Dream Log: September 20, 2000

I had a dream last night about these two girls who are always hanging out in my room. I dreamed that they where laying on my bed, and me on the floor. But for you get to excited it wasn't one of those kind of dreams. We where talking, about all kinds of random and deep stuff. I referred to something as a piece of shit. And one of the girls yelled at me. She didn't much care for my use of profanity. I remember she sat up very quickly in my bed. I thought something was very wrong. When I looked over at her she was just giving me this evil eye. It took me a second to figure out what I had done. After she yelled at me for it. She demanded a backrub. I did as she requested and we talked more. We talked about just why are smilely faces are happy. There where other very odd conversations. I woke up not to long after that.

(My dreams this time around were mostly about acute embarrassment. Lovely.)

I went to a Boy Scout or Explorer meeting of some sort. The leader had a thick Texan accent and wore cowboy garb. A girl in frizzy red hair came up to me and said conspiratorially, "(Dolores? Laura? I'm not sure of the name) signed the cross on your forehead!" I wasn't sure what to make of this, and asked, "So, what does that mean?" "Oh, nothing, nothing really"--she suddenly turned bashful, and talked rapid-fire--"I'd like you and be your girlfriend and all but I know you..." I tuned her out from that point. This was not something I wanted to hear.

The meeting was over and I was determined not to ride home with my family. I instead wanted to find my way in the dark to the leader's house, and get a ride from there. I had no clue how to get there, however, and asked (someone... the leader's son maybe?) if I could use a compass. There were no compasses around, but did I know the pendulum trick? Swing a pendulum properly and it will line up with the Earth's magnetic field, making it just as good as a compass. I tried, but couldn't get it to work. Whoever I was getting advice from became frustrated, and just pointed me down a certain path. The first half of it was surreal, full of gray-white patches of light amid asphalt black; the second half followed the Mississippi, with flood water lapping up over the curb of a street onto the sidewalk. I didn't want to get my shoes wet, so I walked carefully along the side of the path opposite the water. It was no use in the end, though, for when I reached the house, I slipped and fell, sliding partially into the water before I lashed out with my hand and sank my fingers deep into mud to secure myself. The leader's son helped me up, and I went inside.

I don't remember the details of what happened in the house, but in a later scene I was walking from my house toward my parish church back in St. Louis. A phone was ringing. Someone came up to me with a big cheap-looking phone and told me I had a call. I picked it up. It was the Boy Scout leader. "Hello, is (Damien? Dathon? SabreCat? It was some pseudonym I responded favorably to) there?" "Yes, this is I." (I don't answer phones quite that way IRL, heh...) "Have you spoken to (Dolores or whatever that name really was)?" I thought for a moment. "Yeah, she was at the Boy Scout meeting." There was tumultuous laughter in the background, and I realized I'd just been hit with a prank call of some kind. I hung up the phone and muttered, "That's not what I meant. Explorers. Whatever." I picked the phone back up and said "That's not quite what I meant!"... but it had already been hung up, no one was listening.

There was to be a huge Mass at my church. The place was filled with people and A/V equipment. I was part of a team of acolytes or dorm RA's that would be assisting in the Mass, though I didn't know what I would be doing. Jenniffer was sitting next to me, and for some reason a huge lightboard in the sanctuary started making lame jokes--then started making fun of me. It said something to the effect that due to my lack of social skills and sexual incompetence, I was losing my girlfriend. (This is especially bizarre since IRL I don't have a girlfriend, and I wouldn't have a sexual relationship with her even if I did.) Jenn and I laughed, the only reasonable option given the roars of laughter around us, and pushed little buttons similar to those on a tape recorder on each other's backs to downgrade our relationship status, playing along. As the big joke wound down, though, the lightboard flashed: "Just kidding! He really has a great relationship with the most lovely druid in the world--Datharia!" (Datharia is my character in Baldur's Gate.) I was so horribly embarrassed I could hardly move.

Finally the Mass got started, though; it progressed through the readings (which I don't remember), and then got to the homily, at which point the priest sat down, and nodded to our blue-shirted RA group to continue. We went into a huddle, and one fellow produced an excellently drawn comic that was to be the script for a skit we would do. This was strange to me, but I knew the others were from out of town, so maybe they did things differently where they come from. The skit was about a group of Christians in the far future who invented and were planning to field test a teleporter. We broke up to study our scripts, so I went back to my dorm room. I didn't have many lines--just "Energizing! ... Teleporting!" I guessed the rest of the group had been turned off to me by the lightboard incident, but I resolved to make the best of what I had. I decided to act like Lucca from Chrono Trigger while doing this, tapping my foot and cranking something like she did when energizing her teleporter, in the hopes that someone in the congregation/audience would recognize it. I realized it was time to go back, and the skit proceeded in mediocrity; most of the others were reading their lines from the script, and my part didn't even come up. I went back to my seat, but Jenniffer was no longer there, and I was asked to leave by someone with a prior claim (looked like the RA of the suite next door) to the spot. I sat in the aisle. The man who had bumped me became my dad, who reassured me that everything was all right.

• this is supposed to be my maternal grandmother's house  ·  searching all over the place to find some sanitary supplies to assemble some sort of drink? (this is the phrase that comes out of the dream, yet I'm not sure what it means, except that I am searching, and supposed to be somewhere else to do something for those in control.)

• cups, saran wrap and other things in the room are not as clean as they need to be. I am told (or simply know) that I must clean them, thoroughly.

• re-painting a wall. The feeling here is of the early Roman Empire  ·  (bits of BBC I, Claudius creeping in again)  ·  People are offering me money to paint walls (really more fresco painting than simple white-washing) and to do other tasks, the implication, never explicit, being that the other tasks are sexual favors of some kind. An inheritance is at stake?  ·  My grandmother must be wealthy at or near death, something she was not, in fact  ·  The colors: mixed, almost "marbled" in appearance when they appear on the wall, very messy.  ·  I make the mistake of wearing an elegant suit jacket, which gets splattered by the multi-colored paint or slurry that I am applying in an abstract manner.

• Fear spreads to everyone I see. They will not meet my gaze.

I was the mysterious Mr. Pratt, and I had befriended Seth, the orphaned river boy. Seth lived on a riverside property in an old, grey wooden shack that either he had built or his parents had built before they died. In any event, he grew wheat, and we liked to go into the field and eat the wheat raw. Seth didn't sell the wheat, he just lived off it.

So anyway, there was this major corporation who wanted to have Seth declared incapable of managing the beach part of his property. Since it was all sandy, Seth couldn't grow wheat on it. The corporation wanted to have the property divided up, and the beach part declared "desert" so that they would be allowed to buy it and develop it into a beachfront resort. So long as the strip was classified as "beach" they weren't allowed to take it.

There was a meeting that was held on the beach. The corporation made its case for having the land taken away from Seth. And then the arbiter turned to me, and I whispered to her:

"I trust him."

That was all she needed to hear. The corporation lost the case, and Seth was permitted to keep his lands. I was so happy I thought I'd be able to fly across the river, into the sky. When dusk came, Seth fell asleep in his hut, while I stayed awake, watching the sun set on the beach.

Then the arbiter came by, and said she was in love with me.