More weird dreams

So I woke up at 3 this morning with a terrible stomach ache. No more day-old deli sandwiches from Meijer, I think. In the process of trying to go back to sleep, I got to thinking about my mom...and then started dreaming about her. And then I was confused because I was dreaming that I was visiting her last month, but she was fine when I left (as she always had been in the past). I was so lightly asleep that I actually woke up at this point confused about whether or not she was dead, thinking about all the people I had to tell about the 'error' and worrying about that.

And then I went back to sleep and commenced worrying about our (non-existent) rental house which was actually a house we supposely used to live in (I'd never been in this house in real life).

I'm thinking this is looking like a really L O N G day at work.

Dreams

One of my favorite lines from one of my favorite songs is "I dreamed about Ray Charles last night. He could see just fine."

I didn't dream about Ray Charles last night.

I dreamed we had two new people at our next youth group meeting (which was, as dreams are sometimes, wonky in several aspects unimportant to the actual dream). That's a bonus, A-plus thing. I was excited. The new kids were a boy and a girl, the girl sitting at the table and the boy playing catch across the room. Because there are just two boys who regularly attend the meetings usually, I was even more excited to see the guy, but I sat down to talk to the girl.

Then I noticed the baby carrier at her feet.

Yeah. We didn't just gain two new youth group members, we gained three: mom, dad, and baby. I asked her if they were from around here. She said they were both students the main local high school (and married)--which explains why the other kids were ... "elsewhere" in the room watching to see my reaction before they committed to this scenario.

And I woke up.

I woke with thoughts tumbling all around: Would I do the right thing? Would the girl and the rest of the group notice my unsureness, my shock (notice that I assumed the boy wouldn't?)? Were the other leader group leader and Beast going to freak? Where did these kids come from? Why did they just suddenly turn up at youth group--not so much because of "the situation," more what was the context of two unknown people appearing? Underlying it all was the sense of "Well, here's a new challenge, God. Always looking out for those, aren't You? Thanks!"

The worst part of this is that as I'm writing this, I'm already missing these kids, these people I don't even know. I'm worrying about them, and weeping.

What will you do?

Palm Sunday

Mood: not bad
Hair: wet
Eyes: dry
Listening to: Sparky brushing his teeth upstairs

Holy cow--it's Palm Sunday! That means church today will be a little more exciting than usual: kids galore, and good hymns. I may absent myself during the passing of the peace so as not to contaminate anyone who hasn't had this particular brand of crud.

I worked four hours yesterday and then came home and went to bed. The weather is finally perking up. There are rumors of a full week of sunny days ahead of us. I hope I'm healthy enough to enjoy it, but if not at least I can open the curtains and blinds and sleep in the sun.

Weird dream this morning about the library in the town where I grew up. It has since moved a few blocks away, and the whole area has been reconfigured: new streets, different buildings, etc. In my dream the building had been torn down, the streets were as they were c. 1980, and Sparky and I were wandering. We got caught hiding in the old building, which turned out to be abandoned but not torn down. It turns out this is the computer center for the city, and it's more or less an underground parking garage with the remnants of the library signage still in place. The funniest sign? "Circulation" with another sign hanging down from it that read "School Bell Schedule" giving the impression that the bells ring at the library.

Why? Because the circulation desk area was actually the office from Sparky's middle school.

WTF? Dreams are weird.

Dreamland

Mood: either not awake yet or low-grade sick
Hair: uninspected, but certainly uncombed and unclean
Listening to: the dishwasher

Ugh, I hate waking up from dreams like this, although the alternative is continuing in the ugly dream, so I guess waking up is a good option.

Beast and I were having one of those stupid "I don't like your tone" disagreements in this dream. I was ranting about something related to Dean and Beast had just had it with listening to me. Then there were the obligatory hurt feelings all around during which he said something to the effect of just wanting his birthday to be stress-free. Whereupon I told him that I'd spent MY birthday visiting Dean last Sunday and didn't even realize it was my birthday till we were almost home.

What did Beast want to do on his birthday? Go to a Beyonce concert.

WTF?

Maybe the absurdity is what woke me up. While I don't think he has strong feelings on the subject, I don't have him pegged as a Beyonce fan. {understatement alert}

Ultimately, the warning is clear: we need to take time for fun stuff right now.

Also, talking to a teenager and her mom about their currently-very-fraught relationship translates in Dream Speak into stress in my close relationships.

Dreamy weirdness

What a weird night of dreams!

I woke up early from a dream that I was reading an email from my brother announcing that he and his wife were expecting a baby. How did I know this had to be a dream? The email was in my gmailbox, which Del doesn't know exists. Also...just...no, it's not happening.

