Fig Life

You may have noticed (or not) that I imported all my Dreamer Fig entries to this blog. I just wasn’t keeping it up very well over there. Since getting the puppy my sleep has been too interrupted for my dreams to have real story lines. I still have the weird dreams every night but they’re even more muddled than usual.

Last night I went to bed early (10 is early for me lately) and that seemed to help. Let me see if I can recount the dreams I had.

First I dreamed that my husband had 2 wives and I was the second one. The first one was my best friend Audra. That was pretty bizarre because in real life we usually don’t even have the same taste in men (except for one boy in college we both dated but he dated most of the girls in the Baptist Student Union, so that hardly counts). So anyway, I was pretty jealous that I wasn’t the first wife. Then the dream shifted a bit and we were suddenly in pre-Revolutionary France. I was even more jealous because the hubby and the best friend were a very famous aristocratic couple. They were swanning around and even their horses were famous and had similar names (Burgundy and Chablis). They would ride around the countryside on the horses and Audra’s hair was beautiful and would flow out behind her (I’ve never know the real life Audra to have very long hair, though).

Now I’m having trouble remembering the second dream, though my vague memory is it was one of those end-of-the-world kind of dreams and I was fighting the bad guys and a repressive government. Why do I remember the dream where I was the downtrodden second wife and not the dream where I was kicking butt and being a hero?

I haven’t added many dreams to the blog lately, but it’s not from lack of dreaming. I always wake up remembering wacky elements of my dreams but they don’t always hang together so I can remember all of them. Lately that’s been the case because I haven’t had unbroken nights of sleep. Since getting our puppy I’ve been awakened in the night a lot (plus the kids have been sick off and on lately).

However, last night I remembered just enough that I want to add it here, though my memory is a bit fuzzy. I remember that my hubby and I were chillin’ after Christmas dinner when a thief broke into our house (fortunately our little boys weren’t around). I managed to knock the thief down–then I threatened him by saying, “I lift weights and I like to kickbox!” in a menacing tone. Apparently that’s all it took–he was frightened into acquiescence. Meanwhile the hubby called the police and I kept the thief calm by sheer force of my biceps around his midriff (this must have been one skinny and wimpy robber). Then I went into the other room to get some food (apparently we were having a party and there were some visiting couples in another room). I left the bad guy with the hubby, expecting he would keep him pinned down. Then as I was circling the room looking for nosh, I noticed the hubby doing the same. I asked him what he’d done with the bad guy. He replied he thought I had him. You can imagine my distress. So he’d let the thief run off by not keeping him pinned down.

So then I went out into the town to track down the bad dude again. Funny thing was, the town was not where we live now but more like Haarlem in the Netherlands, where we lived a few years ago. I hunted along little brick alleys and along canals. Finally I went to the police station (which was upstairs in a canal house–only in my dream not in the real Haarlem) and chewed out the police for being so slow to come get the bad dude from our house.

Man, I was a real tough chick in that dream. I don’t think I ever caught the thief again, but I sure was ready to get him and take him down. I’m pretty sure in real life if I told some robber I lifted weights and did kickboxing he would just laugh and knock me aside.

Fig

It’s been some time since I posted a dream here, but it’s not for a lack of wacky dreams, of course. Mainly it’s just hard to put them in words sometimes, even though I remember lots of vivid moments.

I’m going to keep this one very succinct because it went on so many weird tangents that I don’t even want to attempt to follow.

Basically, I dreamed that I was a bodyguard for a special teenage princess. She was so special in fact, that she could turn herself into a caterpillar (nope, not a butterfly, just a yellow and purple caterpillar). So part of the protection was preventing people from stepping on her if she suddenly went caterpillar on me (suddenly I’m remembering that weird song by The Cure: “Caterpillar Girl”–I love me some Robert Smith).

Anyway, I had to take the Caterpillar Princess to a meeting on the moon. However, all the available spaceships were going to other locations (Mars, East Texas, Alpha Centauri, etc.) So we had to go look for a private spaceship. Finally we found one that looked more like an open boat, but apparently if you wore the right spacesuit you were fine. I had the cash for our trip stuffed in all my pockets and was worried I would lose some on the trip.

I don’t even know if the princess and I made it to the moon because then it went off on a tangent of being on an actual boat crossing a swamp to get to a rocking party. I guess my mind got bored with the moon trip.

