Nerd Games and Naked Lunches

I was running a rental event at on of our galleries that had Wild Turkey Whiskey as a sponsor. The event involved a bunch of sci-fi nerds doing a video shoot of a game that was all about buying presents for people. I was being a jerk and drinking straight vodka on the rocks, hanging out with my friend Robyne, making fun of the nerds and stealing cases of their whiskey.


Somehow my Dad was there and he was helping the nerds organize their shoot for the game. The game went like this: You were given a piece of paper with a dozens of random things hand-written on it that the other person apparently liked, and you were supposed to look at the very last thing on the list and find a photo of it in hundreds of other images that were placed on the floor of the gallery. I got my Dad's list and the last thing on it was "Biggie Smalls" so I found the picture of Biggie Smalls wearing a crown and turned it over. There were all sorts of items based on Biggie that you could buy, but they were generically manufactured by one company, like mugs with his face on it, ceramic picture frames that said "Biggie" at the top, etc.


My Dad got my list and apparently the last thing on my list was "Curly Hair" he found a picture of a girl with curly hair and ended up buying me a weird curling iron that seemed like it was from an informercial, it was pink and looked like a big, long plastic stick made out of mesh and it didn't get hot, you were supposed to clamp it onto a lock of your hair and let it sit for 3-5 minutes and it would somehow hold the curl until you washed your hair.


We left the gallery and took a bus home. I hadn't bought my Dad anything Biggie Smalls-related so my sisters (I had multiple sisters in the dream) were all harping on me about it saying everything was only $15, how could I be so cheap, but in the dream I was a teenager and didn't have any money so I explained I would have had to ask Dad for the money and that would be pointless, but they ragged on me anyway. I got pissed off and walked off the bus with the curling contraption dangling from my hair and stormed up a country road. Somewhere during my walk I came across my "Boyfriend" who was the werewolf guy from "Twilight" and he didn't have his shirt on. Apparently all the boys were going through werewolf transformation in the town and they were all walking out of their houses and taking their shirts off to go be werewolves.


I apparently lived in a big farm house in a small town called "Whalen" but I felt like a visitor and had never been to any of the businesses in town. I went walking around and small vintage shop with quirky owner who was an old lady with long, blonde, frizzy hair and a younger gay guy named "Octavio". The shop was full of weird junk and vintage clothing and was where all the freaky kids shopped. There was a yellow t-shirt attached to the front door with an iron-on square with a picture of a cat running by a bunch of trees. On the back of the t-shirt it said in red marker "If you want this shirt, you have no business shopping here."


In the shop I found a beaded flowers in amber and brown with a ring attached to it, but it was one of those things you attach to your wine stem to identify your glass. I put it on as a finger ring though and paired it with a bracelet made out of wooden tusks dyed turquoise. In the shop there were also a number of boxes on the ground and platters everywhere that contained various breads, muffins, and cheesecakes. The old lady told me to eat whatever I wanted so I picked a slice of blueberry bread. The lady thought I was super cool for creating the ring/bracelet combo and wanted to hang out with me and so did Octavio but he had a date, so I invited them the next day to my family's traditional "Naked Lunch" and told them to come naked, but in my head I knew it wasn't actually a lunch where people were naked, it had something to do with the food being raw. So it was a mean joke on my part that I didn't really mean to pull but I did anyway.

Clothing dispensers, hair sandwiches, and underwater vampires

I felt like I desperately needed a program that would organize and dispense my clothing so I enlisted 3 nerds (Clement, someone named David, and someone I can't remember the name of) to help me create a prototype that involved a laptop and a candy vending machine. The program would show all my wardrobe (dresses, tights, socks, underwear, shoes, jewelry, etc) and I could create outfits virtually and it would even offer suggestions of things that matched. When I chose the outfit I wanted, all the components would come out of the candy machine, heat sealed in film reel containers (even the bigger pieces like shoes and dresses, and somehow nothing would be wrinkled.


