Tag: dreams

Dream Diary: The One That Got Away

I don’t know if you know what I mean by “the one that got away,” but a lot of people have them. “The one that got away” is a love interest that you were very invested in, but things didn’t work out and you really regret it. My mom had a “one that got away,” her high school sweetheart, whom she kind of regretted breaking up with.

After my mom died, I found an obituary for someone that I think was him, and it wouldn’t’ve worked out. He became a pastor, and, well, how do I make this read smoothly? I’ve reworked this part three times now.

Near where I grew up, there was a church. I’m a Christian as was my mom, but this church had some, not really doctrinal (though there were those, as well) but . . . business-related activities that my mom disagreed with.

The obituary I found said that he worked at that church. Everything else matches up — his (fairly common) name, his age, he was even in the state where my mom was while they were dating. And, well, the pictures of him I found do look like this pastor was her “type.”

So, yeah.

In my dream last night, my “one that got away” was Keith Habersberger from the Try Guys. Why him in particular? I don’t know. The real life Keith is young enough to be my son. So we were never in school together, but in my dream, we had been classmates.

I got a chance to go back in time and fix what had gone wrong between us. I walked up to him and when I made eye contact with him, his career with the Try Guys and his relationship with Becky, his wife, all came flooding back to me and I just couldn’t do it. I didn’t know what kind of life he and I would’ve had, but he seems really happy with Becky and the whole Try Guys thing, so I told him that I had a feeling that he would get everything he wants and deserves from life and he offered me his friendship and promised that we’d keep in touch.

At some point, I attended the wedding of Zach Kornfeld and his fiancee Maggie. She was a beautiful bride. I don’t know if I was, like, there because I knew the Try Guys from my friendship with Keith or what.

Time to get back to Gratuitous Amazon Links. This is another favorite — A Deadly Education, by Naomi Novik. A Deadly Education is the first of a series about El, short for Galadriel, who is a student at a school for witches and wizards. El is a natural dark wizard (called a “Maleficer” in this series) who is determined not to go down that path. The school is well drawn and I enjoy the supporting characters. The second book comes out in just over a month and I’m really excited for it. I also bought a copy of this for a friend and will buy her the next book, too.

Dream Journal 4/24/2021

So. I’ve been cleaning and now I have a headache. Let’s see how much writing I can do before I have to go hide in a dark room. I told this all to Evelyn to cement it in my mind so that I can remember it now.

Just as a little background, Jenny Lawson, writer of books like Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, lives in San Antonio. She owns the Nowhere Bookshop bookstore in a kind of suburb of San Antonio called Alamo Heights (it’s its own town, but if you address things with “San Antonio” as the address it will reach it’s destination). Because of COVID, the bookstore has never been open to the public. They do curbside pickup and mail order and, of course, there’s the Fantastic Strangelings Book Club, which supports the bookstore.

Anyway, it’s Independent Bookseller’s Day today and to celebrate they were having a sidewalk sale, and Evelyn and I were going. I’m 95% certain this is what inspired these dreams.

First off, I was in a restaurant sitting at a table deciding what to order, when I noticed a coworker sitting at a bar. She had a cup of, like, espresso in front of her, but she said she wanted a full-sized cup of coffee.

I saw that the pot (which was one of those little moka pots they use to make stovetop espresso) still had coffee in it, so I gave her a full-sized cup of that and went in search of things to make another pot. I went to the end of the counter, where the singer J. Balvin was sitting and asked him where the measuring spoons were and he informed me that the Spanish word for measuring spoon was “culebra.” I made a little serpentine wave with my arm and asked, “¿Culebra?”*

He was kind of like, “Don’t ask me, I don’t make the rules.”

As I went back to my table, I realized that Balvin had just written a book and that I could have it autographed while he was here. I asked the guy who owned the restaurant if they would hold my table while I ran out to buy a copy.

He pointed to the line at the host’s table and said that the rush was about to start and that if I wasn’t back by then, he’d give my table away.

So I promised that if I couldn’t see a copy from the front door of the bookstore, I’d come right back.

After hurrying as fast as I could with my path being blocked by a large woman who looked like my Aunt Georgia from behind, I reached the bookstore and the entrance was now a sitting area and you can’t see any books from the door.

