saving a school

I was in a school and had to save the students from the sinister teachers by finding a sword or knife hidden somewhere inside. We were waving swords around hoping they would be the right one, but they were not. I went through the halls. Crouching behind an empty bookcase blocking the door to a classroom, I was looking at a woman walking past the open door at the other side of the empty classroom, hoping she wouldn’t see me, but her eyes fixed on me and she stared as she walked past, then started to come after me. I ran down the hall and into an aviary. Behind chain link fences lining the sides of the otherwise empty linoleum-floored lab room, there were somewhat dirty, scraggly-looking birds–peacocks and cranes.

Polio

I dreamed I got polio and was going to lose the use of my legs.

nostalgic closeness

I dreamed that I was over at a little get-together at Sarah’s (but I think it was set in our Bloomington house, only in Berkeley) and David was there. He was finishing up his degree and explained that since he was working at the same time, it would take four and a half years. It was nice; I sat right by him and we kind of cuddled, we talked about our lives and what was going on with us, and I guess the overwhelming thing was this sense of nostalgic closeness, this feeling that because of what we’d shared, we would always be close, we would always care for one another. He said, “I love you,” and I said, “I love you too,” and we meant it not in a romantic sense, as lovers, but simply as people who loved each other, who mattered to each other. Then the door opened and a bunch of people came up the stairs. Sarah, a woman named Kirsten with black hair who in my dream I had known since childhood, Rahul, and some other people. I went over to say hi to Kirsten and when I looked around again, David was gone. I ran downstairs to try and find him so I could say goodbye, and looked around the green meadows of the Berkeley campus, towards the BART station. I didn’t see him anywhere. I had wanted to say goodbye.

I woke up and thought about how nice it was that we had that; and then I remembered it was just a dream, and thought of the strangely awkward breakfast we’d had together (I forget where, I want to say on Bancroft) and realizing I was seeing his public face instead of his private one, that I might never see his private one again. It was a sad memory.

Giant peach, Italy

Dreamed the other night of EAP and couldn’t remember for two days what Mari Carson’s last name was. There, I got it.

Dreamed last night that I was in the peach from James and the Giant Peach. It rolls completely upside down every few hours and makes you very carsick.

Killing lizards with samurai swords, Italian poems about pork, and a hippie dominatrix

I was in a class assignment where we were given a bag and had to kill six giant green iguanas that would spawn from the bag and grow to about 3 feet long (plus tail) within a matter of minutes. I felt quite sad for them because they were gentle and herbivorous and had been chosen because they would not be a threat to us, and we were supposed to kill them. They gave us samurai swords to use to cut off their heads, but somehow I lost mine and wound up with a replacement made of wood. I had to step on many of the lizards’ heads to crush them instead of using the sword. I think at some point they were chameleons, not iguanas.

I was later sitting in on an Italian class with Suneeta and Tiffany. Suneeta didn’t want to stay in class, so we shooed her quietly out the side door, where we saw her run up some stairs with her husband. She was wearing a ball gown, as was another woman running down a path nearby. It was a sunny summer day and the trees were green and leafy. I sighed and tried to settle down to the assignment. I was trying to write a rhyming poem about pork, specifically, sausage and pigs (salsiccia and maiale). Finally, the teacher dismissed us and I felt slightly relieved about not having to do the assignment, but also slightly frustrated that I had worked on it and wouldn’t have to turn it in.

I went upstairs to a dominatrix’s house, up about six winding flights of stairs into a quiet attic. I was going to pay her for her services. She was a sweet and soft-spoken New Agey hippie, and she explained to me that she wouldn’t start with the degradation and bossiness until the clock started running. I started to choose a tea to drink, and she said, “Well, that’s kind of the exception, I insist that you drink this one instead,” and began preparing the new tea for me.

house with pinocchio

Our lease ran out and we went to a new house, a big coop, to live in before moving to a new town. I walked into the living room and a guy on the couch stared at me. “Um, hi… I actually live here. I haven’t been around much, but I live here,” I said, faintly embarrassed. I went up the stairs to our room. The house was decaying, crumbling, big holes in the walls, overgrown with vines, trees poking through the holes. I walked in and remembered we were sharing our house with Pinocchio and Little Boy Blue from Fables. I was dismayed. It was so small! Only Pinocchio was in there, and he was hastening to show me that there was enough room. He would sleep in a drawer in the chest of drawers. But it was really tiny, and we were supposed to keep all our possessions in there too. I didn’t know how we would manage.

driverless car in burlingame

I dreamed I was sitting in the backseat of Jeanne’s car with her, and Jason P. was in the passenger seat. We were driving at a rapid clip down the streets of downtown Burlingame when I realized nobody was driving the car. I had to lean forward and steer while Jason braked from the passenger seat. We narrowly avoided clipping a big white Cadillac, and finally managed to park the car. When we got out, we saw a big, tacky tourist shop (like the ones in San Diego Old Town) and went in to browse.

Sweater of many colors

I dreamed I knitted the Lara sweater and the yarn all looked gray in artificial light, but then when I woke up, the yarn turned out to be many different colors–white, yellow, green, gray, red–visible as different only in natural light.

The dog with a hole and the maggot baby

I was looking at a golden retriever on a leash. It turned and worried its side and a big hunk of golden fur fell to the ground. I bent down and started to say “awww…” and then realized there was skin attached to the chunk of fur. I looked at the dog and there was a matching hole in its shoulder, through which you could clearly see its muscles and bones, some 3″ below the skin, as though the skin were a stiff, hollow shell. There was an injury on the dog’s muscle and I could see a few maggots writhing around in its flesh. “Your dog has lost its graft,” I said to the owner, who explained how they had to debride the wound and then put the skin back on. I was holding something in my arms that started to squirm and vibrate and I realized it was a big maggot swaddled up like a baby.

Dinner with the frat brothers, food poisoning in Venice

I was on a trip to Venice with Rahul’s school, but he was off to some sort of company visit or something, so I was left to fend for myself. Some guy asked if I wanted to go to dinner and I realized while we were out that he was thinking of it as a date. A couple of frat guys came up and said hi and he introduced them. Later, I was at his frat house and someone said “Yeah, a couple of the brothers met you at dinner they told him later there was no way you’d be interested.” I said “Well, I have a boyfriend I’ve been dating for six years, and I don’t think he knew that. I didn’t realize it was supposed to be a date.”

Then I was back at the hotel. They had a big glass counter full of pastries at the front desk. I was looking at them and feeling hungry when I ran into two girls named Ping and Sheena and we decided to go out for dinner. We had walked out into the street a ways when I suddenly realized I was supposed to have been working.

I turned around to head back, and Ping did too. In my dream, she was Japanese, and wearing a kimono. She had food poisoning, though, and kept bending over to vomit up green moldy stuff in increasingly smaller piles on the sidewalk.