An Office Dream
I had a busy, cluttered office/room. Appearing like I was in my twenties, I seemed quite content. In this dream, I was not married. I’m not sure what my work duties and responsibilities were except they involved my computer and going to meetings. I lived on campus but sometimes had to drive to another part for work. None of my co-workers were recognized as RL people.
On this very busy day, I was wearing black jeans and a black shirt. Packing up my laptop, I drove across the campus for a meeting. When I came out, I discovered a friendly co-worker had put a black collar and leash on a young woman. The leash was tied to something. Pretty, with white skin, dark hair, in her early twenties she was dressed in a revealing two-piece outfit with black boots.
I was appalled and spoke with her. How did this happen? Who did this? I told her, I can help get you out. The collar had a key; I had a key that would work for it back in my room. I explained to her, the collar wasn’t a collar but was designed and used for something else. If she went with me, I could unlock her. Conversely, I could go, get the key, come back and unlock her.
We decided to go to my room. We walked and were there in a dream flash. She told me when she got there that she wasn’t going into my room, but she was going to walk around and show everyone what my co-worker did to her. Fair enough. I would get the key and find her.
I entered my room. My desk and stuff were gone. A different desk was in its place, along with a plush, black leather chair. A tall man and woman, both Caucasians, were there, along with a third man. The woman wore white with gold jewelry. The man wore black and had tattoos on his face and short black hair.
I exploded. “Where’s my desk? Where’s my stuff? Who did this?”
At first, the others ignored me. The third man said they didn’t know who had decided anything and didn’t know what had happened to my stuff. The tall man chided me for saying that it was ‘my room and stuff’ because, really, it belonged to the company. I took exception, because the furniture and space belonged to the company, but my personal effects and clothing were gone.
Someone suggested where my stuff was. I went there and found it. I didn’t like the change. Someone said it was a promotion, but I didn’t accept that. It seemed a lot like my original room, but I didn’t like how it’d been changed without telling me first.
Meanwhile, I found the key, went out, and tracked down the young woman. It was a very busy circular place, with many projects going on, and it took me a few minutes to find her. She was walking about, loudly telling all, look what so-and-so did because he thought it was funny. I unlocked her, then mentioned that I’d forgotten my car on the other side of the campus and needed to go get it, if she wanted to walk over there with me. She agreed. An older woman called me over. She asked me if I’d made a contract with the woman with the collar. When I answered no, she told me that I need to make such a contract to explore her emotions and ensure she’s okay after this incident. I agreed to do that.
A bunch of us set out walking, including the previously collared woman. I fell in with the tall man in black and the tall woman in white. Talking with them, I recognized them as minor celebrities. We were going to see a parade; they’d been part of the parade the previous year. They told me they were part of it this year, too, and invited me to join.
Veering off to find my car, I ended up in an auditorium on company business where I met another tall man. Seated in front of me in a plush auditorium, I realized that he’d been with the tall man and woman the previous year. He congratulated me on my powers of observation and keen memory, and then gave me his card. I hurried away because I still hadn’t picked up my car.
Going under cement culverts along street roads, I rejoined the people walking toward the parade route, including the previously collared woman. I broached the subject of the contract with her. She immediately told me she wanted nothing to do with that because she thought them a waste of time. I was relieved because I agreed.
At this point, I was in my underwear, bikini briefs. I didn’t mind because I was slender and muscular. I noticed a number of young, trim, muscular women also dressed only in underwear. I decided that I was going to skip the parade because I still needed to get my car.
The dream ended.
Saturday’s Theme Music
Gold filled the cloudless sky as the sunblast kicked off at 7:27 AM in our valley on this Saturday, January 29, 2022. With the sun rising, the gold dipped. Blue flooded in as the sun’s beams surmounted the mountains at last. The temperature was 32 F. Now at 36, we expect to see 63 before the sun takes its show over the western horizon at 5:21 PM. Look at that, almost ten hours of sunshine and February hasn’t started it session yet.
In bummer COVID-19, all the county libraries are completely shutting down for a week. All materials due during that period will be automatically extended as the drop boxes will be locked shut. Hold pick-up periods will be extended, too. All this is because of personnel shortages driven by employees or their families sick with COVID-19.
