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I was preparing some sort of a needlework exhibition. It involved video and music and dancing, a sort of multimedia thing. There was no real point to it, it was just to display my talents. Other people were doing the same thing, and I found out that another woman had hired Pat Metheny to do the music, and Kenny Rogers to do some sort of voice-over narration, and someone else famous, but I don't remember how who. I was irked about this--we weren't supposed to spend a lot of money on these things, and I went around saying, "Can you imagine how much money she had to spend to hire Kenny Rogers to do this??" I was furious. I was thinking about it, and realized that she must be richer than I thought, in order to hire these people, which made me even more furious. Well, I had Bob to dance for me. He was practicing in another room with his friend John while I sat on the floor and sorted mail. I was placing the mail in neat stacks even though I had no idea who the mail was for. I decided to place it in stacks divided by country. Canada was a big one.
January 30, 1999 I'm out with Matt and Misty and a few other people, and someone decides that we should go to Sam's Warehouse Club. We're all divided among several cars, and I'm in Matt's car with him. He says he doesn't feel well, maybe not even well enough to drive, and I say that I'll drive, but then I realize the car is a stick shift and I don't know how to drive it. I think that when we get where we're going, we can rearrange, and maybe I can drive Misty's car and she can drive Matt's or something. I tell him we'll figure it out. We get to the store and go in. It's one of those where you have to show your membership card to get in. But this time, they ask for your full address. I give it, reluctantly, not being able to figure out why they need it. Then, after I give my address, the guy at the table, an older man with a mustache, asks me how long I think I'll be in the store. I really can't figure out why they need this information, but I say, thinking that Matt doesn't feel well and we won't be there very long, "A half hour." So he hands me three canvas tote bags, since that's the amount of stuff I'll be able to buy in a half hour, apparently. I wander around the store and pick up several things, and soon I've got too much stuff to comfortably carry in my arms, so I stop and put everything down on a counter and start rearranging things into the bags. At this point, I realize he's given me these nice tote bags, and I feel lucky. I have a beaded evening bag and a couple of sweaters and various other things, and I start arranging them in the bags. Then I worry, because some of the stuff I'm buying, and some I already own. So I try to consolidate everything I came in with in one bag, and decide that will probably work. I worry a little bit that I've been there too long, and I've lost sight of everyone else, but I decide they'll probably find me when they're ready to leave, and I continue shopping.
Matt is going to fix someone's computer for them, and while we think at first that he's going to go to where the computer is and work on it there, it turns out that he has to go get it and take it somewhere else. It's huge, about the size of a refrigerator, and he has to put it on a dolly to move it. While he's maneuvering it, it falls. I feel somehow responsible, as if I should have been able to prevent it from falling, but I act as if I didn't see it. I rationalize that it will probably be fine, that even if something has broken he'll be able to fix it. I feel guilty, though, even though I know it isn't my fault.
January 29, 1999 I am talking to someone who is telling me how when they were born, the sky wasn't configured right. They have blueprints and drawings showing how the clouds were positioned wrong, and the stars were in the wrong places, and their parents had the sky rearranged for them, so that it was "right." I'm a little bit impressed that they went to so much trouble. It doesn't seem completely surprising to me, it seems logical and fairly normal, just like a lot of trouble to go to.
January 25, 1999 I'm going to my JavaScript class, and I get lost trying to find the building. I drive down several long, winding streets, then a gravel road, then a dirt road, and finally arrive at the building, only to find that it's the wrong one--they have two offices and I've picked the wrong one. Even though it's the wrong building, someone there (I think it was my vet) decides that he should give me a pre-class test to see if I should take the class. I'm late, of course, but it doesn't seem that I have a choice. I sit down and take the test, which doesn't seem to have anything to do with anything. I don't know the answers to the questions, but I guess, and I finish the test with the exception of the last question, which is so hard that I can't even guess at the answer. I hand in the test and wait. And wait. I finally go find the man and ask him if I'm supposed to wait until he grades the test, and he says no, so I hurriedly leave. I get lost again, driving down winding roads and backtracking, and worrying that I'm going to miss the class altogether, but I finally find it, and it hasn't started yet. But it's crowded, and I don't know where I'm supposed to sit. I finally squeeze in between some other people, into a tiny school desk, and wait for class to start, feeling uncomfortable. The classroom resembles the waiting room at the Driver's License Bureau.