The nerd David had apparently worked with my company before and offered to come over and make us all his "famous egg sandwiches". David had back problems so for some reason he wore one high heel women's shoe and one flat shoe--it made it easier for him to bend over. He came over to a big warehouse with a girl who looked really cool and futuristic and she set up a sandwich making booth and asked if I wanted my favorite sandwich which apparently was Gorgonzola cheese with curly synthetic hair in it.


There was a vampire girl somehow in the mix that needed to be babysat while the nerds created the program. She was an underwater vampire so I had to go with her into the ocean by the Statue of Liberty. We swam through some normal underwater stuff, like schools of fish, etc, but came upon an underwater graveyard and we could see figures rushing into a massive hallway on the other side. In the hallway there wasn't water but it was all sewer muck with garbage and corpses embedded in a thick mud. I saw a lot of sparkly bits of jewelry and started picking them out of the mud. I came across a Lund's bag filled with my own stuff. There was some clothing and lots of jewelry that I actually used to own but lost, I started stuffing everything into my pockets. It became apparent that the big muddy hallway was the gate to heaven so we didn't go all the way down.


There was also a random part about me creating an art installation that was a pyramid of light boxes with abstract b&w photography mapped onto it. If a person walked by they would be turned into an abstraction on the screen. There was also a little snippet about me using the clothing dispenser and going to work in an office but when I got there I realized that I was wearing only one boot and one leg/foot was completely bare and my leg was really hairy like a dude's leg. I called the nerds in a rage because their program for the clothing dispenser still had bugs in it.

Trailer homes and frilly death toilets

My dream last night was very distressing to me for some reason, despite the fact I have way scarier dreams on a regular basis. I think it had something to do with making a very bad decision in the dream. But anyhoo...

I worked freelance for a machinery plant in Columbia Heights writing three cool event blurbs a day and sending them out in an e-mail blast. My sister worked at the plant too but actually doing mechanical work (what they made at the plant, I am not sure). I was in the office one day and noticed something shiny outside. It was a trailer home made out of all metal, sculpted in a similar style to the Weisman Art Museum. I asked how much to rent it and they said only $600 a month. I thought it was the coolest thing ever and asked to sign paper work on it right then and there, without seeing the inside.


When the owners of the plant took me inside, I immediately started regretting my decision. It was really filthy and was packed with weird old lady stuff and garbage. There were some cool things like huge wood tables and display cases full of unusual old trinkets, skeleton keys, and ornate wood and metal embellishments. I immediately started sifting through them and pocketing pieces I thought artist Michael Thomsen would like to use in his sculptures.


The worst part of the trailer, however, came when the landlords told me that the old lady who lived in it before, Irma, had died there. She apparently died on the toilet and fell over face first onto the floor and was there a long time before someone had found her. The toilet was like a big round chair with flowery fabric and frills a attached to it, and there was a random piece of glass over the actual bowl that still had a poop streak on it from Irma, and there was a big grease spot on the floor in front of it where she had rotted for awhile.

Kind of like this but with frills, and round, and uglier.

At that point I was freaking out about how I'd get out of the lease I signed but they wouldn't let me out of it. Then it came to light that a huge monster that looked like Paul Bunyan came with the trailer, and he was immediately after me. I ran into the machinery plant and was slipping through secret passage ways and into the bowels of the factory but he kept busting through metal doors to try to get me. Eventually he got distracted by a woman in a golf cart that was driving through the hallway and left me alone. I can't really remember what happened after that, but I woke up in a real panic.

Collapsing Buildings, Lesbians, and Truth Noodles

This dream started out with me standing in a parking garage that had old wooden floors and wooden posts. A car was driving crazy through it and smashed into one of the posts, breaking it in half, then drove away. I looked at the ceiling and a big bulge began forming, and it collapsed. I could see bodies of people falling in the debris, dusty and broken. I ran. I got a block away and sat down at a picnic table, the entire building collapsed and black smoke and dust began rolling towards where I was sitting, I ran again.


The scene changed to a cute shopping district, that had little cafes, wrought iron tables, flower boxes, etc. I was still in shock from the building collapsing. I walked up to an outdoor table with a group of lesbians sitting at it. One was especially masculine, with short and spikey hair, and a popped collar with rainbow pattern on the inside. She had a long, ongoing macaroni noodle (covered in cheese sauce) wrapped around her ear. I grabbed it and started sucking on it like a straw, which somehow made me be able to see her memories, which were of her cheating on her husband before she was a lesbian.


