zeptember

Last night I went to the bar with two of my house neighbors, and I drank two glasses of red wine. It’s the first time I have drank alcohol since October 17th, when I got blackout drunk.
I did not feel drunk off of the wine until I got home, and then I felt a bit tipsy and rambly at my husband, who got home at the same time I did.

I drank some water before bed, then read for awhile.
I went to bed and woke a few hours later feeling dehydrated and agitated. I drank some water and went back to bed.

Before my alarm went off, I had a nightmare.

I was in the bedroom when my husband or my brother or both people saw a huge spider on the wall. I ran to get a container to collect the spider and toss it outside. I returned to the bedroom to collect the spider, only to find that it was a giant scorpion. The spider upon first look had been about the size of my thumb, but had become this scorpion the size of my hand. The scorpion was dark brown in colour.

Still, I tried to collect the scorpion into a plastic water pitcher I’d found in the kitchen. The scorpion was highly agitated, and ran down the wall onto the floor. I slammed the pitcher on top of it and the scorpion went wild inside, climbing the walls and settling upside down on the roof of the upside down pitcher. The scorpion began smacking its tail to sting the pitcher, and to my shock, the stinger tried coming through the pitcher! I screeched and jumped and felt a nick on my thumb or finger, but continued to try to get the scorpion out of the house. The scorpion came out of the pitcher and began racing after me. I yelped out and hid behind a door but the thing came right for me at a fast speed. I got out of the way just in time, and tried to figure out how we’d catch this thing. Thoughts of a shovel came to mind at this point… no longer want to collect it but to kill it.

I woke - breathing heavy and panicked. Got up, used the bathroom again, tried to go back to sleep to no avail.

According to Dream Moods,
To see a scorpion in your dream, represents a situation in your waking life which may have been painful or hurtful. It is also indicative of destructive feelings, “stinging” remarks, bitter words and/or negative thoughts being expressed by or aimed against you. Your dream forewarns of a self-destructive and self-defeating path. The scorpion is also a symbol of death and rebirth. You need to get rid of the old and make room for something new.

I had been talked into attending Dickens Faire workshops on Saturday with a friend. I’d created a faux pas when acting in hastily assembled (crazed lunatic) character for a group, I did not greet Mr. Dickens himself in the preferred way. I was told later that the guy who plays Dickens is seriously full of himself, but it didn’t matter - I felt I had already let the guildmaster down somehow by this faux pas, and I brooded over it all weekend.

On Sunday, after a long day of continued homework for the class which finished on Halloween, which I’m very late turning in, I went to the bar with my neighbors and drank for the first time in a month. I knew I was being bad, since I have been in therapy for drinking, but I drank anyway. I felt guilty when I got home but did not outright tell my husband I’d been drinking. I was rebelling a bit, not wanting to be “caught” or “get in trouble”, but wanting to do what I pleased, when I felt I have things under control. I feel like there is no leeway - I feel like if I drink, people assume I will automatically be out of control every time.

Hence the scorpion dream.

I always worry when I dream about numbers. I think it might be because one of the things my ma used to study was numerology - before she turned fundamentalist christian. Along with numerology, ma taught me from a young age to remember and interpret dreams. Sometimes I dunno which scared me more in early childhood; her doom and gloom studies of numerology and Nostradamus, or her doom and gloom studies of the Book of Revelation.

So, my dream…

I was with a bunch of friends at a BBQ, [of course, because I just attended two of those over the weekend] and we were all singing a slow folksy song which consisted of us singing 38 as the refrain. At one point we all sang the lyrics, “This tie is number 1239″…

Everyone laughed, because our BBQ/camp site was number 1439, stamped on a railroad tie. Our host smiled and quipped that now everyone would want a railroad tie of their own.

I know there’s a RevCo song called ‘38′. Other than that, I got nothing.

