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.

My Tiger/Panther BFF

This dream was pretty short. Just a snippet, really.

I was best friends with a tiger who would morph into a black panther. We were in Africa, and on or just outside of an army base. The tiger/panther lived in a metal shed that stood about five feet off the ground on wooden posts, so other animals wouldn't mess with him when he was sleeping. He wanted me to move in with him but I was nervous he'd get shot if I did, because it would draw human attention to his home. The only other thing I remember is sitting in the shed with him making a "Best of 2010" list and he kept coming up with weird categories like "Best Leg Tattoo."


There was another random part of the dream that involved people going to an advance screening of a new Spiderman movie. The place where the movie was being shown was surrounded by geometric concrete structures. My friend Clement was there putting big stickers on the concrete slabs that said weird things like "Glee Girl" and "Where is Bingo." That's all I remember.

Fish, snakes and Japanese businessmen

This dream was totally creepsville in an understated way. So much so I woke up sort of sobbing and yelling at 6am and had to get up and write the dream down.

It started out with me in a strange hotel room with a Japanese business man. I think maybe I was his assistant and we were on some sort of shady business trip. The hotel room was sort of disturbing; it had bright red carpeting that was sort of crappy, wood paneled walls and really high ceilings. All the rooms seemed small but tall and there was very little furniture and no decor.


The business man ordered takeout and a 6-pack of Sapor beer but after it came a note arrived saying that an anonymous friend wanted to buy us an order of cream cheese wontons and that they would be sent to our room immediately. The businessman left to do something and I was alone in the room. When the delivery guy came with the wontons I let him him and signed a slip. I went to find tip money for him and he passed out on a twin bed that was in the room. I tried to feed him a beer to wake him up and his head split open and a lot of fizz spilled out and kept spilling all over the bed. The businessman came back and was calm but I could tell he was panicked. He thought someone had tracked us to the hotel and the delivery guy's head cracking open was a homing signal of sorts. He instructed me to turn on some really loud punk music so I did. Someone came banging on the door and we just sat in the room and waited until they went away.


The dream changed to me outside of a mall (I think maybe HarMar Mall?) and a bunch of guys who looked like Genghis Khan (or what I'd expect Genghis Khan to look like anyway) were unloading huge racks of clothing and linens--I think they worked for a dry cleaning company--and somehow I got in the fray and knocked a huge rack over. They all started screaming at me and I tried to help in vain to put the rack back together. I realized that they were running drugs inside the hollow insides of the racks and I started to get scared that they knew I knew. I knelt down near a curb on the street and started sifting through dirt and sand and pulling out little springs and sprockets and hardware pieces that had fallen off the racks and giving them to the Genghis Khans - this seemed to appease them.


The next part switched to a weird abandon loading dock across the street from the mall. I was with a group of people who were supposedly my family but they were people I'd never seen before. We were salvaging old fish tanks and we found a big one that still had about half the water in it. We put it on a pedestal and suddenly a bunch of big fancy fish that had been dormant and had been laying flat on the bottom of the tank began to pop up. They were all gold fish hybrids but some were in huge angel fish format and you could tell they were starving.


I became panicked about feeding the fish but we couldn't find any food on the loading dock. Randomly, a veterinarian wandered over and I kept trying to get her to tell me what to feed them but she wouldn't acknowledge me. She just kept saying she "knew" one of the big angel fish and she couldn't believe he was still alive. I went across the street to the mall and somehow bought a live snake, which I intended on feeding the fish. On the way back he kept getting away and I'd pick him up again and he'd bite me multiple times.


Once I got back to the loading dock the scene morphed back to the Japanese businessman's hotel room. We'd apparently moved the tank there and I was really pissed off about the snake at that point. I held the snake by the tail and smashed his head against the wall and he kind of splayed open but it was all still snake skin, no blood. Somehow by me doing this, it caused a girl with blonde hair to materialize on the floor of the hotel room. She was dying because she was an extension of the snake somehow and she was vomiting a sort of yellow-green gel and spasming against the wall. This is when I woke up crying/yelling.

FBI Hamburgers & Unitards

I had this dream two nights ago and I wrote it in a notebook all scribbly and I couldn't really decode it completely. Long story short, some of the details are missing.

Anyway, the dream started out in an elevator lobby that had all sorts of yellow colors, like warning signs, caution tape and the like. You needed a special badge to get through the glass doors into the offices and eventually I realized that it was an FBI office. Somehow, I knew someone who worked there and he got me in and signed me up for a job interview. The interview consisted of me having to select raw hamburger from a refrigerator case and make the most efficient and delicious burger. Everyone else was making paper thin patties but I made a small, thick mini-burger type patty. Dwight from the show "The Office" was there and he decided he wanted one of mine, so I had to go back to the case and get more meat to make him one.


