Dreamtime Dreamscape: Spirits in Blue

I was at the mall I often dream about, the one with white floors, white walls, and enormous stores that go on endlessly past their colorful storefronts. It took place before my wedding with hubby, and I was there to pick out a wedding dress. I went into a dress store, one that was two stories tall, it had two storefronts.

I walked in the upper level, then walked down this narrow off white staircase to the lower level, where mom and dad were waiting for me. I asked, the staircase was there so brides-to-be could experience walking down a fancy staircase, but I thought the stairs really weren't all that extraordinary.

Dresses were all over the place, on individual racks in cubbyholes around the store. Each was beautifully displayed, no two were alike. The store felt endless.

I had to find a specific dress, mom and dad were insistant on it. Mother wanted me to find a pretty white gown, but dad pointed out that it was my second marriage (which is true in real life, I have been previously married) so I could wear whatever color I wanted. The dresses started being more than just white. I decided I wanted a 50's circle skirt dress with layered petticoat. I wanted to wear blue. The dresses started to change color and style as I dreamed and as we walked further in the back of the store.

Mom picked out a potential dress. I liked it a lot. I don't actually remember the dress, though I had gone through a lot to pick it out. I tried it on, and upon entering the changing rooms, I was suddenly outside in the parking lot. The parking lot had a park in the middle, where I was getting married. It was cold, I wished I had chosen a longer dress. I remembered in my dream that when I was married to hubby, it was cold, but I had worn a skirt and hose that kept me warm.

I walked towards the park, but dad called me back. He said before I could get married, my fiance and someone else had to go back to the store and find the secret there. I went back to the store and found a button on the floor. Hubby was there and someone else. I have no idea who the other person was.

When I pressed the button, the floors and walls peeled back like old walpaper and behind it was a dungeon. The dungeon was made of grey stone, with various torches set up for light. In an alcove where a dress had hung was now a lantern lit by bright blue lights, three of them, that swirled around inside the lantern. I realized the lights were spirits of the dead. I had to free them.

My fiance went with me to the lantern and opened it up. Two of the spirits left, trailing brilliantly blue tails of light. They went out through two other alcoves and were gone. For some reason, we were tired from this, and decided to go to our reception.

Somehow opening the lantern, as simple as it was, it was what joined us in marriage. I realized as we left the dungeon that I had been in the room before. It wasn't just one alcove, it was a huge amphitheater in a cave, with seats like in a movie theater. The seats were being moved to make room for the guests.

I looked down and was wearing jeans, not the wedding dress. Hubby was there, but I couldn't see him. I didn't recognize any of the guests and something kept nagging at me. It took a while of mingling and making terrible small talk before I remembered there were three spirits in the lantern.

I found my father, who said the last spirit was the most important and would start a long test, a quest so to speak. I didn't want to start the quest, but I had to. I had to release that last spirit.

I found my husband and we went through to the dungeon alcove room via a secret passage, for some reason we couldn't get into it any other way.

The lantern was still sitting there, and the third member of our party was still standing there, entranced by the light. Whoever the third person was didn't want us to let the last blue spirit go, but I had to. It was my duty and my job, something I had gotten from my dad.

I went to open the lantern, but the door was stuck, rusted. Hubby helped, and we got the lantern opened up and the last spirit came out. It flew around in a blaze of blue light until it settled on the third party member. He (or she) changed to look like someone I knew in my dreams, but I don't know outside of them. It scared me, I don't know why, but it also woke me up.

I have no idea who most of the people were in my dream, but I do remember the sense of urgency that I let the spirits go. There was a lot more detail to the dream, but it's been enough hours that I only remember the general idea of it.

Three kitty pileup on Caturday!

Oh noes! How will any of us get to work? Oh, that's right. No work on Caturday!

Cheri, Binx and Ara!

Dreamtime Dreamscape: The Wolf

So this is probably my shortest dream I remember. Happened this morning

A black wolf came at me so quickly that all I could see was it's red mouth with huge fangs and scruffy neck. It made a deep and horrible growl and I felt like I was done for.

Then I woke up. I was unnerved, but not frightened. More confused than anything else.

(I think the growl was the sound of the humidifier being knocked over by the kitties. I think I was dreaming of wolves because of a scene in my book with a dire wolf.)

Kendall Exercising for Caturday

Kendall doing her yoga moves!

Kendall on Caturday

Dreamtime Dreamscape: Dioramas and Golden Woods

Last night I had a dream about a diorama, a cabin in the woods, a shopping center, and the basement of the house I grew up in.

It was a strange dream, where I flitted between locations faster than I can keep track.

The parts I remember...

I was in a grocery store, only all the shelves were made out of logs, like in a tourist store for some national park. I was going down the wood aisles, looking at food. I turned a corner and saw some diorama's made out of different kinds of wood. They all showed scenes of the mountains.

