do that?” Some conversation that I couldn’t follow came up.

Then, bizarrely, we were walking. Leaving an airport gate, we headed out of one terminal and into another, going for a down escalator. A woman in a dark blue sweater was ahead of us. Glancing over her shoulder quickly twice, I realized that she was interested in the blonde woman that I accompanied. Then I knew that the blonde woman was famous (but I didn’t know why) and that the woman in the sweater was a fan.

I said to the sweater woman, “It’s okay, you can approach.”

She pretended not to hear me (that was my impression). I said something to the blonde woman. Smiling, she replied, “I’ll take care of it.” Increasing her stride a bit, she caught up with the other person, and said, “Hi,” in a wonderfully friendly voice. “I saw you look at me and thought that I’d like to meet you.”

That’s when the dream ended.

 

6

Friday’s Theme Music

Out of the dream miasma comes Nirvana with “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (1991) – well, hello, hello, hello, how low?

I’m worse at what I do best
And for this gift, I feel blessed
Our little group has always been
And always will until the end

h/t to Genius.com

 

A denial.

1

A Wrong-way Highway Dream

The highway dream began with ice cream.

Bowls of fresh ice cream covered a small table. There were different flavors and colors. As I checked the ice cream, I realized that some of it was blueberry. I thought, that would be tasty.

Mom was there, and my wife. Mom said, “There’s more ice cream in the freezer. The freezer’s not working so we need to get rid of all this ice cream because it’s going to melt.”

Get rid of ice cream? Why don’t we just eat it, or give it to people to eat?

Nobody wanted ice cream because they’d had too much ice cream. Cats and kittens came along. I scooped spoons of ice cream out for them to eat, which they did. Then I gave them a bowl.

Time to go. My wife and I got into a car. (I didn’t see the car at all in the dream but knew it as mine.) We were immediately on an broad, convoluted highway with many lanes. Traffic was heavy. Following signs, we ended up a hill along a long curve that went to the right.

I passed a man on a copper-colored motorcycle with a sidecar. He was in the right hand lane and I was in the middle lane. I thought my car had bumped him, and I worried. Trying to check, I couldn’t see the sides of my car. I couldn’t see any of the car, in fact, so I didn’t know where I was in the lane. This unnerved me.

I stepped on the accelerator to go faster. We were still going up a long, curving hill. The man in the copper motorcycle began passing us. I didn’t want that, so I pressed harder on the accelerator. Still going up the curve, we began slowing down, going slower and slower until we pulled into a place where the highway ended and stopped.

I didn’t understand. The highway had ended. How the hell did we end up here? My wife and I got out of the car to ask questions and found ourselves with others in the same situation. We’d all been following the highway but had ended up stuck here, off the highway.

We were told, “You were all going the wrong way. That’s why you’re here.”

Going the wrong way? I’d been going straight, following the road. There wasn’t any other way to go. How could that be the wrong way? And, I protested, “It doesn’t make sense. The faster that I tried to go, the slower I went.” It frustrated me.

Another man agreed, saying, “Yeah, that’s what was happening to me.”

It seemed like I could learn more up a small hill. It was a paved white cement ramp. I started that way but people told me, “Don’t go that way. If you do, they’ll arrest you.”

But I wanted to see what was going on, and I thought that going up there could help.

“No,” others kept telling me, including a woman dressed in an official-looking uniform. “If you go up there, you will be arrested.”

A few others were going up there. From what I could see, they were being taken away.

I decided not to go up there. Staying where I was wasn’t working, though. I told my wife, “Come on, let’s get back in the car.”

“Where we going?” she asked as others asked me, “Where are you going? What are you doing?”

I said, “I’m going back down there.”

“But that’s the wrong way,” everyone said.

I said, “I know. But I’m going back down there, to where the wrong way began, and figure out how to get out of here.”

People were telling me not to go there, but I was adamant. I felt, being who I am, I could go back and figure it out, and fix the problem. With my wife with me in the car, I began driving backwards back down the road.

The dream ended.