The scene changed to a huge atrium in the FBI building, not unlike the government center in Downtown Minneapolis. My sister was there sitting on a marble ledge with about 15 African kids surrounding her. They were all ages and most of them looked really sick; they were super skinny with distended stomachs, they had flies buzzing around them and some of the younger ones had huge, hollowed out eye sockets with what looked like vaseline filling them with a black marble in each. My sister said someone had "fished the babies out of the river" and that she was nursing them back to health. I offered to walk with them to their next stop (they were on a walking tour of the FBI building) but the kids couldn't follow instruction, they starting running like maniacs everywhere and FBI workers started screaming "TERRORISTS!!!"


The scene changed to a photo shoot that I came late to apparently, and the photos had been shot without me. I was a little bit pissed off but kind of relieved because I didn't really want to do the shoot anyway. I started looking through the images that they shot and they were of four girls in pearl white unitard type things that each had one letter on the chest. It was supposed to spell something important (like a brand name or something) but whoever took the pics never got them all showing their letters at the same time. There were pictures of them wearing jackets over their outfits and all kissing at the same time; there were pictures of them tangled amongst multiple dirty white horses. One girl was giving the devil horns hand symbol by a horse's tail. I remember being livid about the whole thing and I think that's when I woke up.

Pop stars, mustaches and mullets

There's a lot I'm forgetting from this dream...

The first part involved me managing a new female pop star that looked like Taylor Swift. She was going to her first awards show and I was getting the finishing touches put on her gown, which was a sculptural emerald green silk dress made by local designer Emma Berg. For some reason, I brought the dress to my mom's house, and she started adding all sorts of terrible elements to it, like a green velvet cape with white crocheted ruffle around the edges and huge white cotton lapels with eyelets and cut out shapes.


I was in an uproar because there were only hours until the awards show and my mom was ruining the dress, and not listening to anything I was saying (true to real life form). But the pop star seemed to like everything she did to it and I was like "it's your funeral. The red carpet critics will not be kind." I continued to be in a panic and all I could think was "Emma's going to have my head on a stick for this!"

I tried to super-fast photoshop something similar.
You get the jist even though it looks like shit.

The dream then switched over to me riding in a crappy car with three dudes. I was in the backseat with a guy with a zany mustache and the two guys in the front had extreme beards. We were all piled really heavily with strange items like backpacks, pots and pans and animal pelts. Mustache guy and I were under the same layer of junk and smashed really close together. I had my hand on his chest but he said it wasn't his chest and there was someone else under the junk with us. I got really scared but kept my hand on the random chest anyway.


The last part involved me in some sort of small town dive bar. I was either judging some sort of hair contest or convincing people to change their style. I think it was part of a reality TV show. There was one guy with anime character-style hair that was black and stuck out in huge spikes that were sort of droopy. They felt like real plastic. Another other guy had a thick, curly red flat top with mullet that was one big dread that went down his whole back. There was another guy that just had regular long hair, Axl Rose-style. I was trying to convince them all to shave their heads and I even had a clippers but they were all reluctant. I think that's when I woke up.

Imagine this with a ginger flat top attached!

Will is an unruly drunk.

So this dream was kind of scary for some reason, even though only the end was technically scary. It was a very stressful dream and seemed to go on forever.

The dream kicked off with me sitting at the bar at Clubhouse Jager, but it looked a little different, with elements of the Loring Pasta Bar and an unidentified sports bar and cafeteria. I was there alone but I realized the guy sitting next to me was the actor Eric McCormick (Will of Will & Grace), but he looked really inbred and weird, and a bit like William DeFoe. He was raging drunk and I started talking to him and flirting with him. We were getting all cuddly and I realized it was insane that I wasn't getting his picture for LOL/OMG (our real-life gossip blog).


I bust out my phone and for some reason I couldn't get the photo app up. I'm smashing buttons like I didn't know how to use my it, and it was paging through stock images of things like grain, houses, plants, clouds, etc. Eric McCormick wouldn't shut up because he was so drunk and he was sort of flailing around yelling and grabbing me and kissing my neck, but I was very annoyed about the phone and kept pushing him off.


Finally I realize that I was trying to use someone else's phone, and that mine was missing. I went around the bar (which now was really big with all sorts of weird nooks and crannies) looking for it in a panic. I kept mistaking dumb things for my phone from across the room; phones that looked nothing like mine, a small bag of clementine oranges, a weird little shrine with candles, etc.


