fine whine

It's about four in the morning, and I just work up from the first nightmare I've had in quite some time.

Except that it wasn't really that scary - more like a bad foreign horror movie. Here's what I can remember of it.

The earliest part I can remember begins with me in the room I grew up in, in my parents' house. The dream seemingly took place sometime recently, though I did not get a good look at the rest of the room to know if it was before or after they remodeled it, the reason being that I was looking in the mirror on the back of the door.

Suddenly I noticed that I wasn't alone in the room - in the mirror I saw a small boy, probably somewhere between seven and ten years old. He was not a particularly scary looking kid, but what was a bit odd was that I as I glanced to my left in surprise I found he wasn't there next to me, though, glancing back, he was still there in the mirror, just standing around not looking particularly menacing or frightening, as the spooky children in movies tend to do. He was just hanging out, I guess, and didn't seem to respond at all when I started yelling.

One of my sisters was also in the house. She too could see the kid in the mirror, but before I could gauge her reaction things started to get a little stranger. For one thing, the kid now appeared to be in the room with us (though I could no longer see the mirror). For another, so was Kelsey Grammer.

Kelsey* was in the hallway, standing next to a bed's footboard that was leaning up against another door, and the kid was sitting atop the footboard with his head just about even with Kelsey's, at least as I saw it. Kelsey claimed he could not see the boy, though he was being evasive about it. I finally got him to clearly answer by asking an outrageously specific question, something like "If I said there are only two people in this hallway, would that be true?" or some such. The boy also was confusing, mentioning something about possibly being some future or past form of myself or descendant of mine, possibly as some sort of veiled threat.

Further conversation in the hall was cut short by one of those transition-less scene changes that are a signature of (my) dreams. Now Kelsey and I were in my parents' living room, and I was looking at the screen of my digital camera.

The nightmare wasn't over - the room I saw in the LCD was not the room I saw when I looked up. The room around me had the usual complement of furniture, pictures on the wall, and a piano, but in the screen I was room with empty bookshelves against the walls. Stranger still was the girl, who, again, wasn't in the room. Int he screen she seemed to be doing some sort of martial arts-esque dance routine, which, considering she looked to be a year or two younger than the boy. Kelsey, nearly forgotten by now, naturally did not see the girl.

Thinking back to it, there's no way for me to know that he wasn't just lying. In the dream I seemed convinced he was telling the truth, but really, all I had was his word that he couldn't see them too.

The dream ended just as the girl in the camera noticed me, and started moving toward me. I awoke, and immediately recognized that it was a dream, that my slight fright was completely irrational, and that I wasn't going to be able to get back to sleep this morning. That said, it took me at least twenty minutes to be able to get up because I didn't want to catch a glimpse of the doorway, on the off chance that I would see a small child silhouetted there.

As I'd said... irrational.

* There's a slight chance it was in fact Kelsey's best-known fictional character Frasier Crane in my dream - I almost couldn't decide. Snippets of the conversation I can remember bring to mind psychiatric jargon and mind-bending nonsense, and Crane was a doctor, after all, but I could well have been sarcastically baiting Kelsey. I'd like to think this was the case, but I guess I'll never know.

This morning I awoke from a dream wherein I'd been just shot and knocked over by a shotgun in some sort of mugging or other thuggery. Just before that I'd apparently run thorough a series of restrooms, finding in the last a buch of bound and gagged women. Unfortunately I cannot remember anything else of this dream.

This did not bode well for the day. Today I knew I'd be in meetings for much of the workday, at least one of which had been rescheduled from yesterday (when I'd have been able to leave early to go give blood, but alas, for naught) and the others also having been postponed for various reasons. After said meetings we were expecting a large dumping-upon of work to be done.

Such was the case. The meetings went relatively smoothly (and I attempted to stay awake by chewing nasty bubble gum, which worked) but still took their toil on me and my productivity for the day. I also blame my headache on them, though I am almost certain that said pain is due to dehydration (as I did not refill my water bottle nearly enough today, being so occupied otherwise).