The first was a little small, of a cabin in a valley. It had a fountain/stream in it, making a little water wheel turn.

I went onto the second and was suddenly in the basement of my old house as it was when I grew up, with the pine wood slats on the walls. People were there. The room also looked like one of the rooms from the nature center where my mother worked when I was really little. It was built like a cabin, with large logs for walls, everything stained golden brown. There were teachers there too, I think?

The room was dominated by a huge diorama of the mountainside. The mountain was carved out of a singular piece of a deep golden color wood. There was another cabin on the mountainside, made out of green wood. A river ran down the side of the mountain, made with clear acrylic. I wondered why the water wasn't made to be a fountain like in the other diorama.

I got close to the diorama and suddenly I was walking up the side of the mountain. The way was difficult, it was steep. The path was a gravel road that I sometimes had to climb on hands and knees. The gravel bit into my hands painfully.

I saw the cabin. It was a one story cabin, stained with a light color. It practically shone, it was so heavily stained. I wondered why the diorama had the colors wrong, the cabin was golden and the mountain was green. I zoomed out of the diorama and the colors switched, then zoomed back into it.

There was a precipice near the cabin where the stream tumbled down. At the stream's head I could look over a cliff to see down the entire mountain and see the water tumbling below me. I longed to jump off the cliff into the water but I knew it would be too shallow.

I turned to go back to the cabin, but I also nudged the diorama with my hip and the entire thing shifted and tumbled to the floor. The wood was suddenly nothing more than a blanket covering a rough brick frame. I fell both inside the diorama and in the room where it was displayed.

The people in the room all were glaring at me, muttering things under their breath about my clumsiness. Their stares bore into my back and I began sweating terribly.

Desperate, I tried to put the blanket back in place, but I couldn't get the stream to line up. The stream, I knew, was the key. If I got the stream where it had to go, the diorama would turn back into wood and my body stuck inside the diorama would be fine. If not, something terrible would happen.

I kept climbing up the bricks of the diorama, carrying the blanket behind me. I kept slipping and falling because every time my body inside the diorama fell over, I did in the display room as well.

At some point I woke up. The blanket turned into tough wool cloth and it scratched at my hands. I woke up not knowing if I got the stream back where it should be, but I knew I was about to jump off the cliff if I didn't.

It was a bizarre dream, I'm still not sure what the point of it all was or the reason for my frantic behavior at the end.

Dreamtime Dreamscape: Homework

Last night I had a dream similar to ones I had in college. It was a dream about homework. Ugh.

I was in a hallway of the college I have dreamed about multiple times. The hallways are like they looked in junior high, with large dark blocky bricks making up hallways with white floors, the occasional student poster on the wall. I know the exact place in my junior high, always right outside my science class. I spent a lot of time in this spot, I was usually early for this particular science class because I liked it so much.

There was some sort of lab going on, something that we had to do in groups. I had an assignment to finish. I had to get it done before I got called into the lab, so I spread my notebook papers across the hallway to work on them. I remember the worn surface of the hallway, where the thin wax layer had worn off by the grit of junior high student's sneakers.

My assignment was to copy part of a few previously done homework assignments onto a single sheet of paper. There were five or six sheets. I started writing my name on the top, then had to erase it and put my married name. I put the date, the class, the assignment, then I had to put an account number.

Account number? I don't remember account numbers in junior high! I was confused, rubbing my head, then I noticed I'd written account numbers on the other sheets of paper. They were numbers from phone accounts, records from other totally unrelated work. They all started with three zeros, then an A. I wondered why an "A" because my name doesn't start with A.

I didn't have time to be wondering why, I had to finish the homework! I started copying the account numbers and the paragraphs under them. The other work wasn't in my handwriting, I thought, until I realized I had written very carefully. I had to write neatly. I found it hard after so many years of scrawling my words on writing journals. It took a lot of focus.

I heard my name be called by my junior high science teacher and another teacher I'd seen before but never had, and...

And then I was woken up by my hubby. That's all I remember of the dream. I know I've dreamed of similar dreams before. School work is one of the mainstays of my dreamscapes. Has anyone else had persistant dreams of returning to school?

Max on clouds for Caturday

Max is enjoying sleeping on clouds, coming up with good poetry.

Shhhh, Max is sleeping!

The poem is the first verse of I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud by William Wordsworth, altered for Max .

Dreamtime Dreamscape: Babies and Chocolate

I had another dream last night and made sure I stored it in my brain so I would remember it in the morning. It has a lot of mental edits, so I hope I get it across as I write it.

I'm at the house I grew up in, sort of. It's also stuck in the mountains, and it's decorated like the house used to look like when I was really young, with dark wood boards on the walls and a rustic feel. The front yard is somewhat the same. Instead of the rock garden, there's more of a rock hill. It looks the same, but it feels like the garden is endless, full of twists and turns and resting on the mountain's side while still being visually flat.