The rest are now a full jumble in my head, with only the waking thought of "WHAT?!?!" to remind me of how confused I was. At some point, maybe as a result of the weirdness, I turned off my alarm, so I woke up 45 minutes late. Good thing I'm not working today!!

No, instead, I'm setting an appt. for Dbd, and ordering a bunch o' stuff from Amazon.

Speaking of Xmas--the Amazon order--my niece's mother-in-law called me, at work, yesterday to ask if I had any ideas for her son and daughter-in-law for gifts. WTF on so many different levels:

1) calling me at work (my own extended family doesn't even do that more than twice a year, if that!)
2) calling ME to ask about gifts for her family
3) asking, or starting to ask, for an explanation of a person--female--in a photo her ex-husband took and posted on his blog. I was in the photo as well, so therefore I would 'know'. Even if I did, it's not likely that I'm going down that road with her.
4) asking me if Katherine is 'depressed' since she's tired all the time (uh...Genderal Dipshit Alert)

And now I'm logging off here. Happy Thursday!

Dream Time

Last night pretty much sucked in the sleep department. Gotta love insomnia. Though I'm not sure why.... I think I never made it further into sleep than a heavy doze.

I was awakened at some point while it was still fairly dark out while dreaming thusly:

I was reading my comments from a blogpost I'd done on relationships. Or something. Anyway, I said something in the post about not dating people at work, or that it was tricky to do that. I had a comment from someone calling themselves 'k'* (small letter, for what it's worth) full of snark. The snark was not directed at me per se, but at another person (who hadn't commented yet) who regularly reads my blog. I think. ;-) 'k' was asking how I know work relationships don't tend to be healthy, and it went on and on, and was very much a morass of quicksand into which I was (am) not stepping.

And the rest of the morning I drifted in and out of consciousness, trying to remember when I said anything about dating people at work (have I? Ever?), alternating that with mortification over a lengthy comment I left at someone else's blog last night because I was beyond cranky and had misplaced my mental "EDIT" button.

Today is cloudy and dismal, so it fits my general mood. I work till 5, and Sparky plays at his first football game tonight at 7:30, so I won't be home until after 9 tonight (and probably much later than that). Yuck-o.

Happy Friday, ya'll.
---------------
* Yes, THAT 'k'.

Dreamland

My waking up dream this morning took place in church. I was sitting on the left section of the sanctuary (our old sanctuary was divided in half, but in our new building, we're playing around with multiple aisles, so we sometimes have two sections, sometimes up to five, across the width of the room), in the old building. Beast was in the center section. There were a lot of musicians sitting up front, or maybe just more congregation, but anyway they were facing the back of the sanctuary. I got up and snuck down the aisle to sit by Beast for the sermon. Halfway through, I realized that I needed to sit back on the left, so I moved again. Afterwards, Beast stood up to tell everyone that we had family here (which was a surprise; I hadn't noticed them): he forgot my sister and brother-in-law's names, and called my brother "Uncle Norton" (as in OUR Uncle, and his name is Del, not Norton), but he got the other person right, not that I can remember who this other person is now! It was weirdly embarrassing and funny.

I woke up part of the way at this point and tried to sort out why my brother was at church, why none of us were sitting together (hello--THAT is totally clear to me!) and why I was so upset that someone from the chancel moved to my side pew and sat on my (green plastic) wallet. I left the sanctuary at this point and went in to help with the little kids, of which there were two in a very large, completely unrecognizable room with no adult present until I got there.

Apparently, that last detail freaked me out so much it woke me up all the way. At 4:15 a.m.

Fairly quickly, I started to get knotted up about work, realized I was finished with sleep for this night, and came downstairs to check memes and read. I leave for work, with Sparky in tow, in half an hour.

Sparky wasn't ANYwhere in this dream. That's a bit odd.

Anxiety

Had a horrible dream during my waking-up moments this morning. First, the back story: Last night, I drove Sparky to the bookstore in our town at 9:30 for the Harry Potter doin's. Then I came home, took a bath (during which I nearly fell asleep), and made sure Beast had both phones nearby and an alarm set to be sure he woke up to go get Sparky at midnight (in the process, waking Beast up where he was snoring in his recliner). Then I went to bed.

The dream? The dream was that Sparky woke me up this morning by calling to say he'd spent the night at the city firehouse because his dad never came to get him. Beast was snoring in bed next to me (in reality and in the dream), and I was pretty angry with him.

This was at 5:10 a.m. Why the firehouse? {shrug} I saw plenty of cops in the downtown area (Gawd, it sounds quite odd to call it that--it's not what we call it in real life at all) last night while dropping him off. The police station would make more sense. So would Sparky going home with the owner of the bookstore, whom we know well.

I'm assuming Sparky really did get picked up and brought home.