While that’s happening, some genius suggested in an editorial that the best way to deal with the skyrocketing COVID-19 numbers is to open all the businesses and not restrict any of them. Save the economy and give everyone’s morale a boost. But…as the numbers are skyrocketing, people sicken, and the hospitals fill, who is going to be there to work?
Sadly, many see this bizarro logic as an ideal solution. Yet, hospitals across the nation are pressing nursing students into working for free to help with the caseload as personnel fall sick. Other nurses are being ordered to work longer hours, sometimes while foregoing pay, because of shortages. These are the same people who think that bare shelves are a political issue which can be resolved by just making more people work. They completely miss the dynamics engaged.
Enough of that. Sorry for the rant. Haven’t had coffee yet.
Today’s song is a repeat. “Maneater” by Hall & Oates came out in 1982. I was stationed in Japan, on Okinawa, at Kadena AB in the military at the time. That has nothing to do with the song’s occupatoin of my morning mental music stream. The song is there because of the cats. Why, yes, of course.
Sometimes when I’m feeding the cats, maybe just five out of five times, Boo and Tucker will suddenly become oblivious to me. After begging me for their morning meal with patient meows as they follow me around, I’ll put the bowls down and say, “Here you go, Tucker. Here, Boo. Come and get it.”
Hearing that, they’ll sit. Look around. I can hear their minds saying, “Boo? Tucker? Never heard of ’em.”
Papi, the young ginger, will dart pass them to the bowls, give me a meow, and begin eating. I then say, “There you go, Papi, eat up.”
Hearing “Papi”, Boo and Tucker will rise and come. “Papi,” they say. “Why, that’s me.” They say this even though I tell them, “No. You’re not Papi. You’re Tucker and you’re Boo. You two are black and white. He’s a ginger.”
They act like they can’t understand a word of what I’m telling them.
Of course, when they finally came is when I said in my head, “Here they come.” Which started Hall & Oates and the bassline for “Maneater”. Thus is how my mind works. At least before coffee.
Here’s the tune. Stay positive, test negative, wear a mask as needed, as get the jabs when you can. I gotta get that coffee in me, you know? Cheers
A House Dream
I was split about what I was calling this dream because of its varying facets. WTH.
I was a teenager. I’d biked back to visit an area where I previously lived, to see the friends still living there.
But my friend wasn’t home. Platinum blonde and white, with hair and clothing styles lifted from the 1960s, aunts and older female family friends were there and told me, “Make yourself at home.” I was in the kitchen with them and felt uncomfortable because it wasn’t my place. They scoffed away those protests while they stayed busy chatting and doing things.
The large, bright kitchen was fresh, airy, and uber-modern. Hidden doors and cupboards were everywhere. The refrigerator opened and unfolded like a transformer toy and held an amazing amount of food. My astonishment rabbited higher with every revelation.
One aunt was looking for cheese. Announcing, “I can’t find it, I have to go to the store for it,” I replied, “Wait, no, I know where it’s at.” I showed her some unfolding refrigerator section that she didn’t know about where the cheese was tucked away.
After that, I walked around the home’s bottom level. My friend’s mother returned home at that point. Short and fair, blue-eyed, with pink lipstick and white gold hair cut like Marlo Thomas in “That Girl”, she told me that I was welcome to stay as long as I like. I demurred but walked around because the house fascinated me. The living room had two large, comfortably furnished conversation pits, but the back of the living room had two natural reflecting pools surrounded by cliff walls. I saw my friend’s Mom take her bikini top off and sit back, relaxing and meditating, but looked away, not wanting to impose on her.
Going on through the house, I found a large green lawn adjacent to the living room. No walls separated them. Another front door led into that area from the outside. Two front doors! I was quite impressed and thought, every house should have two front doors. It made sense.
I had my bike now, and pushed it toward the house’s back, where I encountered the ocean. Yes, there was a large beach, reminiscent of central California, inside their house, or the house wasn’t closed in on that end. I couldn’t decide which it was as I enjoyed the crashing waves and different bird varieties.