The lesbian was enraged that I sucked her noodle and found out her secret, so she took a Skittle candy off the table and threw it at a stand up mirror that I had apparently been toting around with me that I called my "fortune telling mirror". The Skittle cracked the mirror but I didn't do anything because I figured I deserved it for the noodle incident. Everything went back to normal but I noticed a large item sitting on the table next to the lesbians, it looked like a huge electric toothbrush and I was putting it all over myself because it had a massaging effect, but then I suddenly realized that she might use it for masturbation (after i put it in my mouth) and I put it down. Before I left, the lesbian inspected everyone's chests, and decided a girl named "Melissa" had the best cleavage.


We kept walking around after school collapsed and we went in an art studio building that had a tiny little loft room that you had to enter via a ladder. It was full of records and a few hipsters who were acting really cool. One boy was playing a record that had fancy shape like the border of a silhouette portrait, but it was made up of zany colors. He showed me his playlist and it just had a bunch of songs on it by a band called Panther-X.


There was something random about Lady Gaga playing a concert and both my friends Robyn and Jahna invited me to go with them, but I was all bitchy and refused to sit in the cheap seats, so I was furiously trying to text someone who could get us a suite, but my phone wouldn't let me text and I couldn't concentrate or see the screen. I got really frustrated and started punching the screen of my phone and screaming.


BONUS: Below is gibberish that I typed on my computer with my eyes closed, creating mini dream scenes in my half asleep head. I remember bits and pieces...a wide, thin, cardboard box filled with old shoes and a leg with a rolled up jean cuff and an argyle or striped sock withdrawing from it slowly, and the foot being a gnarled stump that came to a point inside the sock. While I was typing this I really thought I was typing it right. I've bolded semi-discernible parts.

FOQ5QMM 4Q6OMTG RFPPD A [;ATE WOT 4 ;;OVES PM OTSCRABBLE BERRIES FORCING TO TRY ONE. THEY TASTED LIKE GRAPES WITH SEENS. sOME SO KIARAN J4EELS WITH PENCILS STICK OUT THE BACK. [RMVO; PM JRSFMRRF YP JP;F JSMFD PM YJOD MPM DRCIS;;U/ HTRH[TI .[Y'RI VTREW [G ]ARUTU RR]DS NP;RT WPTJ NRARD/ SP,GEER WOTJ SJPRT JAOR// ,[DE; WEAROMG JEADDRESS AS JAD A;; DAU ;PMG/ B;ACL FEATJERS/ TO,,P,HH F[H 'RHHD P , YKR ;PYVKR, [,R PD NSMFSMHRF GPPY/ GRRFOMH YJR, YP ID???NI,NRT 5 VJS;;OD EEWOTH A COCKROACH WRAPPING AROUND IT ORNATELY. PAI; BINAUAN FACE B;IRRED OM A [JPTP/ A CARDBPARD BPPX FI;; PF SJPES. A ;EG WOTJ A GNAR;DED STI,[ FPR A FPPT WOTJ RP;ED I[ JEAMS AMD ARGU;E SPMC\CL [I;;OMG AWAU FRP, BPX/ A RED P;DTO,EU S[EALERBPP,BPX TJAT SCPPTS DPWM TJE SODEWA;L PM OTS PW./ ; A;; TJOS E;OXABETJE STIFF OS A JP,E;ESS ODEA/ JE TJOMLS NJER. NPOTJO,/ WEAROMG A FIR CA[E M[T ;ETTOMG BPUS. PM;U GOR;S/ SSAU MERD OM ,PCRP[JPME/

Suede shoes, spray paint and rock n' roll

This dream was pretty weird and had a few parts that didn't link together, but it had its funny moments.

I was visiting my friend Maritza, who lived on a strange plot of land that was part grass and part dirt lot. It had a number of small buildings on it that looked sort of abandon. I think it was some sort of commune or trailer park situation because people lived there, but it was extremely run down. Maritza had a little building where she lived and it was just a concrete square, but it had a full kitchen/living room/bedroom in it was very cute inside.