0

The Broken Mirror Dream

Dreamed I was outside with lots of people. I could see myself among them. I was wearing a short-sleeved yellow shirt. All the people were my age, and I was younger than I am in real life, with longer hair, maybe twenty years old. I seemed to vaguely know a few of the other people. The area appeared to be a college or business campus. Sidewalks connected plazas with fountains, gardens, and buildings, bisecting swatches of cut green grass. Forest lined the edges. I don’t know why I was there. An air of excitement almost shimmered, giving me — and others — goosebumps. A few of us talked about it.

My vantage kept changing. Sometimes, I was outside, looking at myself with other people from ten feet away or so, or coming in for a close-up, but other times, the point of view was from inhabiting myself.

I’d been laughing and talking with others but ended up walking alone, and decided to check out the woods. After passing a line of mature trees, I discovered a stream and began following it. After some distance, I saw a clearing ahead on the right. Climbing the bank, I drifted that way. As I did, a flash of light caught my attention.

I headed there to investigate and discovered a shard of mirror on the ground. The clearing was all dirt. Wondering how the mirror had gotten there, I picked it up, careful not to cut myself, and glanced around for clues about its origins. When I did, I spotted broken mirror pieces littering the ground not far away.

More puzzled then ever, I tried putting some context around the pieces of broken mirrors in what was a clearing in the woods. I guessed there were more than a hundred pieces, thought about counting them, but then shrugged that off as irrelevant. I thought, someone would have needed to bring the mirror here and break it. Part of me guessed that children could’ve stolen the mirror somewhere, brought it here and broke it, but that seemed like a lot of trouble to go through, and an odd location to do that. There weren’t any clear paths into the clearing that I saw.

Going toward the pieces, I glanced at larger sizes. None of the pieces seemed to match to the other pieces, like they’d been separated after the mirror was broken. Dirt smudged some surfaces, making me think that they’d been somewhere else, and then brought here. Bending over pieces, I realized that they didn’t mirror the area. On the ground, they should’ve been displaying reflections of sky, trees, or something. Instead, each looked like an opening into another place, a weirdness that made me shiver.

None of them reflected me, either. I leaned down lower for a closer look at one, trying to see the place in the mirror. Seeing gray behind bushes, I thought it could be part of an old castle.

A noise like a large tree cracking and splintering came behind me. Standing, I turned to see what it was.

The dream ended. Or, that’s all that I remember. Remembering this dream feels creepy. I feel like I’m being watched.

Before, when I began recalling this dream, the song, “Touch Me” by The Doors, began playing. I wondered if my mind had created some connection to the The Doors and the pieces of mirror – the doors of perception.

It’s another dream mystery.

0

Wednesday’s Theme Music

Dream residue leaves me with “Touch Me” this morning, a song by The Doors from 1968. I was twelve when it came out.

Don’t know why it came up after the dream. Mind works in bizarro manners. Could be the name of my mind: Welcome to Bizarro Manor. Fits. I’m always being accused of having an unusual sense of humor and thinking differently than others. Alas, guilty, but it does bring a sense of isolation.

Hmm, maybe that’s where this song comes in. “Come on, touch me, babe. Can’t you see that I am not afraid? What was that promise that you made?”

This was an interesting video from that era.

2

A Movin’ On Dream

I was visiting a wealthy male friend for some holiday. It was a stop during my travels. In the dream, we were in our late twenties. He was putting me up for a day and night. Had a big, fancy place with alabaster walls high above everything else on a mountainside overlooking the ocean, window walls with fantastic views. He lived there alone.

We visited, nothing special, had a good time. The next day, he went off to work while leaving me with things that I should do before going, if I could, as it would help him out, undoing things that he’d done for my visit. I planned to do them but kept getting distracted. Then, curious, I walked down a winding path to where he worked, to see what he did. He met me as I left the path and told me, “I just manage things.”

It was growing close to my time to depart. I had flights to catch. He told me to take one of his cars. A short and confused discussion followed because I thought I had my own car. I did, but it apparently wasn’t available, I discovered, because he’d taken it off to be worked on, cleaned up, and detailed. That took me aback, but I was grateful and pleased, too.

Something about a container followed. He had this container that he used to do things. He did it surreptitiously. I got hold of one. It was a light green square. My impression was that it was a box for getting a burger from takeout. I opened the box and verified that it was empty. Residue inside it was from a cheeseburger, showing traces of cheese, lettuce, onion, and tomato.

