what dreams may come

Ben asked people to leave their weird & wonderful dreams as comments on his blog yesterday, but I felt that I should devote an entire post to this.

Because if anyone knows about weird dreams, it's me.

I suspect it might be genetic, actually. I remember my grandmother once saying she dreamt she was surfing down Brickmakers Kloof (a really steep road in Port Elizabeth) on her ironing board.
Go, Grandma!!!

But let me tell you: Gran's dream has NOTHIN' on mine!

Apparently some people have dreams that make sense - like a story, perhaps. Hubby's dreams, for example, are as easy to read as a book:
He and I (and/or various close family members) will be in some situation where we are in danger, and he is running around like a lunatic trying to protect us using whatever means are at his disposal.
No prizes for guessing what that one means, huh?

But when it comes to my own dreams I just give up. Occasionally they're nice dreams. For example, not so long ago I dreamt I was swimming with dolphins and it was awesome! I woke up feeling wonderfully relaxed, happy and tranquil because it was extremely realistic and vivid in my my mind.

More often than not, though, I wake up feeling far from happy after one of these vivid dreams. Like the one where I went to work having completely forgotten to put on a stitch of make-up - no foundation, nothing! (This is a big deal for me - you'd have to know what I look like sans make-up to understand. It's scary.)
I only noticed because the guy who got in the elevator with me looked at me strangely and asked if I'd had a long way to walk to get to work. Confused, I said no, it was only about 5 minutes from the train station. Then I went to the ladies' room and almost screamed in fright when I saw my own reflection in the mirror.
Oh wait, that wasn't a dream. Yikes! So okay, maybe some nightmares do come true, hehe.

I also remember dreaming not so long ago that I was with Friends. The sitcom Friends I mean. A little odd but not too far off - I put it down to the fact that I remind myself so much of Monica. Not in looks, mind you, but the neurotic, over-achieving perfectionist Monica. Only, I don't like cooking so much. Not so scary, that one, just a little weird - and the weirdness was how very real it felt.

So I suppose you want to hear the scary and disturbed ones too, don't you? Well, since I have resolved to pretend that Nobody who reads this blog actually knows me, why the hell not.

I often dream about the same place, or places. The funny thing is, I have never actually been to these places. In fact, it starts off as if I'm looking at a map, and then voila! I'll suddenly zoom in and find myself in this place. It's an island, or a group of islands, in the middle of a really calm blue sea - the kind you see in posters advertising Carribbean cruises and such. I'll waft between an island and a big cruise ship, but when I finally settle on the ship, things become unpleasant, and suddenly it's not all pretty and white and spick-&-span, but dark and dusty with rusted railings. And I'll be deep inside the ship, on a steep spiral metal staircase, and trying to get out. Normally at this point Hubby suddenly joins me, and then we'll start running, like it's a race against time. Or sometimes, someone is chasing us - these looming shadowy faceless men, dressed in dark trousers and thick polo-neck jerseys, with caps on, like you see in old Cold War movies - you know, the guys running guns on an old abandoned oil tanker. And then I wake up, normally with my heart pounding and sweating like mad.

Many of my other dreams involve spiders falling on me, or sometimes scorpions. Strange, since I'm not particularly bothered by either creature in real life (except those horrible rain-spiders we get in SA, but that's another story altogether). I woke up really angry with hubby a couple of weeks ago because in my dream we'd been swimming in the sea on an island much like Santorini, and the side of the pool was like a giant rock. He climbed out first and then turned to help me out, and when he grabbed my hand he threw a scorpion on my leg - as a joke. Needless to say I was not amused! And then we got on our horses and rode away into the West.

But also, there are the utterly pointless dreams - like the one where I was talking to my mom about my big toe for a good 20 minutes. WTF???

And finally, this one is for Anne :
Possibly one of the most vivid and definitely the icky-est dream I ever had was the one where I had to climb inside a real (albeit very large) chicken skin. It was plucked, and cleaned - much like when you take the skin off a chicken to cook it, and... well I'm sure you can imagine how it felt. EEUW!!! I had to do this for a job that I was going to be doing, working for a drive-thru fast-food place. Which is a little odd because I have never had such a job, but then, who ever said dreams have to make sense? Especially considering my, er, uniform for that one!

So make of this lot what you will. And Anne, you decide - idiosyncrasy, or not?