She showed me a pair of purple suede ankle boots with black and white stripes on the side that she had just bought on sale - she said they were originally worth $1100.00. I tried them on and they made my legs bend backwards at the knee like an ostrich. Maritza prepared a small plate of cold pizza squares and sprinkled black pepper over them. She told me to deliver them to an old man who lived across the lot, because he needed food plus he wanted to see Maritza's new shoes. So I delivered the pizza squares but came back right away because the grass was wet and I was afraid of ruining the shoes.

Kinda like this, but the stripes were black
and white and more horizontal

I changed shoes and we decided to go over to a rickety train-car/trailer looking thing that was across the field. It had yellow light spilling from the cracks and loud music was coming from inside. We went inside and there were a bunch of drunk people discussing how to turn the trailer into an art gallery. They were deliberating over the name they would call it, "Versailles" or "The Stop." We were sitting on two mangy old couches facing each other that had just enough room between them for someone to walk. A lady brought a kid with a big red afro into the trailer and we were like "he's too young to hang out in here!" but the lady insisted he would just fall asleep, and he curled up under a blanket on my lap and did.


The last part involved me having a job spray painting the heads of underground sprinkler heads bright yellow. I would lay on a skateboard on my stomach and ride down Ford Parkway in St. Paul, spraying them as a rolled by. There was a gang of teenage boys following me and trying to beat me up because I had caught them doing a crime and got them in trouble a few months before.


There was another vague part about me doing a bunch of psychedelic drugs and starting a band with three other people. I played the bass and the violin and I also sang, but a random girl we knew sat in on practice when I couldn't and the band decided to keep her as the singer, though I was still on bass and violin. This sort of pissed me off, but not really because our band had only two practices together and I knew I couldn't remember any of the songs, even though they were all cover songs. I remember thinking that the whole thing was ridiculous because we were all on drugs.


We were slated to play a big outdoor amphitheater and it was completely packed. We got on stage and I realized I didn't know how to play any of the songs and thought "okay, just pretend, you're only the bass player, know one will know." But before we started playing the girl singer said something to the effect of "Before we begin, I'd like to give a little shout out to Kate Iverson, who is one of the ugliest people I know" and then a jumbotron flashed to me and started flashing to other ugly people in the crowd who were laughing but I thought it was super mean. Then the camera flashed back to me and in real life I was covering my face with my hands and looking outraged, but the jumbotron showed me smiling really big and playing a little ditty on my violin, like a dork. I then stormed off the stage and that's all I can remember.

Summer Love with Mikhail Baryshnikov

This dream sort of started off like a Lifetime made for TV movie. It involved me (for some reason I was Bridget Fonda) spending a summer on a lake in a flashback sequence, meeting Mikhail Baryshnikov and having a whirl-wind romance in which we tied each other up back-to-back with bright yellow rope and would go walking around the lakeshore, tied together, doing weird gymnastics moves like kartwheels and handstands and back flips.


The dream fast forwarded to me being older, having been married, divorced and having a daughter named "Kelli" who was now 18 or so. I brought her and her boyfriend to the same lake for a vacation and we were riding in a row boat on the lake, as were many other people. We came into a little lagoon-type area and my daughter fell out of the boat and we fished her out. She said "Ouch! I think I was just stung by a stingray!" I didn't believe it at first because it was a freshwater lake, but when we looked over the side of the boat there were hundreds of small stingrays the size of sandwiches swimming around in the lake.


We got to shore and my daughter started getting really sick. Mikhail Baryshnikov was there and swept us all into his SUV and brought us to the hospital, saying she only had "minutes to live." We dropped her and her boyfriend off and Mikhail brought me back to his fancy house. I asked him "Do you remember me?" and he said "How could I ever forget." He had a daughter about the same age as mine and she was dismantling a red sign that said "Kelley" (our daughters had the same name, but spelled differently) and somehow she got the sign to read "Kelli." She declared she was bringing it to the hospital to liven up my daughter's hospital room.