I was running late by then, so rushed to depart. As I did, driving away in his fancy car — don’t know what it was, except it was white and luxurious — I saw that I’d forgotten to do something that I’d promised to do for him. I wanted to go back but realized that I couldn’t, so I went on with the intention of calling him from the airport.

Got to a busy, bustling airport. It was more like a city than an airport that I’d ever visited, with multiple highways and flyovers connecting busy commerce centers and terminals teeming with people. After a bit of confusion and disorientation, I found my way, parked his car, and called him, telling him where I’d parked and what I’d forgotten to do. He reassured me that it was okay, don’t worry about it. Disconnecting, I went on to catch my flight.

 

0

The Game Dream

First was a non-related prelude.

I was with my wife at home. We had a large ginger tabby. He was grooming himself. I thought I saw a flea on his back. I attempted to pluck the flea out, but it moved away. The cat became agitated. After I calmed him, I attempted to get the flea again. Spreading his fur, I saw three fleas. I realized his issue was more pressing than thought, and went to get some tick and flea control. That segment ended.

What I remember of the main dream is pausing from other activities to kill time by playing a card game. I don’t remember anything of the game. Me, my wife, and a friend were playing.

The friend was teaching us the game. In real life, he’s a retired spokesman for Oregon Department of Forestry, dealing with wildfires. He’s a big guy, bearded, with a deep, booming voice, memorable in the dream.

We played the game, and he won the first hand by using all of us cards. He was then dealt cards from the remaining pile. When no cards remained, he played the last of his cards and won the game. He then explained, “Normally, when one person wins by going out, the other people pay them a dollar a card for each card in their hand. What do you guys want to do?” He was smiling as he spoke, and said, “I’m alright if you guys don’t want to do that.”

I only had a few cards but my wife was carrying twenty cards. My personal (dream) opinion was that we shouldn’t play by that rule, not because we were new to the game, or that she had so many cards, but because there were only three of us playing.

That’s where the dream ended.

0

Sunday’s Theme Music

“Sunday morning, rain is falling.” 

Well, it had been falling. It’s stopped but clouds shroud the mountains and teases the sun with promises of more light rain.

That’s part of what brought Maroon 5’s song, “Sunday Morning”, to me. I never think of this as a Maroon 5 song. The mellow, mildly jazz tune reminds me not of all of them, but more like something out of Stevie Wonder’s catalog. But, here we are.

0

Saturday’s Theme Music

So, you know, grocery shopping, and hungry. Lunch had been a few hours before, and light and healthy, and maybe a little sparse. Browsing the aisles, doing our standard shopping circuit, sampling foods, eyeing others’ carts to see what they’re buying, and judging them and ourselves for what we’re buying and not buying.

I’m hungry but skinny me is in charge of shopping today, along with healthy wife, two idealized versions of ourselves who examine everything with eyes and mind toward weight and good health. It’s a good thing, innit?

Meanwhile, unhealthy me is noticing, look, they have cake! Look at that cake! Oh, and that cake. And suddenly it seemed like everybody in Costco had a cake in their cart. I escaped Costco without a cake, though. On to Trader Joe’s. Back to get some healthy non-fat yogurt! See, it’s right there, by the CAKE and DONUTS. And breads.

We ogle the cake and donuts and talk about Trader Joe’s need to sell single donuts back there, that you can buy and eat, right there. They’re not, so we pass, moving on to the breads, which we fondle for freshness, sniffing them through the package while talking about good how they are.

I don’t speak of my cake desire to my wife the entire time. The cake desire has acquired the specific shape of carrot cake. Yeah, it’s my favorite, especially if it’s spicy with raisins. That’s like, yeah, orgasm. But I don’t pursue cake, don’t speak of it, etc.

Of course I dream of it. There’s cake everywhere in my freaking dream. I’m in a hallway with cake. I’m being offered cake, being told by a woman wandering, “Take whatever you want.” Every time that I go to get a piece, some event diverts me. I awake wanting cake for breakfast.

Which, while thinking of yesterday, talking to my rumbling stomach today, and reviewing my dream as I pursue my healthy oatmeal breakfast, brings the musical group, Cake, to mind, so here’s “Long Skirt/Short Jacket” (2000) just cuz I like it.

And, you know, cake. It’s a humorous video, listening to people’s comments about the song as they listen. Cheers

3

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