I say "almost certain" as this headache could well be a harbinger of far worse ailments, as Jessica's enduring a nasty bout of influenza and the early symptoms of bronchitis and perhaps even an ear infection at the moment and has been since Sunday. My relatively decent health is due in no small part to the fact that I've been washing my hands a lot more lately, and I hope to remain flu-free for quite some time.

Jessica's done for, however, and to make matters worse her parents are coming to visit us for the weekend. I realize now that I haven't done nearly enough housework to prepare for them and feel guilty, as the house is somewhat of a disarray (not yet a mess, but still enough to probably give Martha Stewart mild palpitations) with unwashed dishes and unvacuumed floors.

I'm not completely unprepared for them, though, as I have checked out Once upon a time in Mexico from the library, expecting to head off the traditional arduous trek around Blockbuster to find a worthy relatively new release to watch tonight.

I miss my dreams, in both manners of speaking. Due to my alarm, I don't generally remember them in the morning, and that makes me sad and wistful for the days of yore when I could awaken gradually and dreamily and happily.

I'm not sure which days those were, of yore, but I recall having more dreams at some point in my life. Come to think of it, you could probably replace "dream" with "ambition" and not lose too much meaning in those last couple sentences. Spooky.

This morning, though, I have some recall of my dreams. There were three of them, and I can see no connection between them other than I was me in all of them, and me of the present. Here I shall present them in reverse order:

• I sat bolt upright in bed and looked at my watch (I sleep with a watch on and have for years, since I cannot trust my clocks for accuracy) and though it said 7:20am I could distinctly hear an alarm sounding. This struck me as odd, since my alarm is set for sometime after 8am and hitting random buttons (as I often do in the morning) would make the alarm later, not earlier. That probably wasn't what I was thinking at the time, though I sat there for what seemed like ten minutes before getting up and turning off the alarm in the other room (I don't trust myself to have the alarm in the same room. Paranoid me).
• The middle dream found me spending time with a family with small children and several housecats. As usual, the beginning of this segment is clouded in the all-too-familiar fuzzy recollection, but I do remember it bearing an odd resemblance to the walk to the lighthouse in John Carpenter's Fog, with the long path and the chain link fence. Anyway, as we were approaching their house I had a weird vision or premonition or hallucination of one of their cats dying and then, through some weird time-lapse, becoming undead, twitching and all-evil-ish. At the time it struck me as a nod to Stephen King, and when we got to the house we were concerned about this "tainted"* cat tainting the other pets. For some reason we needed to climb in via the windows (the small children and I).
• The first (and least remembered) dream I had this morning concerned me somehow returning to Italy. By bus. I got grabbed into a conversation with a couple cute girls (even in my dreams I eavesdrop, apparently) and we had something of a good time on the trip. I'm pretty sure I was worried about what my wife would think of all of this, but before I could do much about it the cats thing started up.

None of these is all that remarkable, other than the fact that most other mornings lately I don't even get this much to remember.

* I should point out that this was probably a direct rip (in everything but name) from 28 days later... which I watched not two days ago. Screw Steven King. I don't think he's ever tackled the undead in quite this fashion.

This morning my alarm woke me just as things were starting to get interesting in my dream. I was me, down to the goatee on my chin and the multitool in my pocket. The familiarity ends there, as everything took place somewhere I'd never been (as usual) though I had my car, which figures into the part I can remember pretty heavily. As always I can only remember the last several minutes, but seeing as I hadn't been too hopeful about getting any sleep I was surprised to see even them.

Anyway, my recollection begins just before I am kidnapped. All I recall, though, is a small meeting room with wood paneling, and then several scenes are forgotten and suddenly I'm rummaging through stuff to find emergency stickers to cover the mouths of the other two kidnapees and myself. The stickers I was looking for were green and in two pieces, such that one piece covered a slot in the other. I think that I was looking for these specific ones so that we could still breathe, so caring were our captors. The problem arose that I found only two and there were three of us, but apparently the kidnappers didn't notice and we set off to go, er, wherever we were going. The kidnappers had a small car and could only fit two of the captives so I was driving myself behind them.