Mikhail randomly brought me into town for some sort of big annual event that was going on. It involved a pack of about 20 gorillas in a pen, who were all shaking and tearing apart big white pillows. There was a team of high school football players outside of the pen egging the gorillas on and daring them to grab them and throw them as far as they could. The gorillas would grab a football player and hurl him into the street. The point was to see which player could get thrown the furthest.


The scene morphed to a conference room/cafeteria where Mikhail was debuting some sort of power point presentation he was really excited about. The only thing I could pay attention to, however, were two oval mirrors that were laid down on the counter by the cafeteria's register that had deer antlers attached to them. I kept wondering if they were going to throw them out and if I could keep them.


There was another random part about going through a Burger King drive through to get a "Transparent Hamburger" which was a bun with mayo, a whole bunch of shredded lettuce, ripped up pieces of bacon, and a hamburger pattie the size of a 50 cent piece. I didn't understand what was "transparent" about it, but I ordered two, and all the lettuce fell all over me. And that's when I woke up.

Alex the invisible fox/snake/baby

I was at a hotel working for a beauty queen who had won a pageant. We were in the "green room" of the hotel, which was a basement painted white with worn out carpeting, dirty old plastic toys, a mangy couch and a particle board desk with a computer on it. There was a random nerd guy who was in our entourage who didn't really talk, he just worked on a laptop the whole time.


While we were in the green room/basement waiting for the beauty queen to go make her appearance at the hotel, the floor somehow turned to sand and little fox-like tracks began appearing in it, but when you looked closer it looked like a smooth, snake slither path. The fox tracks kept padding silently in circles around the room and finally stopped right in front of me. I put out my hand to see if I could touch the invisible animal and there was nothing there, but you could see the sand move like it got scared and disappeared. When the beauty queen noticed this, she started smiling really big and almost crying saying that it had to be "Alex," her baby that died. She had to go make her appearance but ordered the nerd guy to write an article about it online.


I was in charge of making sure "Alex" stayed in the room until she got back. Somehow it became apparent that he was in a long storage space in the wall that had an old-timey cast iron stove door on it. I locked him in and stuffed a blue flag into the crack along the top so he couldn't ghost out. I just kept talking to him, saying "It's okay, Alex, your mom is coming right back, please don't leave" and other soothing things.


The last thing I remember was the beauty queen stalking across the lobby of the hotel with an entourage of people carrying her bags and photographers and reporters asking her about Alex. She stopped and got big tears in her eyes and told everyone that he was back and that she couldn't be happier. That's when I think I woke up.

Christmas Nightmares

So, I slept over at my parents' house on Christmas Eve in what one would typically construe as a super comfortable bed. But for some reason I woke up multiple times, had nightmares, and got up in the morning with a back ache. Merry Christmas!

A lot of the details are vague, but it started out with me trying to bamboozle the FBI, who in the dream were evil and trying to kill a teenage girl. I was somehow trusted by them and I was allowed in the FBI offices, where I stole a piece of paper that had a whole bunch of random scribbling on it, but was important to the case.


There was a chase scene that was inside a brightly lit warehouse. We kept trying to fool the FBI by getting on different freight elevators but we kept getting lost because the elevators were magically shifting and losing floors. The floors were all numbered and lettered strangely, like S9, GK3, etc. You could see the whole building like a skeleton and I could see the FBI closing in on us, and I think that's when I woke up.


I went back to sleep and had a serious night terror. I'm sure I was screaming (or at least yelping) in my sleep about it. I can only remember generic details about it but it was terrifying. I was in a strange house and a killer/rapist was in the house terrorizing me and chasing me around. I was screaming out the window "RAPE!" and "FIRE!" and no one could hear me.


The last part involved me running away from him through a rotating door that was spinning really fast. My only option was to run as fast as I could into it and hope I could squeak through. But I got pinned in the middle by the door and somehow it was a portal to the 4th dimension and my top and bottom half started blurring and expanding like balloons and all my organs were popping. I could see a bunch of repeats of the situation I was in. I could feel it cutting me in half and twisting upwards into a funnel type thing. I actually woke up because I was throwing up and choking in my sleep.