My friend still hadn’t returned. I decided to head home. I pushed my bike back up into the living room. Seeing his mother, still topless by the reflecting pool, I called out to her, “I’m going home now. Thanks for everything.”
She came to me, putting a tee shirt on as she did, and asked questions about my planned route home. Announcing she was going that way, she said that she’d ride with me, and pulled her bike out. She was doing some shopping that way.
We rode our bikes along a rutted narrow dirt road filled with potholes and talked. She asked me why I liked her. I told her because she was intelligent, clever, charming, and beautiful. I raved a bit about her house, which I thought was amazing. She was distant in reply; I realized she wasn’t paying attention but was focused on riding her bike.
We arrived at a little market where she wanted to stop to buy bubble gum. Small wicker buckets at angles on wooden platforms abounded in a cramped, small stall. She told me to pick out some gum for myself and then said, “Oh, I need to get tongue for the dogs.”
“Tongue?”
She was holding up several packages. “Oh, yes, they love it.”
I was bewildered. “But isn’t that bubble gum?” Then I thought, who would make tongue-flavored bubble gum? I must have misunderstood.
That’s where it ended.
The Talking Cat Dream
It is mostly such a mundane dream. My wife and I are outside our home. We’re youngish, roaming about in our middle years. This is not the house we live in, nor a place we’ve ever lived in, but easily recognized as a standard, pleasant American middle class dream place, part of a planned development, a few stories tall, with a yard and neighbors in like houses. Not quite homes cut from the same design, but homogenized with individual flares and nuances. Our home is stucco and off-white.
As I say, we were outside, in sunny weather, in the backyard. Our cats walk about, being cats. One began scratching his claws on a headboard. “No,” I chase him away, telling my wife, “Don’t let him scratch this.” I set about repairing it. Adding a strip of wire grid that will keep murder mittens from scarring the wood. I pursue this past time for a period. It’s more tedious than I expected.
Railroad tracks are laid not far from our backyard. I’m up in the house, on the second floor, looking down when a train comes by. It’s an old-fashioned steam locomotive. I can see into the neighbor’s backyard on the right. They have a little train, about knee high, just an engine and coal car, that goes out and greets the train when it passes. I see this several times in the dream and conclude that the neighbors have a motion sensor along the rails. Or maybe they’re just sitting inside, waiting for a train. I never see them, though I know the man is bald, in his late fifties/early sixties, white and wears glasses and flannel shirts.
I’m back in the backyard, working in the bed headboard. It’s an old piece but mass produced, one we purchased from J.C. Penney when we were young, with decoupage flowers.
The cat, a ginger, starts talking to me. His enunciation isn’t very good but it’s clear enough that I know that he’s talking about birds. I snort this away, amused. Cats and birds are like sun and sky. The cat insists, “You have to see these birds, Michael.”
I follow the cat just to appease him. We go down a sloping meadow to a small cottage surrounded by glossy dark green bushes. “There they are,” the cat tells me.
I hear the birds before I see them and know that they’re parrots. Five of them, green, red, blue, and yellow prominent among them, flock toward us, chatting at us while coming up to see what and who we are. I worry about the cat and birds fighting and hurting one another, so I’m wary and cautious. But the birds interest me. I tell the cat that they’re parrots. He’s intrigued. I tell the birds that the animal with me is a cat and that he and I live up the hill from them.
I then see a snake. Don’t know what kind it is. It moves fast and is gone. I worry again: will it bite or harm me, the cat, the birds? I tell the cat, “There’s a snake here, watch it.” He’s immediately interested in trying to find it.
I retreat back up to my house with him, away from the colorful, noisy parrots. Back in my yard, I tell my wife, “There are parrots down there. Come down and see them.”
That’s where it ends.
A Remembered Dream
When I was brushing my teeth after lunch, I remembered a dream I had last night. Basically, all that happened in the dream is that a young woman of color came to me and said, “I’m a dentist. Let me fix and clean your teeth.” She sat me in a dentist chair and did some work on them. I don’t have the greatest of teeth — I was terrible at taking care of them as a child — but no current problems. Wonder what made my mind dream that up?
Michael Seidel, writer 