Later, I had another dream related to Nowhere Bookshop even more directly. I dreamed that Jenny Lawson herself was moving to my neighborhood, only it wasn’t where I’m living now, it was where I was living when I was a teenager. In real life, there is an empty lot at the end of the street but in my dream it was a marshland with a little grotto with a tiny waterfall there. I was admiring the waterfall when Jenny walked up to me.

I didn’t want to fangirl all over her, so I introduced myself, said hello and then took off.

So, as it turned out, the sidewalk sale turned into a “come-in-and-browse” sale and, instead of maybe seeing Jenny through the window, as I had expected, she was actually in the store and was talking to people. And I got to meet her. I told her about my dream, by way of offering to leave her alone, but she seemed approachable and friendly and I’m still fangirling, nearly 12 hours later.

Dream Journal 7/31/21

Wow.

So, I’ve been fighting a headache today, so I decided to take a nap.

Okay, more than that has been going on today. Alex borrowed my car to rescue a friend who was stranded in Waco and on the way home, he had a blowout.

So, I got up as early as I could stand to and took my car in for new tires. I decided to get all new tires, rather than just the one, because I figured that the blowout probably was a freak accident, but I want to take my car on actual road trips, so I upgraded all of them.

After dropping my car off at the shop, *that* is when I had the headache and took the nap.

I started out my dream working as a paralegal and our client was named Jennifer and had the same last name as my cousin. I was told that I’d have to withdraw from the case because she *was* my cousin. Only, my cousin’s related to me through our moms’ side of the family, so we have no blood relations with that last name.

At some point in the dream, her last name changed to my maternal grandmother’s maiden name and, well, I do have a cousin named Jennifer with that surname. Two of them, in fact. Well, I only have one, the other died of a drug overdose years ago. In my dream, I just had the one and that was the one that died of a drug overdose.

The attorney who told me that it would be a conflict of interest to help my cousin told me that she wasn’t *that* cousin Jennifer but a completely different one who is way farther apart on the family tree. He said that my boss could show me the family tree and I could see what he means.

So I went to my boss (who passed away about the same time my mom did), and told him that I couldn’t work on that case anymore and he said that they’d find a new case for me to work on. He couldn’t find the family tree when I asked him for it.

At this point, I said that I knew this had to be a dream, not because my boss is dead, but because I couldn’t remember anything about this job prior to that conversation about my cousin Jennifer.

I’m not sure if there was a transition or anything, but somehow I was going to a concert with a coworker and realized that Deimos (my cat) was in the car with us. There was no time to go home and I could neither take him to the concert nor leave him in the car, so we went to her house to leave him there. Somehow we were unable to leave through the front door, so I went through a sort of tunnel to get to their back door, which was locked and the door had a combination lock. So my coworker had to come and open the door, and she didn’t have to go through the tunnels.

I got upset with her for lying to me about having to go through the tunnels and left for the concert by myself. There’d been a third coworker (who looked like the singer J. Balvin?) in the car with us and my coworker had left him behind because he took too long getting into the car after stopping to talk to a friend.

I got into contact with him somehow, but I never made it to the concert, because I was apparently getting married.

My fiance had a boisterous apparently warm family but the longer I spent with them, the more dysfunctional they appeared. I was at this point being pursued romantically by the real J. Balvin who in my dream had been a dermatologist before becoming a singer.

That realization is why I decided to leave my fiance and give J. Balvin a chance. I have mild eczema and I realized that I could have access to the latest research on eczema.

This dream was, at least in part, brought to you by 23 and Me, because I have opted into research and I did an eczema survey last night.

For today’s Gratuitous Amazon Link, um, well . . . Ooh! Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh! Imagine me dancing badly.

There’ve been three books that I’ve waited for for years, and so far, this is the only one that I’ve been able to hold in my hands. And it was *so* worth the wait!

For those unfamiliar with Allie Brosh, she wrote a web cartoon that is a masterful combination of poignancy and laugh-out-loud humor, Hyperbole and a Half, for a long time, and her two books, this and her other book, also titled Hyperbole and a Half, are more of the same. Awesome, amazing, just all-around fantastic.

And someday, maybe, I will be able to hold the other two books in my hands and bring you reviews of them, as well. Hopefully.

Dream Journal (4/30/21)

I actually had two different dreams, both of travel, at different times and of different locations.