They were paying attention to what I was doing, though, and I didn't want them to see that I didn't have a sticker thing over my mouth. So as I was driving I held a pillow (the one I was likely drooling over at the time) up to just under my nose, but I think they caught onto my ruse as they promptly ordered me to pull over. We were driving along what looked like a country road but I pulled off near some trees and a guard rail overlooking a steep cliff.

Before my nefarious captors could do anything to or about me a small child dressed as a pumpkin popped out the trees giggling, followed by a somewhat embarrassed father. To make conversation he mumbled something about the nice weather for Halloween that we were having, and as I glanced over the rail at a neighborhood decorated with jack-o-lanterns and spiders, I wondered why anybody would be celebrating Halloween in January, though it was indeed nice weather to do so.

Then I missed another transition and I was suddenly inside a building with one of the kidnappers. Before any of this could make sense to me the door of the room burst open and a loud woman entered with the other kidnapper in tow. He glared at me as if to say "play along" and I had no choice but to adopt a silly cross between an Austrian and French accents when she opened with "So you're Swedish? I've never meet anybody from Sweden!"

My affected accent was so thick that she couldn't understand my words, let alone any between-the-lines cries for help. She said that I was "too cute" and I grunted something about my blond hair or something else that she didn't understand, so she repeated herself even more loudly (clearly American) "You're too cute!" to which I replied "You're too kind" and then the alarm started going off before I could escape. Just as things were getting interesting, eh?

The Japanese company that sells the wacky Bowlingual translator for dogs' barking (and the Meowlingual for cats) is developing a device that will let people program their dreams before going to bed. This news article makes mention of the device. More significant to me than the mere total control over dreaming is the gradual waking feature that uses

music and lights that simulate sunlight so that users of the gadget do not forget their dream in the shock of waking.

That's the key feature for me. I don't need to create my dreams beforehand as my imagination is more than capable of creating interesting dreams. Take for example this morning's masterpiece:

For once, I was me, though I think I was younger. High school age, perhaps, but I can't be sure; I always had been a mature kid (ha ha ha). Anyway I was at home with my parents and possibly a sister or two, and we had a problem. The house was infested with rodents. In the dream I had a vague recollection of seeing rodents around before, but not enough to worry or panic; now, though, the little bastards were everywhere. They scurried under tables, desks and the fridge. Anything leaning up against the wall would have several rodents under it when moved.

I keep using the word "rodents" because these were not conventional critters. They looked like large mice or small rats and they were grey with beady red eyes, but they looked to be stuffed animals--I could see seams and stitching and whatnot. They moved and acted like real rodents, though, which at the time didn't strike me as so odd but I know that I noticed it.

As is usual for my dreams, the beginning setup is long since forgotten and I was left only with a vague sense of responsibility and guilt for the sudden population explosion of the little fuzzy guys. This sense came to me in a store selling computer software as I was looking at buying something for DVD burning, but that too is vague and transition-less to the rest of the proceedings. Those proceedings were also somewhat disjointed and mildly non-linear but I will try to present them as well as I remember.

Until now I neglected to mention the other characters that figure into this dream. We will meet one of them now and the others later, so I'll introduce just him for now. Sitting at my dining room table was Ghostbusters' Winston Zeddmore, Mr. Ernie Hudson himself. I can't say for sure if it was the actor or the character at my table, and in the morning I was muttering the name Winston Smith (wrong movie, of course) to try and remember while the song "Girl all the bad guys want" by the band Bowling for soup played incessantly in my head. I'm getting off track here. Winston/Ernie had a particularly scene in the dream. I had given him one of the live rat things and asked him about them biting. Apparently he was an expert on such things; how fortuitous of him to be in my dining room. To demonstrate his rodent expertise he held it close to his left hand and allowed it to bite the heel of his palm. It kept chomping away, and Ernie/Winston was moving it around to effectively slice open the bottom of his hand. He set aside the now-still rodent (with his good hand) and reached into the gash. Fishing around, and spilling out some bloody innards that looked strangely like a lump of brain matter, he retrieved (from his hand, remember) a pair of fogged-up eyeglasses that he then donned over his sunglasses, and smiled like a madman. Which, under the circumstances, was entirely appropriate.

