I often dream about tornadoes, where by often I mean a couple of times a month. I’ve never seen a tornado in person, nor do I think about them often in my waking life, but I am scared of them, so maybe when my brain reaches for “scary thing” to insert in a dream, the dice tend to come up tornado. (Also, airplanes. But not death or cockroaches.)

Usually I see them from afar, but last night’s dream-nado got really, frighteningly close, to the point that I got myself, my dad, and my dog (the main characters up to this point) into the bathtub and covered us up with a mattress. That’s still the protocol, right? I don’t know how people are supposed to have time to haul mattresses into their bathrooms – real time doesn’t stretch like dream time does.

Anyway, the story ended happily with the house still standing and my discovery that the tornado was nothing more than a fabric and wire contraption being hauled around on the back of a truck. Then the bad guys (who had made the tornado to scare me) went to jail, and I learned how to climb trees using three glowing rings invented by a friend of a friend. But I digress.

Dream-nado: totally fake. Dream-airplanes-falling-out-of-the-sky: still real. This is an improvement.

I don’t watch many movies, but I did see Inception. Disappointment city.

The visual effects were stunning, to be sure, but the plot was uninspiring. Huge corporations fighting to corner the energy market? Seriously? The only character I cared about was Ariadne, in spite of her INTENSELY SYMBOLIC name. I guess I was supposed to be invested in Cobb and Mal’s relationship, but Cobb was mentally unstable and (his projection of) Mal was (1) trying to kill everyone and (2) imaginary. I didn’t even cry at the end, and I cry in EVERY MOVIE. All of them. No, I take that back. I don’t think I’ve ever cried during Monty Python and the Holy Grail. But all the others.

The movie went to so much trouble to set up these neat rules for dreams that I’d hoped it would be full of intriguing logic puzzles, but instead it was full of holes and nonsense.

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I’ve managed to avoid thinking about my upcoming airplane flights (three weeks!) most days, but I do sometimes dream about planes. The experience, fortunately, is usually pleasant.

Last night, for instance, I dreamt that I got on my plane to Nashville and found, to my relief, that it was much larger than I’d expected. So large, in fact, that it had a jumbotron-equipped lounge and a full-size Starbucks in the back. I would have liked to head back there during the flight and enjoy something decaffeinated (caffeine exacerbates the anxiety thing), but the plane only got airborne for a minute or two before it landed again and began driving the rest of the way to Tennessee.

This has been a common pattern in my airplane dreams lately: huge luxury planes that don’t fly much. I’ve dreamt about a plane with hotel rooms, a plane with a buffet, and a plane with office space. And whatever the type of plane, if it gets into the air at all, it scoots along about ten feet off the ground, dodging bridges and trees. Now THAT’S what flying should be, eh?

Man, is this week dragging, or what? I don’t think I’ve spent a minute less in front of my computer than I would have otherwise, and if I did, it was because I was either playing taiko or sleeping. I probably did pay a little more attention in class, though, so that’s a plus. Still, I’m ready to be done with this exercise.

Some unconnected bits:

Last night I dreamt that John was being chased by an angry kangaroo. He escaped by running to his dad’s house and tricking the kangaroo into jumping into a frozen lake. Then I stole an airplane and turned it into a robot. I tried to sign my brother up for a locker at his new law school, but the roller skating rink was on lockdown. I did find my own locker, though, and it was full of old swimsuits.

Samson is sleeping with his eyes half-open. All I can see are the whites, and every now and then they’ll roll around a little. It’s creepy as all get-out.

Three showers later, I’m still wearing the same eyeliner I put on for the Galveston show Saturday evening. I’ll probably have to take it off tomorrow because it’s finally starting to get patchy, but it’s had a good run.

Yesterday I was in a crummy situation that was all my own fault, and the idea popped into my head that it would be an ideal time to give blood, since I was already crying. The worst part of crying, after all, is trying not to cry. Once you start, all the tension releases, and there’s relief in knowing that however much your situation sucks, you no longer have to put on a brave face.

John and I haven’t gotten to see each other much lately, and it makes me sad. This weekend we’ll miss each other again because I’ll be in Hidalgo the whole time. Then three weekends later I’ll be in Nashville. I want to spend more time with him before he leaves the country for six weeks at the start of his new job in June, but spring taiko season has other ideas.