I'm in the house, talking to a bunch of neighbors. They are all somewhat hostile, they keep saying something is in the mountains scaring people off. They keep hearing cries at night. They think it's something sinister. I can feel the heaviness in the air as they talk, but I feel I have to figure out what's causing all the crying.

I step out of the house. The garden stretches off in the distance. The large rock that was always the solid focal point of the garden has been split apart into large slabs. The slabs have been propped up to make a cave. I hear the crying coming from the cave.

It feels like it should be daytime, but the moon and stars are out. I glide above the ground, not quite walking, not quite flying. I am focused on the rock cave. Even though the garden is flat, and I know it always has been flat, there is a depression where the small cave is. It looks more like a tent made of rock than a cave. I don't even go inside.

Without stepping a foot into the cave, which is both big and small in the strange manner of dreams, I pick up two small bundles. They are no bigger than my hand. My hand is suddenly huge, but I feel like it's gentle, too. I place the cloth wrapped bundles on my hand and go back to the house.

All the neighbors are gone. I feel like I made them leave. I'm glad they're gone, I have to hide the bundles from them. I know if they found the bundles, they would kill whatever was inside them and probably me as well.

I go into the basement, into a secret room dug straight into the hillside. Inside each bundle is a tiny baby. The babies are too small to exist, so my dream makes them kittens, but I know they're human babies. I keep going back and forth on this. Are they children, or kittens? It takes a while for my dream to decide.

Years past in a blink of an eye. I have twin girls. They have beautiful blond hair, they are cute toddlers, yet teenagers at the same time. I keep them hidden from the neighbors until I can explain to them how I found them. They tell me they've always known that I wasn't their true mother (or father, my role as parent flip flops in this dream) and they are children of the mountains.

I tell them that we need to introduce them to the neighbors, but they cannot know where they came from. We agree to pretend that they are my children from a woman the neighbors have never met, or maybe they are my nieces, here for a visit.

There is a storm brewing. I can feel it in my bones. The neighbors come over, and during the council meeting I tell them about my two daughters. They are blinded by their beauty and forget to ask questions. The dream is a little blurry here. I know something else happened during the meeting but I'm not sure what.

The next moment of clarity is myself, as a teenager, with the two blond headed girls. A huge storm has come in. The house is covered by a foot of snow. I look out the kitchen window and see the cave is uncovered, the only spot of darkness in a sea of white flakes.

The twins are in the basement, looking at our supplies. Outside the neighbors are wandring around like wraiths, trying to get in. I know they can't get in, so I'm not afraid of that. I'm worried we will run out of supplies. I know once the snow melts the wraiths outside will go away and they'll realize the twins are normal humans.

The twins sit in a room full of child sized desks. They are eating chocolate. They look like Swedish models. I am in awe of their beauty. They tell me we'll have enough chocolate to last the winter.

I look in the cupboard. It's bigger than it looks, stretching down the entire length of the house. It has rows upon rows of chocolate, all larger than life. I'm starving, I need that chocolate. I grab a huge Ferrero Rocher chocolate hazelnut. It's as big as my fist. It comes, beautifully wrapped, with a tiny plastic spoon the size of my pinky nail. It looks so good, I am so excited to eat it. I tear open the package and start spooning it into my mouth. Outside I hear the groans of the neighbors and the crunch of their feet on the hard packed snow.

The twins watch me eat, eagerly. I don't like them watching me eat, so I go into the cupboard. The tiny spoon is making it take a long time to eat the chocolate. The hazelnut flavor is making me sick. I remember I don't like hazelnut flavoring much, even though it seems to be the popular taste right now.

I'm still very hungry, so I eat almost the whole chocolate. The bottom of the wrapper is filled with nuts and more chocolate. I feel sick, too much sugar and hazelnut, but I scrape my little spoon against the wrapper and eat what I can. I look around, all I can see is endless king sized candy bars. I realize the girls have been hoarding this for years, since they were no bigger than my palm. I look at the tiny spoon and realize it was big enough for the to use as tiny babies.

The twins find me. I hear the crunch of snow outside. I ask them why they like chocolate so much, they don't answer but they look at me hungrily. A cold wind blows across my back from deep within the cupboard, it feels like winter has gripped my bones. I wonder, absently, if the laundry water has frozen. I wonder if I should eat more Ferrero Rochers. The twins and their perfectly straight blond hair say something in another language to me. I feel scared. I remember at one time I thought they were kittens.

I have no idea why, but thinking of them as cats wakes me up. I felt a sense of uneasiness, I know if I had dreamed much longer it would have turned into a strange slow moving nightmare. I realize I've had a hankering for good chocolate for a while, and I'm hungry. I want to get up and get something to eat, but I'm too tired, so I turn over and go back to sleep.