Regardless, it's 6:00 and I have to go to work now, check in The Book to our first nine hold-placers, and gear up for our HP adventures pre-work hours. And then try to make some headway in my three nearly-full carts of backlog.

Oh, and there's the matter of Session minutes which I need to have finished by 8 tomorrow a.m., and finding my TobyMac CD which I need a song from for our presentation tomorrow at church tomorrow at 9.

And I've realized this week that the house, she is FEEEELLLLTTTHHHHHYyyyyyyyyyy!

All I ever do....

I had the weirdest dreams last night. I don't remember any of them, really, but the overlying theme seemed to be showering.

What?

Yes, showering. I'm not sure why. I don't feel particularly dirty. I don't smell particularly bad (and I slept on the couch last night, so it's not Beast, either--my allergies are playing havoc with my ability to lie flat AND breathe, plus I had too much DP too close to bedtime last night).

So. I guess I'll take a shower this morning, but I'm anticipating that weird dream-déjà-vu feeling to completely weird me out.

Overlap

All you people out there in BlogLand? I'm dreaming about you. In typical dream behavior, I'm mixing you all together into different people entirely. For example, Lisa now has strawberry blond hair--and a slightly different hairstyle--and your name is Annie, but you still have the same child, although he's 9 years old and has dark hair, and we went to high school together.

On top of all the mix-and-match weirdness, I've added elements of The Sims like being able to redecorate and move walls at a whim. I think I even incorporated one of the books I finished this week.

I have a weird way of consolidating everything in my life. At least none of you ended up working with me! It's possible that I'm so zoned at work that I can't even remember it: I cataloged nearly 100 items yesterday, in 6 hours. Gotta love copycatting!

Today I have a staff meeting at 8, but I don't start actually working until noon, though I think I'll see if I can show upat 1 instead, otherwise I'll be there for 10 hours (minus a dinner break, which I usually don't take anyway).

Dreaming was more interesting. Can I go back to bed now?

Dreamtime

OK, so "New" Blogger won't let you place an 'automatic' link in the title of the post. I'm irritated about the whole linking thing anyway, since I always get a reject from Microsoft about linking in "Edit" mode.

Anyway. Dreamtime is a concept I thought I remembered reading about somewhere. Unfortunately, the dream I was having this morning wasn't very optimistic about things. It was clearly a stress dream, though it was a funner stress dream than my usual one.

BACKGROUND:
Ask anyone who works closing anywhere public, be it store or library or whatever, and I'll bet you'd find they have the occasional dream about not being able to get the damn building closed up for the day. I used to have recurring nightmares about this when I worked for PsychoBoss. There were so many things she required beyond the basic "lock the doors, turn out the lights, make sure no one is left in the building when you leave" stuff: replace all magazines in the correct places on the displays, "face" each and every shelf throughout the adult area, count the money in the cash register/run a daily report/balance it out, have everything shelved that was returned that day, pull expired reserves off the shelf behind circ,... and the list went on. It was a fuckin' nightmare in real life much less in dreamtime.

So the recurring dream I had involved Sundays, which are notoriously chaotic because we are shorter-staffed and people seem to come in the same numbers as a regular day, except in only three hours instead of 10-12 hours. Closing on Sundays was hard because there are all those last-minute homework assignments. In PsychoLand, there was also only one adult working (all the circ staff on Sundays was teenage pages, no adults!) and that person was responsible for everything from answering reference questions to handling security issues (fights, broken things, flooding toilets, you name it) to supervising the circ staff and handling crises there to throwing people out the door at closing and making sure the post-closing stuff was handled. So that was reality. Usually it wasn't so bad, but worrying about it was all-consuming for each and every reference librarian.

The recurring nightmare itself involved people refusing to leave, finding people hiding in various places, disovering that people were getting inside after we locked the doors, not being able to find all the magazines, having 150 books left to shelve at closing time, not being able to balance the cash register...nothing terribly criminal or scary, just frustrating and annoying. I seemed to always wake up in the midst of a panic about making the pages work extra time (for which we didn't get paid--we only got paid till the minute the doors were supposed to be locked...any extra time was somehow "our fault"), sometimes amounting to hours and hours of extra time. Guilt? Yep; that was the era of it all being my responsibility, my fault, my problem to solve. I'm cured of that (mostly) now. Thanks, PsychoBoss, for that at least!

TODAY:
So I woke up this morning having the following dream:

I'm working a much smaller version of our current library with several of my current coworkers. Techie Librarian was there, as were several daytime circ staff. Techie and I were finding books for a lot of Large Print readers (no clue about that!), and generally winding down the day. The circ desk was smaller, and had just one checkout terminal, so there was a long line. Well, "long" for the library; it looked like a short grocery store line. And we were in sort of a grocery store building, similar to the smallest, family-owned, supermarket in town. There were lots of windows, and separate entrance and exit areas.