Lately I’ve been having long, involved dreams every night. I’ve read that extremely vivid dreams are a potential side effect of quitting Lexapro (which I am currently attempting to do, so far successfully), but these aren’t any more vivid than my usual dreams, they’re just longer. Previously I’d wake up most mornings remembering bits and pieces of several dreams, each feeling like it lasted at most fifteen minutes, but now I’ll have one giant dream that seems to have gone on for an hour or more.

Each bit of storyline morphs into the next in that way that dreams do, where all of a sudden a new idea appears, and your brain invents some way to insert it into the action that’s sort of continuous, but in the light of day makes no sense.* And this goes on and on and on.

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I was in the middle of writing a post about some of the icky ethical dilemmas posed in my Professional Responsibility class, but now I’m home, and my book’s in the car, so I think I’ll finish that one later.

Instead, I’ll (again) share something I dreamed last night. Dull, I know, but hey, no one’s forcing you to read it.

I was walking through a super fancy store in a mall when I spotted a designer “dress” on a display stand. I put “dress” in quotation marks because it was really a big circle of wood with a clock face painted on it, held up by a chain of paperclips. The back had a smaller wooden circle just big enough to cover my butt.

I tried it on naked (shocking a few small children in the process) and fell in love with it. It cost a thousand dollars, but I knew I had to have it. What a fashion-forward figure I’d cut, walking around town in my fancy clock-dress! I figured I might as well wear something under it, so I picked out a little blue dress* to go with it.

The sales lady tried to convince me that I’d also picked out a pair of purple sequined flip-flops for $9000, but I knew that couldn’t be true because I was boycotting everything sparkly, and anyway, could we please hurry this up? The waiting around was aggravating my dad’s cancer.

The End.

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* Even now that I’m awake, I still love this imaginary blue dress. If I can find fabric like I dreamed of, I’m totally going to make it.

… and it’s only Day 3. Welcome to NaBlo, folks!

I’m going to fall back on what will likely be my default blog topic, which is to tell you about a segment of my dreams from the previous night. I’ll warn you that this one is slightly unpleasant.

I was about eighteen and still living with my parents. I went up to my room and found either a rat or a snake, I don’t remember. Deciding to keep it as a pet, I put it in a box I had lying around, only to discover that my hamster Stripey, who (I thought) had died and been buried in the backyard when I was ten, had actually survived and was living in that box. I threw the rat-snake in there, too. Why not, right?

They did okay for a while until I went on vacation and forgot about them. When I got back I wondered whether I should open the box. Maybe my wee pets had survived on whatever magical food source had sustained the hamster for eight years. On second thought, I realized that if they had died, then one of them had probably died first, which meant the other would have eaten it.* I decided not to open the box.

The End.

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* This actually happened with two mice our ninth grade biology teacher left at school over winter break with no food. I was so angry. And disgusted. But mostly angry.

Last night I dreamt (in part) that I went to the Olympics, but there was only one event. It was called “track.” Each competitor had to do a front flip, swim in a circle, and then do a triple jump out of the pool. The scoring was subjective, and the athletes were all middle-aged English gentlemen in sweater vests. Quite a civilized sport.

Hey, why not make this a regular feature?

Some of these come from the same dream sequences, but describing the whole bizarre chain of events would be confusing and boring (as John has confirmed many times over). Just the highlights for you, internets.

1. I was eating at a restaurant in Austin with various members of my extended family, admiring the Matterhorn just outside the window. It was a brilliant purple, as mountains are.

2. I hopped on a chairlift only to find that instead of metal, the chair was made of a dozen geese tied together. I got nervous when one goose snapped in half, leaving the chair swinging wildly, and tried to call the chairlift operators on my cell phone, but the line was busy.

3. John, Samson, and I descended three stories into the basement of an old house in search of a public bathroom. I was worried we’d lose Sam because he didn’t have a leash and was the size of a mouse.

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1. I pulled a looooong strip of slimy black plastic out of John’s ear.

2. I saw a video of a transvestite eating plants off of a coral reef 20,000 feet below the ocean’s surface and sent it to everyone I knew. Then someone pointed out that the video must have been a joke because he/she wasn’t even wearing a scuba suit.

3. I had to drunkenly drive down a muddy mountain road in the middle of the night to catch a train to Belgium and save my dog. I took the corners off of a few houses in the process.

4. I stole a rental Lexus convertible that was clipped to the side of a bus and took it for a joy ride to find ice cream. I freaked out when a lady started shouting at me, but she only wanted to make sure my laptop had the most current updates.

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