I wasn't the only witness to this gruesomely weird scene. With me in the dining room were two random short-haired girls, one blonde and one not. They were probably aged somewhere between eighteen and thirty but I cannot really narrow it down any further than that. Needless to say they were disgusted by Eddie/Winston's little demonstration. And then we were in a room that could have doubled as the deck of a ship for all of the exposed wood--floors, walls and everything. I had the impression then of it being a ship's deck, at least. We moved a table or cabinet thing to the center of the room and we joined by another random fellow who I will call Mr. Booze, because I think it sounds cool. He gave us a small corked yellowish bottle which was opened to reveal some bubbly champagne.

We poured out the champagne over the table thing, in the idea that it would do something to the rodents, and there was a discussion in which I always mispronounced 'champagne' much in the way that Christopher Walken's recurring SNL character "the Cosmopolitan" does. We will never know if I was doing this accidentally or deliberately. Then Mr. Booze, the girls and I all went to bed.

To try to get some sleep.

The morning after we were on a school bus. I still had the beer-bottle sized champagne and was sipping it, while Mr. Booze was gulping down a monstrous root beer of the sort that emphasizes "BEER" on the label and downplays the "root". He was across the aisle from me and the girls were a couple seats up. Evidently the blonde hadn't slept well, and I was getting ready to figure out a way to let her get some sleep when the alarm rang. Just as it was starting to get interesting.

And in other news, informal testing has revealed the shelf life of a Krispy Kreme glazed donut to be three days.

I wish that I could remember my dreams more coherently. This morning's only comes back to me in disjointed flashes, all so different from each other as to boggle the mind at their connection though at the time it made sense. Here are the scenes that I can remember:

• A short indoor snowball fight between myself and a long ago coworker. Very short, in fact, as it consisted of her throwing one at me (and hitting? can't remember) and me whipping one back at her. There was much more to it than that, though, as I stumbled mid throw and dropped my snowball, but in a surprisingly deft motion caught it, turned around and regained my balance, and tossed it over my shoulder so as to catch her on a bank shot off the ceiling. This is why it was important that this was indoors, I guess. Also since it was indoors there were some other people around, but the only one I can remember is the guy who played Carl, the dad, on the show with Urkel. He also appeared in Die hard and some of its sequels, but I cannot say why he would be in my dream watching a snowball fight under fluorescent lights and a drop ceiling.
• Not all of my dream was indoors. I spent some time in the woods on a trail of some sort. It had obstacles and at one point I was riding a white horse. This was neither a normal trail nor a normal horse, as he started talking to me when we reached a river with an incomplete bridge that he couldn't quite jump. I ended up on shore and he was in the water, yammering on and on about how we were supposed to get across and what we could do about it and so on. It was almost aggravating, really, and soon I found myself in the water sloshing around with some floating things (that were like logs, but not) trying to build a raft or a bridge or something. We did not make it across.
• But as I had said there was something of an incomplete bridge. Two, as I later discovered; the one to my right was built solid about half way and then stopped. The one in front of me was only the pillars without any bridge to support. Earlier I had the impression that the horse was supposed to jump on these to get us across but clearly that didn't work, but now as I watched (again from shore) some cars started driving over the bridges. One that looked like a Volvo reached the end of the bridge and splashed into the water, but not before becoming entirely white, as though glowing or covered in thick animal fur.

What do these mean? I don't have a clue. The Volvo might have come from an article I read about a design team working on a women's car (complete with lack of hood to open, I kid you not) and the snowball fight from mention of a guy in New York selling snowballs for a buck, but why the horse and the river jumping? The only exposure I had with horses recently was watching The ring and the only horses in that were black or dead. So a mystery it will remain.