Grim Reapers, Photographers and Neil Gaiman

Just woke up from having a dream, but also think I stopped breathing in my sleep so I got kind of scared.

Anyhoo, the dream I had involved two unidentified guys that I apparently liked and was trying to impress. One was some sort of either actor or director and another was a theater photographer. I was at a show at the director guy's theater and suddenly he announced that they were going to do a sneak peek of their production of "Spring Awakening." The stage design was really weird and rough looking, parts of it were cardboard boxes stitched together and there was a big gap in the middle of the stage. I texted the photographer and told him to hurry down because I could get him onstage for the preview to shoot.

The stage was kind of like this but way weirder:

When the photographer got there he came on stage with me and the director guy was standing on the far front edge of the stage in a full-on grim reaper suit, narrating the play. We laid down on the ground by his feet to keep out of the way and the photographer detached his arm and said something about his arm being named "Frankenstein" and that he took it off to get better angles on photos sometimes. Parts of the theater in the way back started crashing down but the show kept going.


The grim reaper/director laid down with us and I was sandwiched kind of in between them. In the dream, I was wearing a bright orange hoodie (I would never in real life!) and the director got up and said he couldn't stand laying down with us because we both smelled like "fire." I tried to remember if I was at a campfire before but I couldn't. While he was gone, the photographer showed me his phone and said that people we knew were stealing his minutes and bandwith and that one of them had been playing an online game called "Falderfux" for two days straight.


There was another random part about me selling records at a charity sale, and having to wrack my brain to prove to a client that I was who I said I was. I kept thinking of how my tattoos could prove it and maybe a blood sample. And then I woke up.


Update:

So, I woke up at 4am, wrote the above, then went back to sleep. I had another mini-dream that I don't remember that much of, but it was pretty funny. It involved me riding the city bus with Neil Gaiman. He was wearing a soccer hooligan outfit and being sullen in the very back of the bus. I bopped back there and started being really annoying and asking him a million questions. I pointed out a manufacturing plant that I said was "the biggest in the state" and then the ruins of another that looked like a post-apocalyptic nightmare that "used to be the biggest in the state." I tried to tell him how I used to be a security person for Vanessa Williams and that I used a lot of "Neil Gaiman techniques" to protect her. The techniques included baking a dozen diamond rings into a pie and serving it to her daily. Another involved having a really talkative, annoying guy that was actually two guys that were identical tag-team people who we construed as a threat. That's all I can remember.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find Neil Gaiman in a soccer outfit! haha.

Husband Killer

This dream is one I scrawled down in a notebook the other night so bear with me...

I was at a cabin because someone in my family or maybe a friend's family had gotten married and all the main people involved were there. The cabin was set on a river bank that was all gray, slate-colored gravel and crystal clear water. Everyone was swimming to a floating square that was in the middle of the river but I refused because I saw a bunch of skeletons embedded in the gravel underneath the water. There were human skeletons, a bone-version of a stingray and a bunch of fish skeletons and a couple ox skulls.


The scene changed to the garden next to the cabin. I saw something white underneath some dirt and I brushed it away, only to discover it was a man's face. I got the bride and she started freaking out and showed me a picture hanging in the cabin of the same man when he was alive. She said it was her ex-husband and that she had killed and buried him there 20 years ago. She begged me not to tell and wanted me to help dig him up completely and re-bury him somewhere else, but I thought that was a risky plan. The new plan involved semi-re-digging him up, pouring lye all over the decomposing body (which was relatively in tact for being 20 years old) and then covering him up again with dirt and then a layer of decorative landscaping rocks. Somehow the bride's mother found out and insisted on seeing the body. She looked at him and just said "what a sorry bastard" and let us finish burying him.


There was another random part about the women in my family passing down all their diamond rings to the younger generation. They sat us down at a table that had a track that rotated, and threw all their rings onto it. We had to snatch whatever rings we could as it spun around. I got a pinky ring, an engagement ring, and a man's ring - all of them were covered in dozens of diamonds each. That's when I woke up.