Finally I found the phone in a back room at the bar that looked like a sports bar and had green carpeting. There were three really girly blonde chicks there that were really bubbly and like "Oh. My. God." about everything. They had hooked up my phone to a projector and were watching a movie on it. I had no idea my phone was that high tech and was very impressed. The were projecting it in a weird corner that had a jutting out piece of wall and some pipes and they were projecting over that and partially on the ceiling because they said the 3-d option worked best in that spot, and it totally did. They gave me the phone back and somehow along the way I aquired a Pizza Luce pizza and was excited to bring it back to the peeps at the bar to share.


When I returned to Eric McCormick in the front of the bar there was already pizza there and he was having a face-down pizza eating contest with one of the bartenders from the 501 Club. They had their hands tied behind their backs and everyone was cheering them on. They were making a terrible mess and sauce was all over them, their faces and the bar. Pieces of my pizza slid out of the box and onto the floor and they were all different kinds of slices.


Paul (a real bartender at Jager) was pissed off about the whole thing and started yelling at Eric McCormick about having not paying his tab, which was only $2. But Eric was too drunk to acknowledge him. Paul went into an awkward secret passage way adjacent to the bar and refused to come out. I kept trying to take a picture of Eric McCormick with my phone but he kept moving around and all the pictures were stupid looking blurs.


I sort of woke up at that point, but then fell back asleep for a bit longer and had a small snippet of a new dream which basically consisted of a bloody, dirty girl escaping from a closet. She came running out and screamed "Mommy, it HURTS!!" and she had a bunch of skin carved off her because a cannibal had been keeping her locked up so he could eat strips of her skin. I think there was something else to it, but that's all I can remember.

Shapeshifters, Wormholes, and Michael Jackson

So, a lot of last night's dream was actually sort of terrifying...but other parts were just plain weird, as usual.

The first portion of the dream involved me at home, which was sort of a combination of my ex-boyfriend from a long time ago's house and my parents house. There was some sort of infestation of rats and other animals that was getting out of control. I had a guy that I knew come over to fix the problem because he had the ability to shapeshift into a really crazy flesh-eating monster that would flush out every animal and eat or kill them. The problem was, that when he shifted he went totally berserk so I had to lock myself and my cat in the bathroom while it was happening so he didn't eat us.


While we were locked in I heard all sorts of screeching and commotion then something started forcing its way in the bathroom and I couldn't hold the door shut. It turned out to be a big black panther and I ended up letting it come in to hide from the shapeshifter. When he forced himself in, I could see all sorts of dead rats all over the floor outside. Eventually, the shape shifter returned to human format and called to us that it was okay to come out. He had eaten all the animals but said "sorry, I left you a surprise in your office, I couldn't help it." and the "surprise" was a huge pile of shape shifter shit.


The next part morphed to a sidewalk adjacent to a park that I grew up by. I was hanging out with some unidentified people and a van pulled up. A famous band (I don't remember who it was, but I think it was a heavy metal band) got out and started talking to us. I told them it was a huge coincidence because when I was a little kid they had parked in the same spot and got out and randomly played a show on a hill near the playground. They said they'd do it again and started unloading their gear.


One of the guys in the band handed me a plastic lavender DVD case that was sort of see through and explained that it was a recording device. I don't know how this happened, but as soon as I took it I was flying through a wormhole/tube or something, and it was just big enough for a human to fit in width-wise, so I was flying headfirst. There was all sorts of static noise and the walls of the tube looked like gray, electric, churning water. I dragged my hand through one of the walls and it just made more noise and felt strange. I took the DVD case and held it straight out in front of me; this was supposed to record my experiences in the wormhole as long as I kept rotating it clockwise. The wormhole morphed into different scary scenes, one was pitch black with just screaming noises and another was pitch black with hundreds of pairs of glowing yellow eyes blinking.

The dream switched to me owning a house/compound that was connected by underground tunnel. One part was a workshop that looked kind of like the Soap Factory, there was heavy industrial equipment and wood slabs in it. The next segment of the house was a lecture room/class room where we went to "college" and also had a flea market in every week. And the last segment of the house was a loft space with oriental carpets, couches and a stage. The loft part was apparently located in the Northern Warehouse in Lowertown but you could only access it by underground tunnel.