Yesterday I took a rather long nap (I always plan on short naps but they always end up longer, maybe because I enjoy Dreamland so much). During that 2-hour-ish nap, I managed to dream what felt like a novel. Unfortunately, I didn’t write it down early enough to tell you the blow-by-blow, but basically I was living in medieval times (not sure what country but since they were all speaking English, we’ll say England). The king at the time was a terrible tyrant and I planned to overthrow him. I found out I had magical powers (always a convenient discovery in dreams) so I used those to my advantage. The part I remember best was near the end, when I confronted the evil king, demonstrating my power by creating fire at will and terrorizing him with it before magically extinguishing it. I also did something like make part of the roof fall in in a perfect oval. Then I made my own evil declaration: “I HAVE THE POWER. YOU SHALL FALL. I WILL RULE ALL.” Boy, pretty tough, eh?

So, if that weren’t enough, I went to bed last night and had another wacky dream. This one was very convoluted and involved an intricate escape from a huge building. At one point we were just trying to get through a line to catch a taxi, but then it changed and I was trying to escape Vatican city with all the Swiss Guard and all the cardinals after me. I was actually escaping with a small group of people and a child (it was the child the dudes were really after, but I’m not sure why). At one point we even stepped in a fake toilet to whoosh down a tunnel (thanks for that idea, J.K. Rowling).

So I’m livin’ large–at least in my dreams. I awoke before I we escaped Vatican City, but I have great confidence that we would indeed have prevailed (even if I had to make it happen with lucid dreaming–I rock at that stuff).

OK, this is not an actual dream, but I love this Wordle website I found from my friend Sarah’s blog. (Sarah always links to cool stuff.)

Above you can see the weird Dreamer Fig Wordle or you can click here to see it at Wordle.

OK, last night was another epic bizarre dream. I was actually a superhero but I was wanted by the law because apparently there was some mistake and people thought I was a villain instead of a hero. So I was hiding out in an elementary school pretending to be a student–not just any student but a space alien student with a musical instrument type of thing on my head. Somehow I was able to shrink down and pretend to be this alien. I guess aliens were common enough in this universe that no one blinked an eye at them being students with the regular humans. Oh, and I looked like Robert Downey, Jr. when I was my superhero self. I haven’t even seen Iron Man so I’m not sure why RDJ.

Another interesting aspect of the dream was that Stephen Colbert was the school principal. Can you imagine? I eventually trapped Stephen in his office and assumed my superhero form again. I was able to convince him that I was indeed good and not evil and I needed his help to escape the police and go back to working good in the world.

At some point I also did some kickass leaping across the rooftops of the school. Unfortunately I did not fly. I love those superhero flying dreams. Throughout the dream I was also trying to figure out where my next class was because I thought I’d missed at least 6 months of school (odd since I was just pretending to be a student as it was). Another random element is I was trying to hook Stephen up with one of the teachers and get him to ask her out.

This is one of those dreams where I woke up slightly disappointed I wasn’t a superhero, but relieved I was a woman again.

I’m actually copying this one over from my Fitness Fig blog. I realized it might actually be more appropriate here. It’s from Nov. ’07.

Well, I’ve still been sick. I may actually end up taking a rest week and not just a rest day. I just haven’t been able to kick this random virus (or multiple viruses). The fun thing about being feverish is my weird dreams get even weirder. Well, I don’t know if it’s fun, but it makes for some interesting memories when I wake up. Last night I was lucky that I happened to be turned away from my husband, since I actually slapped out in my sleep while slapping someone in my dream. I slapped my hand on the headboard–ouch! It’s been a long time that I’ve gotten so physical while sleeping. I tend to get quite physical in dreamland–violence-wise, I mean. I hit people a lot–not sure what that means. I’m really fairly gentle and non-confrontational in real life. I also had a rather strong sentence in my mind as I woke up, which I guess came from my dream. I wrote it down because it amused me: “Give it up, you nefarious strawberry-stealing bastard!” So apparently I was working on saving some strawberries in that dream. All I remember is an earlier dream that involved sneaky aliens disguised as people and a pirate ambassador kidnapping me in a helicopter.

Another recent wacky dream I had seemed to involve a visit back to my old alma mater. It was a lovely, hilly campus in southern Missouri and we enjoyed sledding down those hills when it snowed. So, in the dream I was visiting the school after a good snowfall. Naturally, I wanted to do some sledding. However, I had no sled. Apparently there wasn’t even a cafeteria tray available to misuse for the purpose of sliding on snow. Luckily, Bender, the drunken robot from Futurama, was also on campus. He bent me a pair of skis (I don’t know what he bent, but I think they were fireplace pokers, not the most comfy skis). Then he went skiing with me. For some reason, though, I did this skiing in shorts and a tank top. Considering my ongoing fears of showing my mom body (which varies from decent to “please hide it!”) it’s surprising how confident and happy I was to ski around my campus in minimal clothing. In spite of the great confidence, I did notice it was rather cold and that was my primary worry until I awoke. It was chilly in my bedroom, too.