I had a dream that an acquaintance joined an old 80’s band that had begun touring again (their music sounded like Clan of Xymox or some such) and they were doing what looked like stage plays of all their hits. It wasn’t a concert - it was a formal dinner affair with dim lighting and the band doing coordinated and complicated acrobatic dance numbers to their music on stage, as if they were in a play or musical - cheerleader smiles and the whole bit. I noticed that while on stage, he had on a black Fischerspooner* tee shirt.

There was crazy DIY combination drinks in punch bowls for people to mix up themselves.

During an intermission, I was milling about and saw my old goth friends from Michigan and California. There were people from around the world for this, and a good mix of all types and genres of people. Formal dinner tables were set up in three different rooms. I was fortunate to be at a table right in front of the stage. I saw my chosen sister at a table in the next room, which had a partial view of the stage in the room my table was in. I stopped at her table and chatted.

There was a dark spot in the dream - At the same table as my chosen sister was a friend who up and stopped talking to me years ago over a petty misunderstanding that she never confronted me about. I had to find out through my chosen sister why she stopped talking to me. She looked as depressed and forlorn as she ever was when I knew her, and this goes back all the way to high school. She turned to her left and looked away from me as I had approached the table, then got up and slowly walked away (and looked like a spectre doing it).

A couple of tables behind my chosen sister’s table, right next to the door to the main room, I saw a friend milling about. After chatting with my sis for a few, I went over to him and we gave each other a hug. My husband was sitting at that table chatting with people. I walked over behind him and gave his shoulders an affectionate squeeze, and I think I bent down and we smooched hello.
Someone at the table was looking at some fliers on the wall, and remarked that he hated when fliers contained misspellings. The word in question was for a band damed DUCK and it was spelled DUCH**, but I wondered, was it really a misspelling? Then we talked about the time Bella Morte was misspelled to Bella More.

I remember telling several people at the event that I was so happy that my acquaintance was able to pursue this, and had the courage to come out of the rivethead mold to do it, because he had waffled over this for awhile and then finally did it, and looked a natural at the performance. So many of his friends had come out to support him for this, and were already fans of the band as well.

* Let it be known that although I have heard the name ‘Fischerspooner’ over the years, I have never heard or seen Fischerspooner’s music and concerts in my life. Looking them up on youtube after I woke up from my dream was very surreal and fit near perfectly what I was seeing in my dream.
** I looked up ‘duch’ to see if it means anything in other languages. Google tells me that “Duch means Spirit or Ghost in Slovak, Czech and Polish language.”

This is TOTALLY one of the cooler dreams I’ve had, given the verifications when I awoke.

Just woke from a dream a little bit ago…

I had spent a week in the U.S. army on U.S. soil to see what it would be like. There was a whole group of us. We had loaded up our gear, our belongings from the barracks, and I had more crap than the others. In real life, I always do have more crap than the others when going camping for example…

Anyway, we were coming back from the post we’d stayed at - we were in a big tour bus, and just entering the military base where we’d disembark and return to our normal lives, when suddenly, just inside the base, we began to hear explosions, machine gun fire, and screaming death. People rushed to the windows to see. People ducked down and hid. There was a bit of panic. At first I ran to the windows on both sides of the bus to see what all was happening, but had to duck out of the way when glass began shattering. The bus sped up and hauled ass through the base. I had seen what looked like a revolt going on.

When the bus came to a stop outside of the building we were originally headed for, all was quiet. The MP had gotten the revolt under control. But it took a bit of convincing for us on the bus - many of us were hesitant to get off the bus and just wanted to get the hell outta there.

We had to sign paperwork of some sort. I put the date in the upper right hand corner - 11/##/08

I scratched out the date in the middle cuz I got it wrong, and wrote in the correct date:

We said our goodbyes and got off the bus and walked in a daze to find our cars. It looked like a war zone all over the base. My car, which had been parked on a side street on the base, had been squashed between a civilian bus and a couple other cars during the rampage. I now had to get home but I can’t remember how I did it because I had to leave my car behind.