We would regularly have big parties and bands play in the loft but the cops could never shut it down because there was no way to enter the space from the actual building so they could never figure out how to get in. On a particular night, Mark Mallman was playing and afterward we were sitting on a couch talking about his music. My phone buzzed with a text message and it was from Michael Jackson and it just said "What's up?" I wrote him back with a link to a Mark Mallman song and soon after he called me. I put him on speaker phone and was all "How's it goin'? Long time no see" like we were old friends and he started telling me he hated Mallman's music because he didn't go in for "spiritual crap" even though the tune I sent had nothing to do with spiritual crap. I told MJ that Prince loved Mallman but MJ said he hated Prince too and that Prince was a religious nut. There was an awkward silence and then I just said something like "Well, okay...but really, how are you doing, Michael?" and I actually woke up saying those words; I was propped up on my elbows in my bed.

Trixi and Jon and the Steam Engine Pool

As usual, I forgot a lot of components to this dream...

A bunch of random people were in town for someone's wedding, and everyone was doing social things, like hosting dinners at their homes and letting people stay with them. My real-life friends, Trixi and Jon, invited me over to socialize before the wedding. They owned a little restaurant/deli called "Cookie's" but they had been ousted from their space so a video game store could move in. They were in the process of moving Cookie's to a really fancy downtown location even though it just served sandwiches and soups. Jon was wearing an expensive suit and talking on his cell phone about it a lot.


Their house was kind of like a compound, lots of gray concrete, but it was attached to the former Cookie's location which was in turn attached to some sort of strip mall type of thing. The inside of their house was really big and they were most excited to show me their indoor pool, which Jon had built himself and designed to be heated by a steam engine. You had to be careful to make sure it wasn't too hot before you got in, because sometimes the water boiled.


I got in the pool in my full clothes and boots and waded in all the way up to my waist before I realized how stupid that was. I got out and laid on the concrete in a sun patch to dry my clothes, which somehow were not really that wet. When I got up, Trixi and Jon were gone and I couldn't find them.


The dream changed to my apartment. I was letting my ex-boyfriend from like 12 years ago stay with me because he was apparently going to the wedding too. I woke up in the middle of the night and he had ordered a pizza and had let the delivery guy into my apartment, invited him into my bedroom and they sat down on a bunch of my clothes that were (and are in real life) strewn all over the floor and started eating the pizza. I was livid because I didn't want the delivery guy judging me for having a messy room so I was yelling and trying to kick them both out but they wouldn't respond to me. I don't really remember much else after that...

Severed puppy heads...not cool.

This dream had a lot to it, and I thought I had it solidified in my mind, but by the time I got my laptop on and pulled a document up to jot down the specifics, the majority of it had fled my mind. The most disturbing part remained intact though...

I was on a road trip with my dog searching for my real dad. I had adoptive parents who lived in a house that wasn't any house I've ever been in, but it had the same kitchen as my real-life parent's kitchen. Anyhoo, there was a huge contraption on their kitchen table covered with a navy blue sheet. it was a bunch of distorted metal, kind of like a bird cage but pieces were missing...like a giant had ripped it open.

big like this, but with more of a twisted, warped wrought iron element

In the dream, my dog had one puppy, and my adoptive parents had been looking after it while we were on the road trip. I knew if I lifted up the sheet, I would see the severed head of the puppy, but I didn't want to, so I looked halfway in and said it was empty. My "mom" got really mad at me and said my dog had chewed off the puppy's head and killed it but I knew it wasn't true. I insisted that since my dog didn't have blood around her mouth and that we were on the road trip that she was innocent. My mom forced me to look under the sheet and the puppy's head was hanging by a wire from the top of the cage-thing. The neck was cleanly severed as if from a knife, further proof that my dog didn't kill the puppy, but no one believed me and they wanted to kill my dog. Somehow I knew my fake dad had done it and that he was a total psycho. I woke up screaming, and I remember clearly flailing my arms around my head and screeching.

I can't bring myself to post a pic of a severed puppy
head, so here's a cute LIVE puppy.

I fell back asleep pretty quickly and the dream changed to me being in college and living in a dorm with one of my old friends that I haven't seen for years. At one point, I was climbing stairs holding onto the banister like I was climbing something really steep. It was hard to pull myself up but no one else was having the same problem.


There was another strange part about our dorm room doubling as a boutique that sold random fashion stuff and my other roommate, who happened to be real-life l'etoile project manager, Natalie Gallagher, had designed a line of accessories that was made up of big fake diamond brooches that were really sparkly and had pieces in them that projected light. They were in an acrylic display cabinet that you could rotate. She was also the manager of the store but only tried to sell people the brooches. I can't remember any more of the dream after that.