Overnight I dreamed that I was in Houston at some hotel, possibly for a science fiction convention of some sort. I had friends who were already there and were showing me around.

I’d been told that the top floor of the hotel was only for celebrities and so when they took me up in the elevator and showed me the view from up there, it never occurred to me that that was the top floor.

I enjoyed the view, and Alex (who was apparently with me) and I found an empty room and sat down for a minute, admiring how airy and spacious the room was. We walked down the hall and found a sort of banquet/conference room that was also very airy and had kind of golden-brown trim.

We bumped into a member of housekeeping who was shocked to see us there because we weren’t celebrities. You see, we were actually on the top floor.

So we went back downstairs and found our actual room, which it turned out we were sharing with two strangers. The celebrity rooms were airy and spacious. The rest of the rooms weren’t anything like that.

I kind of know where the celebrity rooms on the top floor came from. I’ve stayed in the Reliant/Medical Center/NRG Crowne Plaza Hotel, which used to be the AstroWorld Hotel, and which once had the most expensive hotel room in the . . . world? I think?

The room is still there, but no one stays in it any more. I considered seeing if I could use this blog as a way to get up there and see it, but I chickened out. I’m bound to go back to Houston some day. Maybe I’ll have more courage then.

I got up and had breakfast, but was still sleepy, so I went back and took a nap for another couple of hours. During this nap, I had the second dream, this one set in Philadelphia.

Now, I kind of know where this came from. I was a combination of President Biden having gone to Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Amtrak, the cypress trees along Harwood Street outside of the Dallas Museum of Art, and my own disappointment that Alex decided not to go into the Boy Scouts*.

In this dream, I was somehow involved with a Boy Scout troop (though they were wearing blue Cub Scout uniforms) in Philadelphia that for some reason was having trouble finding somewhere to meet.

We went to the central library, which looked nothing like the real central library, of course, which was surrounded by trees, and I suggested that the troop could plant more trees around the building, staggered with the trees that were already there, and we could use that as our meeting place. I don’t know if we decided to do it or not.

For our Gratuitous Amazon Link, today’s book is The Authenticity Project, by Clare Pooley. Monica, who owns a coffee shop, finds a composition book left behind by an artist, Julian. In this book, which he left behind intentionally, Julian challenges the people who find it to write their truths in it and leave it for others to find. She does so, and the people who find it, then find each other, and honesty and drama, and maybe a few happy-ever-afters result. I think this was one of my BookBub purchases that I enjoyed most of all. I may even read it again at some point.

*I’ve always told him that it’s not what you know, it’s who you know, and that getting into some level of the upper echelons of the Boy Scouts would let him know a lot of people who could help him, even if he didn’t get all the way to Eagle Scout, even being a Life Scout would’ve been a help.**

** I would’ve loved to have been a Boy Scout. I certainly was unhappy with my Cadet Girl Scout troop’s desire to go to Six Flags with all of our money instead of having outings that were useful. Of course, if I’d’ve been (a) aware that the Girl Scout Gold Medal exists, and (b) able to see the future and known that the senior troop that my cadet troop fed into did the service projects and skill learning (I seem to recall that they learned how to sail at one point), I might’ve put up with cadets for another year so that I could get into that senior troop. But I digress.

Dream Journal 4/16/21

I’m journaling my dreams (a) for content and (b) because I want to get back into writing fiction some day and maybe writing about my dreams will spark a short story, novella, or even maybe a novel.

Short stories. That really never occurred to me. I bet that the little plot bunnies I’ve been toying with and that never seem to pan out could be reworked into short stories. I’d maybe also get experience submitting them to fiction sites and working with editors to see if I could do that professionally at all.

I have a lot of performance anxiety regarding my writing. I think it’s to do with how what self-esteem I have is based on my ability to do things well, rather than my value as a human being. I write and write and when I hit a roadblock I tend to throw my hands up in frustration and quit.

If I restructured the part that I’m working on as a standalone though . . . . I think I might be on to something here.

I don’t know if there was a real throughline in last night’s dream, but let’s see.

It started out on a beach with a bunch of people who had dogs. I took a liking to one of their dogs and asked if I could pick her up. She was cute, but kind of strange looking, with a long body, like a dachsund or something, and also longer legs than you’d expect.