…

I really wish I remembered what the first date was that I’d scratched out. It was a single digit, that’s all I remember. Now I eagerly await what the month of November brings, because I’m weird like that.

I’m not panicked by the dream. I’m curious.

About 18 days ago, I had a conversation with someone about how I feel it’s time the U.S. experienced a revolution from within, that there’s so many people who are dissatisfied with the status quo, the current government, the current economy, etc…and that all these things are coming together fast and can only result in upheaval. I even quoted Einsturzende Neubauten; “Destruction is not negative”.

I was at some sort of goth convergence-alike, staying in a fancy hotel. We’d gone out to one of the nightclubs and I was zoning out when suddenly I realised an African American woman on the edge of the dance floor turned and looked at me, got irritated and looked away. Then another African American woman, sitting to the left of me, got up and reached over the table that separated us as we sat, and she said something about me having gotten to that woman on the dance floor. I was apologetic and explained that I often zone out when I’m in public places like this, and before I know it, someone’s in my line of unfocused, zoned out sight. The woman who approached me was cheerful - she reminded me of my fiancé’s bandmate’s girlfriend. But I still felt bad about having upset someone by seemingly staring them down or worse, glaring at them in my moment of zoning out.

The next song that came on was either the original or an electronica remix of Eye of the Tiger by Survivor. I laughed and started telling someone I knew about how I used to love that song when I was a kid about the age of ten, and that it was the soundtrack for a recurring dream I used to have.

The rest of the dream featured me as an adult taking everyone at this gothic gathering into my childhood dreamscape. There was this old abandoned white building with white interior and lots of cascading stairways. The stairways were lined with brass or chrome staircase railings. There were large, open doorways, sometimes fitted with glass and glass doors in this building.

I was always in a race to get to one of the top floors of the building, to a room of operations held by the enemy, who wanted to do Bad Things™. It was always my job to take out the bad guys (via cheesy 80’s fist fight/martial arts), then set a timer and run as fast as I could back down to the ground floor and exit the building before it blew up.

I wish I was better at this early hour at explaining the fine details of how the building looked on the inside.

As the adult in this childhood dreamscape, I got to the top floor of operations and found the group of people I needed to take out. But this time it was different. They were dressed in suits and I wrestled with a woman who looked like she was wearing a stewardess jacket and skirt. She was trying to pull a taser and/or a gun from her waistband as I fought with her and the others in the room looked on. I can’t remember if I grabbed her weapon and killed her with it or just knocked her down and ran, but I knew the timer was on…as well as the soundtrack - Eye of the Tiger.

And now, whoever from the gothic gathering was with me in this dreamscape had to run with me for their lives. I left them behind because I knew how to navigate quickly down the hallways and staircases, often jumping over railings and such to get to the next level before. That’s how I always did it as a kid. I noticed however that as an adult, I was much slower now - not so limber - and I worried that I’d not make it out of the building in time. My childhood confidence was replaced by adult worry and insecurity.

When I got to the bottom floor, as I approached the foyer, the cascading stairs were carpeted in red, and the couches in the large lobby/foyer were red faux leather.

I did make it out of the building, and others made it out with me, but the building did not explode. I assumed that meant we made it in record time. But I also knew that in my childhood dream, the building would always explode just as I made it out, but I’d always end up unscathed. So I was perplexed as to why it didn’t blow, yet.