January 24, 1999 Bob has asked me to get him a book of golf course information, and they didn't have it at Borders, so I ordered it from Amazon. In my dream, when the Amazon shipment comes, they've sent the 1988 edition rather than the 1998 one. I can't see it very well, so at first I think they've sent the right one, but by squinting, I can see the date, and they've sent the wrong one. In the package, though, were a bunch of other things--some pewter or old silver charms, some candles, some small toys, and I don't know whether I can keep these things if I return the book or not. I look through the box for some kind of explanation, but don't find one. So I decide that I'll try again to find the book on my own, and I go to Barnes & Noble. While I'm there, I hear a phone ringing, and suddenly realize that I don't have my cell phone with me. I believe that I brought it with me, so I must have left it somewhere. I find a pile of coats and find mine, and find the phone in the pocket, but when I bring it out, realize it isn't mine--it's in a different kind of case. So I look around some more and finally find my coat and find the phone, but I can't figure out how to get my messages from it, and I'm sure there must be some since I heard it ringing but couldn't find it.
January 23, 1999 There is a terrible ice storm, and there's a big dog--a hound of some kind--scrambling around on the ice, in trouble. A Black man comes along and bends over the dog, holding him so he feels safe, and says he'll take him home and take care of him. The dog, wild-eyed until then, calms down. The man looks at me somewhat disdainfully, as if I should have helped the dog more than I did, but I didn't know how. I felt helpless.
I'm in my brother-in-law's apartment. The walls were mostly covered with wood panelling, and there were several very small rooms, all furnished with cheap wood veneer furniture that looked like it came from a vacation cabin or state park motel. He had been baking cookies and was arranging them on paper plates to give to his children, my nieces. He was looking for some labels that said "From Dad" on them that he wanted to use on the cookie plates after they were wrapped with plastic wrap. He asked me if I remembered them from last year, and I did, but I didn't know where they were. There was a miniature Santa outfit framed on the wall.
My brother and I were looking through a bunch of old boxes full of papers and magazines and various records, looking for information about my father's family. There were lots of photographs and newspaper articles, and some of them talked about my grandfather as being happy and smiling and always telling jokes, and this confused me because that's not the way I remembered him at all. He was almost always stern and sober, and I don't remember him ever telling a joke. There were also photographs of my grandmother as a beautiful young woman, which was also sort of strange since I only knew her when she was elderly.
I mentioned to Matt that I would like to have a small television on a stand next to my computer monitor so that I could watch while I worked. He asked me if that wouldn't be a distraction to me, and I said it wouldn't because when I typed from dictation I didn't have to think about what I was typing. I said that he couldn't do that, he had to pay attention. I showed him that if I had a television set at about the same height as the monitor, I wouldn't even have to look down to watch it.
January 20, 1999 I dreamed I was pregnant. This seemed, if not a surprise to me, at least something that I hadn't given much thought to. I knew my due date was tomorrow, so I was leaving either school or work (it seemed to be a workplace, although the feeling was of a school) for an extended absence. Everyone was looking at me sort of oddly because (I assumed) I didn't really look pt. I hadn't gotten very large, which pleased me at first, then began to worry me--was it really good that my belly was small? Did that mean that my baby would be too small, or harmed in some way? And I really hadn't given much thought to the pain, either, which began to worry me also. I remembered that people said that you didn't remember it afterwards, but that wasn't going to help me now . . . I went out to the school bus to get on it and come home, but I remembered that I had left my jacket inside. I stood outside the bus doors trying to decide if I should go back inside and get it or not. I wasn't going to be back for awhile, so if I was going to want it, I had to go get it now. I told the bus driver--an Oriental man--that I was going to go inside and get it, and asked him if he would wait for me, and he said he would. So I went back inside and got my jacket, and while I was there several people stopped me to talk. By the time I got back outside to get on the bus, it was gone. I looked up and down the street, hoping that it had just moved but no, it was gone. So I stood outside on the sidewalk and tried to figure out what to do. I thought of everyone I knew, but no one lived close enough, really, that picking me up wouldn't be a hardship. Bob didn't seem to be in the picture; I seemed to be completely on my own. I tried to decide if I thought I could walk home--it seemed like I had done it a few times when I was a kid, but I wasn't a kid any longer, and I was wearing shoes with heels--chunky heels, but heels nonetheless, and besides, I was pregnant . . . I finally decided that the only thing I could do was start out, try to walk it, and as I did, I woke up.
January 18, 1999 There's a little restaurant right around the corner from the office called JJ's. And there's another restaurant out south closer to my neighborhood called YaYa's. Well, it used to be called YaYa's, now it's called YiaYia's or something like that, because of copyright infringement issues. In my dream, they were the same. They were owned by a man named John, and Yaya (or JJ) was his nickname, something that he was called when he was a child. I saw this man, and he was a huge, big man, a big Italian man, who was affiliated with the Mafia, and I thought how funny it would be if everyone knew that JJ's was owned by the Mafia.
January 17, 1999 Just a vague memory--I'm in some sort of a spaceship and a young man is boasting, teasing, about being Master of the Universe. Suddenly, hundreds--thousands of spaceships of all kinds converge on us--we see them through huge windows out into space. They're coming because of him--the Master of the Universe. He's frightened and overwhelmed for a moment, then we see that they are all tiny beings, and he could be master of them.