The dog’s owner just up and disappeared, leaving me with a dog I didn’t expect to have to take care of. I went home and my home was a smaller place with this tiny spiral staircase in the corner. It looked more like a set of shelves than a staircase, but there was a door at the top.

At some point, while still trying to figure out where the dog’s owner went, I squeezed myself up those stairs and discovered that the upstairs was way roomier than the downstairs and had a laundry room and things. Alex was up there and I had thought he’d said that he didn’t go up there, but he’d been hanging around up there for a while (this is probably about him moving out six months ago).

At some point, I met a rock and roll singer who was in some kind of mobility scooter thing and we went to a church with a group of people (I’m not sure where they came from). The church was having communion and the bread looked like it had sprinkles baked into it, like a confetti cake.

We didn’t go into the sanctuary but hung out in the narthex (the area just outside the sanctuary doors). Some kind of shipping container arrived and it turned out that the rest of the singer’s band was in the container. They gave a concert then, and I accidentally groped the other lead performer in the band while trying to reach the volume control to turn it up.

The crowd for the impromptu concert was really large so I guess the people inside the sanctuary joined us.

I never did find the dog’s owner, though.

Today’s Gratuitous Amazon Link is by one of my favorite YA/kidlit authors (I suspect I’ve said this before, because I really do love her books!), Ally Carter: Winterborne Home for Vengeance and Valor, the first book in the, well, Winterborne Home for Vengeance and Valor series. I had to redo that post, because I totally forgot to actually copy the Amazon Associates link and instead pasted my last post there. Augh! Anyway, Winterborne Home for Vengeance and Valor is about April, who has been bounced around from foster home to foster home. Miraculously, she has a note from her mom promising to return and a key. Events conspire to her living in the house that the key comes from and that begins her search for the mysteries of the Winterborn family. The second book has been out for a while and I really have to read that one. As soon as I finish the other dozen books on my TBR list.

Dream Journal

Last night’s dream was a doozy. As a bit of background, my dad’s family was never really close. We saw family members maybe once a year, once every two years, things like that.

My uncle died in December. The first we heard of that was when a . . . what’s the probate version of an ambulance chaser? Basically, it’s a company that will get money from the probate court for you, but will take 33% of whatever you inherit.

My dad thought it was a scam of some sort, but eventually he was able to ascertain that my uncle had, in fact, died. Now my dad is trying to figure out how much my uncle left. My uncle was childless and died intestate. By our calculations, my dad stands to inherit 1/3 of it, then my aunt’s kids will get 1/6, and my other uncle’s kids will each get 1/9. That may be nothing or it may be quite a bit of money for each of his surviving relatives.

So. Dream.

I dreamed that I had two friends over for dinner and was making steaks. I don’t really “speak” steak, so my brain was, like, “steak?” and threw in something that looks like halibut steaks made from beef. I mean, they’re . . . steaks, right?

Sometime before I started dinner, my dad, who had been out of town, came home and brought my recently-deceased uncle with him. Now, my uncle didn’t look like my uncle looked in real life, and I even acknowledged that in my dream. He looked like my dad looked 15, 20 years ago.

I’m putting dinner on and I realized that I only had four steaks and that I’d need a steak for my uncle. I head to the store.

When I get there, one of my coworkers walks through the door right behind me. I get stopped by the manager, who tells me that my shoes aren’t acceptable for their store. I may have been wearing open-toed sandals, I may have been barefoot. I think it changed back and forth.

I told him that I just wanted to buy one steak and I’d be out of there and he said that he would turn a blind eye to the state of my feet as long as I would buy a pair of shoes in the store and so I went to the shoe department, which had all of the shoes hanging from a kind of a rack, I think, and grabbed a pair of ankle-high slippers. Not wanting to take any more time than necessary, I took the tags off and put them in my pocket, so that I could pay for the slippers with the steak.

I never made it to the butcher’s department, though, because then the head of store security stopped me to tell me that my footwear still wasn’t appropriate and then she demanded to see my back under my shirt. I turned around and lifted my shirt so she could see it and she did something. Touched it? Rubbed something on it? And said that she thought I was okay, but that I couldn’t come back into the store until I got a clean bill of health from my doctor, and then they escorted me from the store.

I texted my coworker to see if she was still in the store, but didn’t get an answer, and finally decided that we’d just order a pizza.