I was in the parking lot of that building at this point, talking with Naveen Andrews from the TV series Lost (which in real life I watch a lot of on DVD at one sitting on about a weekly basis). He was telling me about a sticker on the back of his car, which was from his elementary school teacher, who was now 94 years old and still kicking. I wondered if I had any elementary school teachers who were still alive and told Naveen I’d be visiting my hometown again in November.
We parted ways and as I walked off. As I walked away, I turned and said, “by the way, I’m not 23, I’m 37 (years old)”.
(Earlier in the dream somewhere, I’d told him I was 23 for some reason. I wonder now if the character that Naveen was involved with in the series Lost was 22 or 23. I forget. I have no idea if this is a tie or not….)
As I walked off, I hoped he didn’t feel like I had a crush on him because I knew he had a wife, and I have a fiancé, but I just enjoyed talking with him (in real life, I often worry about how men I talk to are reading me, because I’m usually uncomfortable around men. I want to relate to them as one of the guys but I’m hyper aware of the fact that I’m a chick and that just by being a chick, there can be sexual tension on one or both sides. This is why, as a kid entering puberty around the age of ten, I sobbed and begged my mother to reverse the process. I knew all too well that I’d never be viewed as an equal again by my male friends. That emotional trauma has stuck with me throughout life.)

I got back to the hotel and saw that people were checking out. I realised I did not have my hotel key on me, and my roommates had likely checked out already. I went up some carpeted (red paisley?) stairs to the front desk. They were open stairs with a brass staircase railing. To my left below the stairs was a sitting area for the hotel lobby. There were three female attendants at the front desk; the one in front of me on the right of the desk was doing something at a computer, checking on something for someone. The middle woman was talking with a customer, and the third, the one on the left, was on the phone. The phone was white and antique. I made my way over to her. She set the phone down a moment after I appeared in front of her and I told her I’d forgotten my room key. She got my info and told me that everyone had already checked out, and the room had already been emptied. She craned her neck to look over the front desk at something. I turned and looked - suddenly I noticed several suitcases and bags scattered on the floor behind me with people going through the bags to find which one was theirs. I went towards the edge of the brass railing that separated the front desk area from the lobby sitting area below, and started to sift through the suitcases and bags. I was told by another female attendant who came to me that my suitcases were in this area, as was a luggage bag, but the bag had poop in it! That’s right, she said, someone had left a brown bag of poop inside of it. I had loaned the bag to one of my hotel roommates, who was a goth boy in his early 20’s. Obviously he in his youth thought this would be funny to leave a woman nearly twice his age as a gift of thanks.

I awoke one minute before my alarm went off, having left myself in the dream having just found the bag with the poop in it. I woke with Eye of the Tiger playing in my head.

I can’t say now for certain whether the childhood dreamscape was ever REALLY something from my childhood that I was remembering, or something new altogether, made special for me in this morning’s dream…

I do know that the part of the dream containing Naveen and me worrying what he thought is a direct reaction to having had to work yesterday with the father of the child at home at the same time I was working. My fiancé had come over to drop off some money for me to catch a bus to see a florist later in the day, and he got to meet the child’s father. Because of the trust issues I’ve had (my partner’s end and my end) in previous relationships, I felt awkward socially in the presence of two males like this.
The child’s father will be home again today and I’ve not been looking forward to it because I feel like ‘The Help’ instead of being in charge on my own with free reign. The father in no way has made me to feel this way - it’s just my emotional hyper-awareness of having been reared socially in this culture that females are lesser, and nannies are lesser still. There was a time when this was so but likely it is not so in this day and age. I just carry outmoded social mores with me. Great, huh?

Risin’ up, back on the street
Did my time, took my chances
Went the distance, now I’m back on my feet
Just a man and his will to survive

So many times, it happens too fast
You change your passion for glory
Don’t lose your grip on the dreams of the past
You must fight just to keep them alive

Chorus:
It’s the eye of the tiger, it’s the cream of the fight
Risin’ up to the challenge of our rival
And the last known survivor stalks his prey in the night
And he’s watchin’ us all in the eye of the tiger

Face to face, out in the heat
Hangin’ tough, stayin’ hungry
They stack the odds ’til we take to the street
For we kill with the skill to survive

chorus

Risin’ up, straight to the top
Have the guts, got the glory
Went the distance, now I’m not gonna stop
Just a man and his will to survive

chorus

The eye of the tiger (repeats out)…