Space ships, Buzz-cuts, Toddlers

DREAM #1:

All I remember is that we were all going to go see “Wicked,” but couldn’t because the theatre flooded, so we jumped onto a spaceship for a spaghetti dinner instead. Then we realized that half of the people with us were zombies, so we spent about half an hour trying to avoid them and then finally managed to separate from them and lock ourselves into the “escape pod.” Then we realized that the zombies were going to destroy the ship, so we actually had to escape with the escape pod. The problem was we were a little overcrowded by about 4 people, so we took off barely in time, with people not buckled in or still scrambling to even find something to hold on to. Somehow having 4 people too many doomed us to death, so after discussing our options…killing 4 people, sending out a distress signal, etc, we decided to just try and make it back home. It was a big risk, and we knew that if we didn’t make it home within two hours, we would ALL die. So the majority of us gathered in the main room for a Sunday school lesson, just to pass the time. It was kind of a boring lesson, but I was sitting with Jordan and Sarah and Jenny and Annie, so we drew pictures to keep us entertained. Then I noticed this delicious smell and looked around to discover that it was coming from Jordan…he was smoking a cigarette and it was almost gone. I looked at him and smiled and he just said “I’m stressed. Last two hours I might be living, you know?” I said “Pass it over.” I took the almost-finished cigarette from him and just about finished it myself. It tasted like tobacco and caramel, and while I was smoking it, he lit another one. I looked at him and said “When did you start smoking?” He looked at me guiltily and said “Over the summer. It was just really stressful, you know?” I laughed and said “Yeah. That’s when I started too.” So Jordan and I sat and smoked the rest of his carton of caramel Marlboros in Sunday school while we waited to find out if we were going to live through the next few hours.



DREAM #2:

I was biking home from somewhere and noticed a handful of people I didn’t know sitting around on a corner, with Kirby flyers in their hands. I stopped to see if I knew any of them…if any of the old Kirby gang was there, but I didn’t recognize any of their faces. They were waiting for Shadi to come pick them up, so when he and Johnnie came by in the white Kirby van, I hopped in just to say hi. We stopped to drop me off at these apartments where Kathleen was washing her van, and where Jenny was living by herself a few doors down until her baby was born. There was a moment of wondering why Jenny was pregnant, but in one of those dream-moments of clarity I remembered that Jenny didn’t need a husband or even any kind of relationship to have a baby.

I wandered over to what was suddenly my own apartment, where my sister Melissa helped me trim my hair. I decided I wanted to buzz it, but changed my mind halfway through, so just the back was buzzed. We tried to layer the rest, so that it looked like a really close A-line cut, but we knew that really we’d just have to wait for it to grow out.

Then Isha came in and said it was time for me to take her to school, so she and I walked through the woods to her new school. It was the first day she was going, so I had to try and help her find her classroom. Sometimes it was Isha and sometimes it was Beckah that I was helping. We were wandering around South Medford High School, which had all these additions to it, and I realized as I was walking through them that they were actually the kid’s section of the Fremont Main Library. They had apparently just transferred the entire chunk of the building from California to South Medford. They also had a new theatre where the old theatre classroom used to be, which made me cry, it was so beautiful.

We never found the classroom, because apparently it didn’t exist. Beckah said that the whole building smelled of iron and salt, so we left a note on a map on the wall that said “Classroom 151 doesn’t exist. HCl Le.” Apparently we were using the chemical symbols to notify people of the iron and salt smell. I have no idea if that’s correct or not.

My sister stayed at the school, and I walked home again through the woods to the apartments, but on my way, I ran into JD and Melissa Taylor with their son, Shadi and Stacey and their baby (who in reality hasn’t been born yet, but in my dream she was like two), and a handful of other people I didn’t know. They were on a group outing to the park that was just through the woods a little further, but they were stopped because Jaden, the Taylor’s son, was trying to draw their attention to something on the ground. They were leaning over a metal railing, which all of a sudden I remembered was supposed to be decorated for Christmas, so I quickly hung a “Season’s Greetings” sign on it while watching Jaden try to tell JD what it was he wanted.

Apparently Jaden was bizarrely good at communicating for his age, but it wasn’t necessarily in words. He seemed to share this semi-telepathic bond with his parents, but it was hazy and it was only with them. Finally JD figured out that Jaden wanted the seashell that was on the ground next to the railing I was decorating. He picked it up and then all of a sudden we noticed that there were dozens of shells all over. We spent a few minutes picking them up and touching them and playing with them and showing them to the toddlers in our midst. Shadi and Stacey’s daughter got upset because one of the shells was “still alive” so instead of being hard, it was soft and porous on the outside. It really bothered her, so Jasper Cullen came and kindly took it from her and we all kept walking to the park which was just around the bend. The baby girl was upset because she really wanted a shell, but she didn’t want an alive one, so Jasper comforted her by promising that we could all play baseball in the park. I looked at the crowded and sunshiney park, and asked “Uh, can you do that?” He smiled at me and said “Nope.” And so we all went back to the apartments instead, where we tried to distract the toddlers with half a dozen metal folding chairs.