Makeup-less

A couple of days ago, in real life, I went to an interview for a part-time community college teaching position and it was decided that I would return the following week for an orientation. Afterwards, I planned to drive to Irvine for a movie and dinner with a friend. In my dream, I arrived for the orientation, pulling into the parking lot. For some reason, I had to get out of the car and unzip my pants. To my embarrassment, my interviewer appeared as I was getting back in the driver’s seat. He was welcoming me when he glanced down at my unzipped […] fly. – he pretended not to have noticed. When he left, I quickly tried to zip up my pants, but then another staff member […] came to my car door to welcome me. The parking lot was quickly filling with cars as teachers arrived for the meeting/orientation. We were all parked in a row along the curb, next to a forest […].

I followed the teaching staff as we all milled into the campus building. I went in through a side door, up a flight of stairs, and down a hallway. Even though the building in my dream looked nothing like the college building in real life, I thought, “Well, this looks familiar. This was the way I went for my interview.” – i.e. the path through the building that I took.

I was still feeling flustered, probably from the zipper incident, so I decided to backtrack down the hall to the bathroom to ready and compose myself. In the bathroom, I thought I’d look in the mirror and was shocked to find that I’d forgotten to put on my usual eye makeup that I wear in real life. My face did not look like my face, but was pudgy with squinty eyes and freckles. My hair was also a long, disheveled, and tangled mess. I thought angrily, “What the hell?” Back at the parking lot, I realized I’d forgotten the things I was planning to bring to Irvine later—I felt really aggravated and couldn’t remember how I had driven to the campus, thinking that it was as if I’d suddenly materialized there. This latest incident with the makeup upset me even more. “Let’s see what I’m wearing,” I thought, ’cause in real life, I’d planned on wearing my flowery green sleeveless to the orientation. In the dream, I looked in the bathroom mirror, turning to my side, and saw to my consternation that I was wearing my long-sleeved brown shirt. I went into a bathroom stall in a huff, hoping this was all just a dream.

At this point, I think I woke up a little, thinking relieved, “Oh, it was just a dream.” But then I fell asleep again. In my dream, I was lying in my bed, peering through squinted eyes, seeing my bedroom through a haze. My room looked exactly like it does in real life, except there was a pink Strawberry Shortcake balloon hovering at the foot of my bed. My friends, [Irene] and [Ellen], were also in my room, [Ellen] at my bedside. They had brought the balloon for me ’cause it was my birthday. But it didn’t make any sense to me because how could they have gotten into my house without me letting them in? I thought I must have been dreaming and kept trying to wake up, but I couldn’t. I got more and more frustrated. Then I thought maybe [Irene] and [Ellen] really were in my room, and I started groaning, trying to ask them to help me wake up, but they didn’t hear me. I thought, horrifically, that perhaps I’d somehow wound up in a coma and couldn’t wake up, though my friends and family were urging me to fight it and wake. I tried desperately with all my effort, but I couldn’t do it.

At one point, I dreamt that I’d gotten up from my bed. I opened my closet and realized I was still dreaming when I saw that my closet was only half-full with all my tank-tops missing. In real life, I have a giant yellow Tweety bird stuffed animal. In my dream, it was in my room but it looked uglier with a smushed-up face. I grabbed the giant Tweety and threw it on my desk so it was looking up at me. I was raging with frustration that I couldn’t wake. I thought, I bet if I grabbed the Tweety, I would feel it as though it were real, even though this is all just a dream. Angrily, I grabbed the Tweety’s face and it felt exactly like the plush it should have been. Somewhere through the anger, I felt amazed that my brain could conjure up such realistic detail. But I also felt angry that I couldn’t wake up. – I think I started punching the Tweety’s face.

Eventually, I woke when my alarm rang […].

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Museum Snow

I dreamt I was back in London. I was walking through the British Museum, as I often did in real life when I was there. In my dream, they had installed a new children’s section that I really liked and I explored it excitedly, delighting in these two cottage-style rocking chairs in a corner—trying the chairs out, squeezing the pillows and sitting in one, exclaiming how much I liked them.