Oh, and as I walked back to my car, I put my hand in my pocket and felt the tags in there. I knew that I’d have to get a clean bill of health, because, even though I hadn’t been given much choice, I felt guilty about “stealing” the slippers.

Today’s Gratuitous Amazon Link is Children of Blood and Bone, by Tomi Adeyemi. There’s a lot to like here, though it wasn’t perfect (like, how come no matter how fast they traveled, they couldn’t get any kind of lead on Inan?). I’m still working on the next book in the Legacy of Orïsha series, Children of Virtue and Vengeance, which, for some reason, is nearly not as interesting to me.

Dream Journal

Since I’ve decided that my dreams might be a good source for possible fiction stories, I may decide to actually do a dream journal here.

My dad insists that all dreams mean something and usually I take that with a grain of salt and think that they’re mostly about my desire to be able to write fiction again or to have the money to travel the way I want to. This one, however, seems to be packed with at least three meanings.

I was visiting some kind of factory with Thomas. We did the factory tour and it was all very interesting. We left (the parking garage was my usual dream parking garage, in that it looked like M.C. Escher was the architect).

I decided for some reason to go back to the factory and this time the floor was quaking. I found out that the material the factor had been using was being quarried out from under the building itself and had destabilized the building.

Now, there is the obvious end-of-my-marriage interpretation, with everything being okay with Thomas and falling apart without him.

But another interpretation is something that’s been on my mind yet. And that’s. . . .

Okay, we’ll start in the last couple of weeks. In one of my Reddit communities, a poster said that they were struggling with learning to love themselves. They’d achieved all they wanted to, and they still felt unfulfilled.

My immediate reaction was that they were getting their self-esteem from their own achievements rather than from a feeling of intrinsic worth as a human being. And I realized that was a big part of my own problem. I feel like I can achieve my way to feeling better about myself.

And I haven’t achieved anything like my potential. I worry that I should push myself harder and achieve more, but there’s a part of me that recognizes that I should love myself despite not achieving what I had hoped to.

And I think that I might be putting the proverbial cart before the horse. I craved love and acceptance from my mother, and she gave me her attempt to make me an Überkind instead. If I can base my feelings of worth from who I am and that I am a human being who deserves love, maybe, just maybe, that will lead me to a place where I can achieve what I feel is my potential.

And that’s what I see in that dream. Building the factory on top of the source of its raw materials destabilized the factory. If the factory stood on its own, with the mine somewhere else, then it wouldn’t be threatening to fall into the hole that is now where the mine used to be.

Also, I shouldn’t hire M.C. Escher to design a parking garage.

Gratuitous Amazon Link time. Today we have the first book in Margaret Petersen Haddix’s Greystone Secrets series: The Strangers. Chess, Emma, and Finn Greystone find out that three children also named Chess, Emma, and Finn, and having the same birthdates have been kidnapped. Soon afterward, their own mother goes on a business trip and the three Greystone siblings begin to search for their mother and to find out what, exactly, is going on.

I have bought the second book in the Greystone Secrets series, and downloaded it to read by cellphone light during the snowstorm, but haven’t quite gotten to it yet. And, since I read The Strangers in October of 2019, even if I were to read it tonight, the Gratuitous Amazon Link is way far away. Also, it feels very weird having a two-paragraph Gratuitous Amazon Link. I don’t think I’ve ever done this before.

Let’s See If I Can Make this Quick Post Quick

Ha! That’ll never happen. I have to be up in nine hours, so I don’t want to spend all of it writing; I’d like to get *some* sleep.

Let’s think. I guess that last night’s dream will take up some words towards my 35,000 word goal.

I was at the movies? Watching a movie on television? Something like that. And the movie that was playing was one of the Harry Potter movies. I don’t know if they were the original Daniel Radcliffe ones or newer ones. But as the movie progressed, I found myself actually *in* the movie.

And the longer I was in the movie, the less Harry Potterish the movie seemed. I met a man with a small child and the man told me that he had a new wife, not the mother of the child, who, when he said her name, I recognized it as the name of a woman who had figured in a video that had gone viral in which she had been behaving badly. I don’t know what she was doing; I think she may have been mouthing off to a cashier or a waiter or something.

