two dreams… and then a third!

One benefit to not feeling like awakening in the mornings (it’s not as depressing as it sounds) is that when I sleep more, I remember my dreams more.  Last night, I had two that I remember well.

In the first, a couple of friends of mine from the days at the dental school had been traveling together around the world, and they’d contacted me to see if I’d join them for their winter sports portion of the trip.  It basically started in the Alps and skiing and somehow ended at the Winter Olympics for fun.  In real life, I like these girls, but we certainly aren’t as good friends as would be making this trip together.  I can’t remember the second girl, but the first was LaJean, a super nice now-dentist who actually made it to contestant’s row on The Price is Right a couple of summers ago.

Anyway, I agreed to come, and met up with them somewhere in Europe.  We had great fun reuniting, talking about the things we were up to, and planning our skiing vacation.  On our first ski day, we were interviewed by some XTREME European sports show reporter, in his 40’s with leathery skin and semi-spartan orange hair, about our trip and our eventual attendance of the Winter Olympics.  Then we started skiing, and on our first trip down a slope, at the bottom, it became apparent that my bindings weren’t set properly as I hit some slush and my ski stuck.  I stopped—totally gracefully, mind you—and, finding it difficult to maneuver back up the bit of slope to the ski, turned to ask my friends if they’d go get it for me.  As I turned, however, I noticed that they weren’t paying attention to me and were almost to the front of the ski lift line, and I couldn’t catch their ears or eyes before they had gone.  I removed my other ski and walked up to retrieve my first, and decided I needed to sit and wait for them at the bottom so they’d know where I was when I went to get my binding adjusted.  Only, they never came back.  I waited for hours and they never came back.  Boring dream!

In my second dream, four of us were supposed to go camping, but everything was wrong.  One of us couldn’t make it until later, after dark, and so we decided to camp near a trailer so he could find us easily.  It was my job to navigate him to us, so I spent half the evening on the phone with him, and we had a very difficult go of it.  In the meantime, the family living in the trailer started having blow-up arguments and occasionally gave us grief about being on their property, making for a very tense night of it.  When our friend finally arrived, it wasn’t possible to have much fun because the trailer people had gone into full-on crazy mode, playing loud music, fighting with one another, and shining spotlights onto our tent just to mess with us.  I advocated taking off since we weren’t going to enjoy ourselves, but the other three guys wanted to stay and try to go to sleep early so the rednecks wouldn’t bother us.  We ended up in an argument about this, because their desire to stay didn’t make any sense to me, and in the end, everyone started ignoring me and trying to go to sleep.

So there you have it!  Two dreams where I was ignored.  Make of that what you will.  I know those were boring, so I’ll conclude with a third dream, which was actually pretty awesome, that I had last weekend.

So.  A group of five friends and I had arrived at some massive Spanish mansion—you know, the kind with the huge courtyard in the middle and the wide verandas circling the floors of the building facing the courtyard—and we were taking a tour around the grounds.  It was beautiful.  The gardens were stunning, the servants gracious and happy, and the mansion itself was beyond belief.  We were all giddy that we were going to be spending time there.  Suddenly, though, as we were walking around the third or fourth floor veranda, and we were leaning against the railing and looking over the gorgeous courtyard, robots stepped out from behind every visible doorway, on every floor.  They had skinny hydraulic legs and articulating necks.  These were advanced robots. Actually, now that I think of it, they looked a lot like real-life versions of the Robot Ghost of Christmas Past from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, if that helps you visualize.

Without warning, the robots opened fire (we didn’t even notice that they had guns!), but they weren’t firing at all of us.  Only one of us was shot, but he was riddled with bullets in mere seconds, and he fell forward over the railing, splattering onto the tile floor 50 feet below.  The gunfire ceased, we all ran to the railing to witness the inevitable; he was dead, and blood was visibly pooling around him.

Then, my dream got strangely cinematic.  I was no longer seeing things from my own point of view.  Instead, I was floor-level, right in front of my deceased friend.  Only, from this angle, I could see that his body wasn’t actually touching the ground—there was a three-inch cushion of air between him and the floor!  The “camera” panned up to show us all looking down in horror, and then panned back down to reveal that my dead friend had opened his eyes, and they were bright red.  Not with blood, but with evil!  He smiled and glanced around, without betraying his status with animation, at his robot army, and mouthed the words “get them.”  Without delay, the robots all began marching to us.

My vision returned to my body, and the five of us, in a panic, hurriedly decided that the only chance we’d have would be to split up and run, which we did.  The heavy, metal footsteps of the robots were a terrible, menacing soundtrack to my attempts at finding a useable hiding place.  I eventually settled into a large bathroom, where I crammed into the cabinet beneath one of the sinks (yes, one of the sinks—I told you this place was fancy).  Eventually, I heard a robot enter the bathroom, and I could see his legs stomping by through a crack in the door of the cabinet.  He wasn’t alone!  He had a thick steel chain by which he was leading a dog.  “Thank God,” I thought, “that I thought to spray the perfume I found in the bathroom all over this door.  I hope it masks my scent from the dog.”  The dog sniffed the cabinet for a long while, slowly, even pensively, and I was sure my position was given, but to my surprise, he sneezed, likely from the excessive perfume, and the robot, having grown impatient, jerked him away with the chain.

And then I awoke.  Sorry.