Tag Archives: dreaming

Dreaming while you sleep…

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It’s always been rare when I remember dreaming at night. Maybe I’m recalling the one I had last night so vividly because I’ve had some variation of this dream four or five times over the last few weeks. Each time is slightly different, but each one has been a variation on a theme.

There’s not a power in heaven or earth that could get me to go back to teaching. In fact, I’m pretty sure my certificate remains revoked in Maryland since I walked out in the middle of the year when I quit. Still, there my dream self is, right in the classroom, walking the hallway, or more recently in the admin office raising three kinds of hell. Each time I have this dream the situation is more farcical than the last.

My brief teaching career was enlightening in a lot of ways, but it’s not something I feel a real need to revisit in my sleep. I’m sure there’s some important message my subconscious is trying to send through the static, but it would be more helpful, perhaps, if it contacted me during normal business hours instead of at 2:30 in the damned morning.

I just hope like hell I can sleep tonight without another visit to the past that never was.

Another chicken dream…

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I had chicken for dinner last night. As happens more often than not under these circumstances, my subconscious treated me to yet another of what I’ve fondly come to think of as “chicken dream.”

This one featured a very vivid sequence in which I was driving the Jeep along the edge of a park or maybe a town square. It was tree lined and bucolic and filled with protestors wearing red shirts. As I passed, rolling slowly, they began spilling over into the street. One of the red shirts, armed, and now standing in the middle of the street leveled a rifle (hunting, not assault). I have a stark recollection of staring down the open barrel – its bore looking like an ever-widening maw – and then instinctively popping the clutch and knocking the unknown rifleman out of the way.

Rather than fleeing as would probably have been advisable in a real-world mob scene, dream me pulled to the curb on the next block, locked the Jeep, and checked into a hotel. The next morning the protestors were gone, but so was the Jeep. The entire square looked pristine and as if no one had even the audacity to walk on the grass the day before.

I was getting decidedly surly looks from townspeople who were gathering in small groups of two or three people, whispering as I passed. After scouring the surrounding streets for the Jeep, my dream self gave up, commenting “Well, I guess I just live here now.”

And that’s where I jolted awake in the very early hours of Tuesday morning. My inner self was more than happy to go along with the crowds, running down an armed bandit, and choosing to stick around overnight for no apparent reason – but even in a dream state it couldn’t get past the idea that I’d voluntarily live in “downtown” anywhere.

I’ve said it before, but I really do need to stop having chicken for dinner. It truly makes for some of the dumbest dreams.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Surprise that hurricanes cause infrastructure damage. Reports this week say that “a lack of power and phone service in the areas of Florida flattened by Hurricane Michael last week was hindering efforts” to respond to and recover from the event. Well yeah. That happens in a natural disaster. That happens when one of the strongest storms to hit the United States in all of recorded history flattens everything resembling modern infrastructure that happened to be in its immediate path. FEMA, the media, local governments and anyone who knows anything about emergency preparedness has been screaming for years that people, individuals, need to do more to be ready when the unexpected happens (not that an approaching major hurricane is an “unexpected” happening here in the 21st century). If you insist on staying in or returning to what is, by its very definition, a disaster area before even basic power and communications infrastructure is available you’d damned well better be prepared to generate your own power or rely on battery backup and understand that winds that can knock down brick and mortar buildings can surely strip the bits and pieces off of a modern cell tower while it tears hard-wired communications networks asunder. Basic infrastructure like power and telephony took generations to build out. Screaming complaints that it hasn’t all been restored in a week or two is unrealistic and makes you sound like a idiot.

2. More chicken dreams. It’s not a sure thing, but I’d estimate that close to 50% of the time I eat a chicken-based dinner, I end up with wildly realistic dreams a few hours later. They’re not quite what the reading defines as “lucid” dreams and they’re not nightmares, but these chicken-fueled dreams are wildly realistic – in a Hollywood back lot kind of way. The most recent found me walking through a storefront I knew well as a kid into an interior that had hints of what “should” have been there but that was dominated by people and things that would have no business or reason for being there at all. I think I’m going to have to stop eating chicken for dinner. It’s not that I mind these dreams as I’d just rather not spend the time from 2:00-2:10 am laying awake wondering what the actual fuck is going on in my head.

3. People. Yes, people are a perennial target of my ire, but as far as I’m concerned it’s a consistent refrain because it’s so richly deserved. This week alone I’ve observed people walking out into traffic without looking, nearly sideswipe me on the highway (again without looking), (attempt to) jump into the checkout line as if there weren’t already three people standing in it, and generally moving about in the world as if oblivious to anything outside of their own arm’s reach. I really have no idea how more people aren’t apoplectically livid about their day to day interactions with people. Maybe you’re all just better adjusted than I am… or maybe you’re just too nice to say it out loud in public.