January 16, 1999 I go to the grocery store and there aren't any carts available. I have to wait for someone to bring some in. The first two that come back in are the ones with the big plastic child seats on them, and I let other people have them. The next one that comes in is a regular one, and I take it, and start going around the store. I realize, though, that I all I needed was milk, and once I got that there wasn't anything else for me to get. But there are so many people in the store that I decide I can't wait to check out, and leave the cart and the milk in the store, just abandon the cart and leave. While I'm in the store I meet a couple of older women who are talking about one of the women having met a man in Cancun, a man that she left her husband for. I then meet a man who seems nice, and I lean in toward him and brush his cheek, and as I do so, I realize that this may be a mistake, that he may misinterpret my action as being more interested than I really am. But he has the nicest, soft blond hair . . . He does misinterpret my actions. He kisses me, and I look over at the women, and they're looking at me, and they say that they really like this guy, that the more they see of him, the more they like him, and they predict that I will end up with him.
January 5, 1999 I was in a bed with a man that I didn't know. I wasn't in bed with this man, I was just in a bed with him. Sharing a bed with him; not sleeping with him. We didn't seem to have anything to do with one another aside from the fact that we were apparently sleeping in the same bed. Well, actually, I was in the bed, then he got in, and he found a couple of things in the the bed that appeared to be mine (one was a book and I don't remember what the other things was), and he tossed them over at me with a look that asked if they were mine, and I admitted that they were and tossed them off the bed onto the floor. Sometime during all this tossing, he showed me that he had invented something pretty cool--socks that had clocks positioned over the top of the toes so that during the night, if you wanted to know what time it was, you just looked at your feet. I woke up chanting (silently) "clocks, socks, clocks, socks," so I would remember. Except that when I actually woke up in the morning, I was chanting (silently) "fox, socks, fox in socks . . . wait. Clocks, socks, clocks, socks."
January 4, 1999 I was standing watching a couple of people talking to each other. One of them had really long, dark hair, and at first I thought it was AK. Then I realized that it was a young Oriental man. The way he had fixed his hair was unique, and I looked at it really hard to try to remember it. The top was pulled back in a pony tail, and then the lower part was pulled back in another pony tail, but the sides were left free, and hung down behind his ears so that there were four separate pieces of hair. His hair was very, very long, down past his knees. I remember thinking that he must have never had it cut since he was a child.
January 3, 1999 I was working in a bank, I think. Someplace with a big front office, lots of desks and lots of big plate glass windows and doors. I was going to be working late and there were only a couple of people still around, and I was worried because I didn't know how to lock or unlock the doors. Someone came over and showed me how to do it, then he said something about wasn't I going to find the error in the books. I was sort of indignant. I said, "I don't do accounting. I can't do accounting. I can't even balance my checkbook." He looked incredulous, and I said, "Well, I can, but I don't." And then he looked aggravated because I said I wasn't going to do the work, and I said, "Well, isn't the error only about $300?" And I looked up at a display and saw that it as closer to $400, and said, "Well, okay, $400?" because that seemed like a small error to me in the grander scheme of things. But I gave in and said that I would look for the error, and then I had to go around and leave notes for everyone about something, and I couldn't find a pen I liked. I went around and looked in all the drawers, and no one had a good, black pen. I finally found one that was sort of okay, but it would hardly write, and I got up to look again to no avail.
January 2, 1999 I was in an industrial kitchen making sandwiches, and I was trying my best to make them perfect sandwiches, because if I did a good job, I could be apprenticed to these two guys who were apparently the greatest sandwich makers of all time, or something. So I was trying really hard, lying pieces of ham just so on the bread, and making them look perfect, and although I fell down somewhat on the cutting test (I'm guessing my knife wasn't sharp enough, because when I cut the sandwiches the bread fell apart a little bit along the cut), they decided to take me on, and I was ecstatic.
My friend Micki knocked on the door of my house and asked me to come help her on the computer--she was trying to access a website and there was a graphic of a baseball cap that wouldn't download. My sister was in the house, and I didn't say anything to her--I was just going across the street, after all, and wouldn't be gone very long. But she (my sister) came running out of the house crying because I had left without saying anything to her. I told her that I would be right back, and went with Micki.
January 1, 1999 Just brief memories of a dream about a house that a man had built for the woman he loved--a wooden house of many stories. I visited it and climbed up to the 26th floor, but decided not to continue on to the 27th, because it seemed too intimate, or it seemed like an intrusion into their lives, even though they were long dead. I had a strong feeling of connection with the people who had lived here, and I looked out the windows to see ocean waves crashing on the rocks of the shore.
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