Then we closed. Except there were still people in line. Techie went home (actually, it being a dream, she just disappeared) [OK, in reality she does that quite often too.....hee...we joke about getting her a cat collar so we can find her] and suddenly the daytime circ people had morphed into the crew with whom I normally work Thursday nights: Alabama, Sout' Sider, Argentina et al. I was still helping people find things, and whenever I looked up, someone else was coming in the front door. There was no one free to lock the doors, so people just kept coming.

Suddenly, we weren't a library at all anymore, we were a grocery store! People were carrying shopping baskets (which we actually have at our library, by the way) and pushing carts. The line was going down: it was mostly one or two items at a time per person, but more people kept coming in. Someone finally managed to lock the doors, and I started herding people towards the front, but every aisle had people in it. I'd clear an aisle and go on to the next, only to find the first aisle had people in it again. I looked over to the entrance once and saw a very tall 'person' made of paper-clips ducking into the inner doorway. Then some antagonistic people came in to buy liquor and the checkers/circ people said they wouldn't let them: we were closed, sorry, go home, etc. Those customers got crankier, the desk staff just refused to do anything with them, and more paper-clip people (shorter than the first) were coming in because--I now noticed--one of the (glass-like-supermarket) doors was broken so it couldn't lock.

The last straw was three teens who came in to purchase the air hockey table (except it wasn't really air hockey, it was some other similar game that combined air hockey with foosball and basketball). Upon their entrance, everyone got very worried; they turned out to be nice guys, a little boisterous, but intent on what they were doing and not really troublemakers. They carried stuff (table, pucks and pieces, hoops) to the front, paid, and hauled it all out the door with my help, and I woke up.


What in the world!?!


Paper-clip people? I think that comes from listening to Inkspell; they reminded me of the glass man in that book.

Grocery store? OK, new marketing plots are swirling around the library, but hopefully we aren't aiming to be a grocery store just yet.

Panic about closing? I haven't had a dream about that for years. In fact, I've only really had that dream a few times over all the time I've worked at my current library (11-plus years) because it's so much less stressful than PsychoLibrary. Granted, I work until closing tonight, but I'm rarely on point for doing anything much about it beyond covering what others haven't gotten to. That usually means bathrooms and/or basement. No problem.

Where did this come from anyway? My shoulder hurting? Oy, so weird. The upshot is that there's tension at work, I think, but why it's coming out in such a bizarre dream I have no idea.

As I said, this was probably the funnest stress dream I've ever had (yes, I know it's not a word). I was kind of laughing when I woke up, and my heart rate wasn't up. Paper-clip people. Huh.

:-)

Appended: Just found that today's quote of the day is quite apropos: "Look for the ridiculous in everything and you will find it. - Jules Renard"

Saturday

We met with Beast's family friends for a couple of hours yesterday. Then we came home and watched "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" which we stopped and rented on the way back home. Like anything else in this area, meeting up with these folks meant an hour drive each way to the meeting point: the biggest freakin' outlet mall in the universe! Which, naturally on a Saturday afternoon, was crowded beyond belief.

Pirates = silly. One very funny scene and some good editing and acting--I was impressed by Keira Knightly, and I love Johnny Depp--but all-in-all a very silly movie. OK, at one point, I leapt into the air in shock, but that's only because we have surround-sound.

Took a bath, and of course that's when the phone rings. Beast was already asleep (ish). It was the pastor/chaperone for the camping trip Sparky is on. He left a message because neither of us could get to the phone. Seems that Sparky got in trouble for something--not quite clear on what. Sigh.... We'll find out today when we pick him up.

As a result of that call, I had some really bizarre dreams last night. One involved the laptop: I dropped it in our bathroom (the master bathroom--yeah, not in there with the computer real often!) and broke the hinges on the screen. The frame around the screen also broke and there were parts lying all over the bathroom. Somehow Beast got it all back together and it worked just fine. My hero.

Today is sitting-around-day. I need to research and buy plane tickets for Spring Break for Sparky and me, and of course we'll have to go pick up the kid, but otherwise there's no scheduled events.

For a change.

Thank God!! Oh, yeah, and we aren't doing church.

How totally...bizarre

This one woke me up before my alarm could go off, and it's not even a real dream, just a snippet of "information" that is so off-the-wall that I'm not sure what to do with it, or where it came from:

Turns out my brother's wife left him about 6 years ago and he's been lying to us ever since.

My first thought upon waking up? "But, haven't I talked to her since then??"

Yes. I have. Dozens of times. I've even seen her, at their house in Arizona, within the last 5 years. I like her, too, so it definitely isn't wish-fulfilment.

So. What the heck does this mean?