The group I was with ended up inside Malfoy Manor somehow, and while we were snooping around, it occurred to me, like a memory that I already had, not like something that I’d been told, that the guy I was with had a twin brother who’d died somehow.

We ended up inside Narcissa Malfoy’s wardrobe and I remembered a scene where Hermione was wandering around in there and that the very back of the wardrobe is where the most beautiful of all of Narcissa’s beautiful clothing was located.

I seem to recall having an ongoing theme of beautiful dresses in my dreams. I swear I had a dream where my mom had a hidden wardrobe of gowns in the back of her closet (or was it in our basement? dreams are weird).

This, in turn, may have been influenced by having seen a wedding gown dressing room at my local Sears when I was a kid. I didn’t know what I was looking at. I only saw a room with mirrors all over and a platform in the middle. In fact, I never saw another one until I was getting ready for my own wedding.

Anyway, Narcissa’s wardrobe was a room full of shoes and purses, laid out more like a shoe store than anything else, and then a small closet at the back. You open the small closet and there’s another type of clothing in there, like, pants and skirts, maybe and an even smaller closet. Then you open the even smaller closet and there’s another type of clothing, like tops, and a smaller closet. And then eventually you come to a very tiny closet about the size of the knee hole in a desk and that’s where the gowns were.

Something happened there and we ended up in some kind of danger and someone rescued us. It was a person of indeterminate gender dressed up in a way similar to a sandperson from Star Wars. They were wrapped in brown fabric and had some kind of mask on their face. I got the impression that the person who rescued us was the twin of the guy in our group.

When we got safely out of Malfoy Manor, we bumped into a woman who was a kind of mother figure for our group and we ran to her and I hugged her.

When I first woke up, I realized that the place we were was less like Hogwarts and more like New Rome from Rick Riordan’s mythology books. There were entire families living there, not just students.

And now that I’m thinking about it again, I realized that the entire dream took place in some kind of shelter, like maybe a cave or something.

One day fiction will come back to me and I’ll be able to parlay at least one of these dreams into a book and maybe, just maybe, be able to make enough money to survive on my own. Maybe.

I know that my Gratuitous Amazon Link should be a less gratuitous Harry Potter or Rick Riordan book, but I think I’m going to continue to go through my Goodreads list like I have been doing. So, today we have The Hidden Power of F*cking Up, by the Try Guys. In The Hidden Power of F*cking Up, each of the Guys takes an area that they feel insecure about and sets a goal for improving that area. We watch their journeys and get to enjoy the humor that the Try Guys are famous for along the way.

This Afternoon’s Dream

Wow. I’m totally failing at Camp NaNoWriMo this month. I wrote 267 words on the first and no words at all yesterday.

I have four hours left in the day, so let’s see if I can cook up a couple thousand words in that time.

This morning, Evelyn brought Mila by for the day. She came really early, so I ended up leaving her in my bedroom while my dad and I had breakfast. She barked quite a lot while I was eating, but I knew she was safe and had food and water, so I just waited it out. She stopped barking just about the time that I finished eating, so I stayed at my computer and read for a while before I went back in.

Then the thunder started. Mila was pretty distressed by the thunder, so we stayed in my bedroom. I decided to take a short nap of about an hour or so, then I slept for more than three hours.

This is what I dreamed.

I was living in a foreign country with my dad and maybe Alex. It was a very nice country, with some kind of guy ruling it (a king? a prince? dunno) and everyone seemed to have a good standard of living.

However, U2 (the band) had written a song about how poor and downtrodden some of the people of that country were and so I went to track them down and found a family living in the tunnels by the water main. That water main was their only source of water. They had one of those big wheels that shuts off a water valve, only it was designed to reroute water into a trough that they could drink from. They had tunneled one wall into a room that had three beds in it and was where the family lived and the walls of the tunnel and room were covered with some kind of gray fluffy material that may have been asbestos.

I’m not sure what order things went in. Either I met the king/prince or there was some kind of calamity that destroyed everything.

My home was destroyed and my dad disappeared, presumed dead. He’d left a lot of expensive photographic equipment behind and so I set out to figure out how to use that equipment in order to document the destruction and what was left of the former beauty of the country.

I met some people in . . . a bar? who were helping me learn how to use the camera.