As I wandered around the museum, I became aware that I was dreaming and marveled at how detailed the images were—no different from my experiences in reality. I stopped at a large window and looked out, with several other museum-goers, at the London streets. It was snowing, a gentle descent of gradually thickening snowflakes. There was an old bridge extending over the streets, below which pedestrians scurried through the snow in thick layers. I was amused that it was snowing in England at the height of summer. And I still couldn’t believe how realistic it all seemed. – I could see every detail, just as in reality, and I looked at a pedestrian’s dress, thinking, “Look, it’s like I’m really here. I can see all the details of her dress,” and I proceeded to memorize the dress’s colors: a dress of brown and black stripes—because I wanted to remember it when I woke.

There was also an incident at the museum where I punched a woman in the face just because I could, since it was my dream and I wasn’t really there, so I could get away with it. When I made my way back to the museum’s lower level near the elevators, I saw her reporting the incident to the police. I felt a bit nervous. Nevertheless, I later went up to her while we were all seated at a diner-style eating area, saying, “Boo! It’s me! I’m not even really here.” She just rolled her eyes at me in response. She was middle-aged, with a round face and short mousey brown hair.

I began to wonder about the reality of my dream, since everything was so vivid and concrete. I entertained the idea that maybe it wasn’t a dream after all and I had somehow been transported to London. I thought how I would freak out if I woke up to discover that the British Museum really had installed an extensive children’s area or that it really had snowed in London.

My dream then segued into me waking up in my bedroom and peeking out my window between the blinds at the workers clipping the grass. They had cut almost all the brush away, so the grass was so short it resembled a tiny golf course. Then I realized the blinds were pulled up and the workers could see me looking at them. “Ugh, who did this?” I asked, as I tried to jerk the blinds back down.

I turned to see one of the workers in my room, rearranging it. My father had let him in to re-do my room and the worker proceeded to tell me how he planned to re-organize everything. I was still in bed, not dressed, and I was feeling embarrassed and irritated, so I quickly dismissed the worker. I was also annoyed that my room was in disarray, my things boxed up. I saw the worker had moved my diaries onto a different shelf and the first one was missing—shuffling around on the shelf above, I found it with enormous relief. Despite the detailed realness of it, I realized I was still dreaming and felt relieved that no worker had been in my room and my diaries were safe.

The next dream that followed, that I remember, I was surfing on one of the moonboards from my novels. – it’s this silver board that you can use to surf on the air. At night, I used it to surf out over the sea just beyond the shore. I curved around the shoreline, the landscape morphing beside me in the dark, the land moving like an animal, rising into great cliffs, like the cliffs of Dover. There was song, and perhaps sirens and temples—and on my moonboard, I danced to the music, thinking how my parents would think it dangerous what I was doing. The waves of the sea began to swell into tremendous towers—the waters high over me, menacing—and the danger of surfing around them frightened me. But I splashed through the great waves, all the while singing and moving to song.

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Shattered Home

I felt as though someone was lying next to me in bed […]. I was afraid he’d broken into my room and was in bed with me, so I kept trying to wake up, but couldn’t.

Finally, I woke up, only to find that my entire room had been ransacked, all my furniture lying broken and strewn in pieces about the floor. I was alone, and I stumbled around, panicking and crying out, “What’s going on?” I couldn’t understand what was happening, or what had happened while I’d been sleeping. Everything was a mess, and I hadn’t been woken by any of the vandalism.

I went to the bathroom, as is my usual waking routine, only to look in the mirror and find my face beaten up, my left eye torn by a gash across it. And once again, I was filled with the horrible feeling of being unable to understand what was happening. I realized that I must still be dreaming, and kept trying desperately to wake, but couldn’t. It was like a heavy weight was pressing down on my consciousness, and I couldn’t rise up out of it.

Around me, the bathroom was a mess – ruined and shattered. It was much larger than my bathroom in real life – longer, with a bath tub, and a broken length of something lying on the floor beside the tub. It was dark – I hadn’t turned on the lights. I still kept trying to make sense of what was happening and to wake.

Eventually, my dream changed, and there were all these cute, blue, fuzzy creatures in an arctic environment, sitting on the ice floes. But I don’t remember much anymore – except that maybe I was at a mall and trying to buy the creatures. I’d ceased to realize that I was dreaming and slept peacefully on, until I finally woke up, feeling very refreshed – and relieved to find that my room was completely orderly, sans vandalism, everything was normal, and that it had all been a dream.

[…]

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