CRACK DREAMS!’There’s a Jumble on the computer if you want to do it.’
So last night, I had one of those crazy dreams that Stacey affectionately calls crack dreams... and I didn't even have any cheese before bed! (Last summer, Chris had heard that eating cheese right before going to sleep would induce crack dreams, so he tested that hypothesis most nights of the week in our staff room by offering everyone cheese cubes while we candled.)
Anyway, here's what I can recall of last night's fairly entertaining crack dream:
The cabin kinda sorta looked the one in this photo by mhansen514 on Flickr.
It's Oct. 23, and I'm at a cabin-type place up in the mountains somewhere. Things probably happened at that cabin further back than my memory can reach, but what I do remember is that at night, I went over to spend the night at a house where these three ladies (sisters, maybe?) and some kids around my age lived. Said kids and I had a sleepover in the basement, watching movies and looking up dumb stuff on the Internet... you know, the stuff I do with my real friends. But none of the kids or the three ladies resembled anyone in particular from real life, which is strange since real-life people started making cameos right before my alarm went off.
Anyway, we're having a great time until I realize that it's 1 a.m. and I need to get up to start copy editing at 6... and thus, real life starts to intrude on the dream. So I go and brush my teeth and hit the hay (or, more accurately, pull-out sofa) and I think everyone else starts to pass out about that time too. But for some reason, I only get about an hour or two of shut-eye in before I wake up and can't get back to sleep. After many failed attempts to fall back asleep, I decide around 4 a.m. to just get up and to go next door to get a head start on packing or cleaning or something. (It's around this part of the dream that my 6 a.m. work start time turns into a departure time for some sort of excursion instead.)
When I get to my cabin, the complete mess inside makes me glad I came home early. All the lights in the place were left on, as well as multiple TVs and a laptop or two. I went around and turned everything off, thinking that I'd have to log into the SRP Web site later to see exactly how much power I had wasted overnight. Then I set to work on the mountains of dirty dishes and pans and everything else culinary that was piled up in and around the kitchen sink.
Picture the amount of dirty dishes seen here in emotionaltoothpaste's Flickr photo multiplied by like 10ish. That's how much stuff there was to wash in my dream kitchen.
Anyway, my mom appears around 6 or 7 a.m., making her the first real person to make an appearance in the dream. She's ready to go wherever it is that I and apparently now she are going for my birthday, but I realize that I left a bunch of stuff next door. I run back over and start cramming an inordinate amount of my junk, which had of course spread out all over the basement, into a single duffel bag.
Just before I left the basement, I ran and either got something from the bathroom or put my contacts in or brushed my teeth in there, and on my way out, I turned on the TV for a second. On a TiVo-like menu, there was some sort of news headline that caught my eye, so I selected it, thinking that would tune the TV to CNN or bring up an on-demand news video.
Instead, it brought up an unedited YouTube video showing a hostage who I presumed was about to be decapitated. He was holding up some handwritten sign that I'm sure summed up his captors' demands, and speaking of the captors, I was surprised to see that the one hostage-taker who appeared on screen was this somewhat petite blond girl. She didn't look like your typical captor, so I figured there were some rough-and-tumble kind of guys behind the camera who would handle the actual throat-slitting. I did not watch long enough to see if my hypothesis would be proved correct, though, because srsly, watching someone get beheaded is no way to start off your freakin' birthday.
Anyway, I got my stuff and went upstairs, where I ran into the ladies of the house. I thanked them profusely for letting me spend the night, and they all accompanied me out the front door.
As we walked — well... hopped, really — down the big hiking-trail-style steps that led from the house to the road (and that I somehow did not remember scaling on my previous two entries to the house) the most prominent of the three ladies — the eldest sister, queen bee or something like that — slowly morphed into my Aunt Susan. That makes her real person No. 2 in the dream.
But down at the road, the real-people tally went through the roof as I found a bunch of my real-life BFFs congregating down there. Of particular note was the fact that Phil quickly brushed by me, even though for some reason I wasn't expecting to see him either right there and/or right then. Since I had seen a tweet of his (both in real life and in this dream too, apparently) that hinted at a "reunion with the stage," I excitedly asked him if he was getting back into acting. I seem to remember his answer being somewhat similar to the real-life one he posted on Twitter overnight, which I didn't see until this morning... except for in my psychic dream! Oooh! Or maybe that's just a case of subconscious revisionist history. In any case, whatever Phil said to me in the dream got me so excited that I had to run through the pack of peeps who were milling about to find Claudia and tell her all about it.
Minutes later, though, I'm back standing outside my cabin, making sure I have everything I need for whatever trip I was going on when Chris Hoerber walks past me and says, "Hey man. There's a Jumble on the computer if you want to do it." But before I could get inside to see said word puzzle on my laptop... and figure out why it was there and/or why I cared, my alarm went off.
So sadly, I'll never know where I was headed for my birthday excursion or why Jumble, the bane of my editorial existence, reared its ugly, pain-to-download-and-get-over-to-the-Production-server head in the inner sanctum of my dreams.
But hey, it was a rather star-studded, hella interesting dream... and I might just have to have some string cheese before bed tonight to see if I can one-up it.