And I went around photographing buildings that used to be beautiful but now weren’t. At some point, a car that was driving in front of me slid off the road and into the water and I was afraid to leap into the water myself because expensive camera equipment. I found some other people just down the river who’d seen the car go in and I offered to watch their valuables if any of them would go in and help. Two men took off their jackets and jumped in and so did a little girl. The men got the people out and the girl emerged with a bottle of something that looked like juice.

This may be when I met the king/prince and he explained that he knows he isn’t a very good king/prince but he’s the only choice the country has. He promised to raise his kids to have good values and judgment and to abdicate as soon as a kid with good judgment and values was willing and old enough to take over.

At some point there was some kind of national superhero and I ended up at Union Station in Los Angeles. My dreams have a pretty good throughline on story but I can’t explain all of them.

Somehow we managed to end up making the country better than it had been before and I moved back to my home, where it turned out that my dad had been evacuated, and he wasn’t dead at all. They also were repainting my living room, which, both in the dream and in real life, is yellow, to have a burgundy accent wall.

We fast forward about twenty years at the end of the dream to where the superhero is flying towards a boat anchored off the coast. I know that the boat contains the current ruler. The hero takes off their helmet? Cowl? and long hair spills out from underneath it the heroine walks over to a sort of covered chaise longue or something, where the current ruler sits. I see that the ruler is a queen/princess and can tell that she’s good and wise and the heroine kisses her on the lips and . . . I don’t know. I don’t really remember much more than that.

When I woke up my first two thoughts where, “What time is it?” and “Why didn’t I suggest some kind of representative democracy?”

The time was a little after 3 pm. I don’t have an answer to the other question.

For today’s Gratuitous Amazon Link, I have the currently-last book Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series, Games Wizards Play. In this volume, there is a worldwide wizarding competition called The Invitational and far from being competitors, Nita, Kit, and Dairine are appointed to be coaches for two of the competitors. I really enjoyed this one and, most of all, this book is how I discovered Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray celery-flavored pop. Nobody else I know likes it, but I love it.

I Need to Write Something Today

November 27, 2020 1 of 1

I’m not even going to lie to myself that I’m going to do more than the one post. I may not even make much of this one post.

I mean, one of my standard posts is what I had for dinner. And what I had for dinner was one human-palm-sized chunk of duck breast with barbecue sauce to make it slightly less dry.

Yeah.

So. Post.

Oh! How about if I write about the dream I remember from last night.

I was getting still another degree in education. I mean, the first one, the one I got when I was awake, was a mistake. Why would my subconscious be “Hey, why don’t you dream that you’re getting another one?”

And this was a mistake as well. In real life, I wasn’t exactly popular, but I had a few friends in school. In my dream, everyone in my program hated me. It was like grade school all over again but with adults.

And I had a class that I forgot about. This is a pretty standard dream for me. Usually in my going-back-to-college dreams I’ve forgotten that I’ve gone back to school at all until the end of the semester, when I have to somehow get myself together for finals when I know nothing about what the finals are on.

This was earlier in the semester, fortunately. How much earlier? I don’t know.

At any rate, I was with the same group of students for all of my classes and I saw them walking and caught up with them. I asked where we were going and they all just kind of looked at me and were, like, “Physical education. Duh.”

I didn’t remember having a physical education class. We all walked into the gymnasium together and they started changing into bathing suits. I realized then that we were having a swim class.

The pool was an entire room. It was like, there was a balcony that was where you stand to get into the pool, and the room itself was just water. I think this pool has appeared in my dreams before.

I believe I went in search of a bathing suit. Maybe like a bookstore or something? I’m not sure. There was some extra guy in there, and I guess it all became illogical and dreamlike after that.

I got my state park pass today, so that’s good.

I also have tomorrow and Monday off, so hopefully I’ll be able to make some actual progress on NaNoWriMo on those days.

I’m still cleaning up my Goodreads account. There are so many books from series that sounded promising but fell apart towards the end (I’m looking at you Michael Vey) and I just don’t want to revisit them at all. So I’m just assigning January 1 of the year I added them to my Goodreads list as the date I started reading them and December 31 of that year as the end date. Then my undated books will be ones that I want to reread to add accurate dates to them.

Speaking of Goodreads, our Gratuitous Amazon Link for this post is a return to the Nancy Drew series. We have The Clue in the Diary, by Carolyn Keene today.