A Grain of Salt

Objectification

I tend to have very boring dreams--case in point, one a couple of weeks ago where I was manually deleting songs from my iPod. (I was going through a Mason Jennings playlist and was deleting the songs that I thought were duplicates, realizing too late that I was getting rid of the originals--a weird, boring sort of anxiety dream, the cause of which I still haven't quite figured out.)

Anyway, last night I had another boring dream, but one that was bizarre enough to comment on: I dreamt that I was strawberry ice cream. Not that I was eating strawberry ice cream, or buying it -- that I WAS strawberry ice cream. Or, to be more specific, I was about to be turned into strawberry ice cream. See, I was in a castle on an island far, far way from land, and there were two ways to get back to shore: swim through the frigid, shark-infested waters, or temporarliy turn into a batch of strawberry ice cream, which could be transported by a pre-existing pneumatic tube under the water (in a manner similar to BART, or NYC subways) and pop back up on the other side. I opted for the ice cream, then had a panicked dream moment wondering what, exactly, it would feel like to be strawberry ice cream, and then be reconstituted as myself.

I wish I could tell you. Instead my dream suffered from a jump cut and I found myself not becoming a vat of ice cream, but instead being plunged into the cold dark waters, left alone to swim to safety.

What does it mean? (And, side note, how weird would it be if in order to take public transportation under water, you were required to become an inanimate object?)

This reminds me of the time when I was teaching Latin and dreamt I was a passive verb.

This is the blog for Salt Magazine.

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One more thing: last night, I had a very involved dream right before I woke up about how I was supposed to be working on pitches for the Colbert Report's series, "Better Know a District." What does that mean?

Miso Soup

Hi. I'm waiting for Flash to embed a video clip right now. Has anyone ever spent an afternoon embedding video clips into Flash? If so, you'll understand why I am on a different screen on my computer, writing this blog post: I am going fucking crazy.

Anyway, here's my dream from last night. I'm in high school chorus. We're performing Handel's Messiah (the Hallelujah Chorus, to be exact) and I'm supposed to do a solo. This is horrifying; I hate solos. But even worse, all the words to the 'chorus had been rewritten to be about the topic of miso soup. And I didn't know them. Fast forward to the performance; I'm standing there on stage desperately flipping through a menu looking for the miso soup listing and can't find it any place. Someone shows me their menu, on which miso soup is listed, but it's not the right description: it won't fit the music at all. Suddenly I'm running down the street, in desperate search of a Japanese restaurant.

Thoughts?

California Dreaming

Catherine here, just realizing that I've had a series of really weird dreams recently. And they didn't include beating Gene's geography mastery. 74% accuracy, people! They teach something in Brooklyn right!

No, my dreams have been more of a compulsive nature, and many have focused on my teaching days. Last weekend, for example, on Saturday night I dreamt that I was back at the school where I taught, and there was a show being put up of the boys' woodshop creations. I was walking up the stairs as a parade of students passed me carrying wooden boats. The teacher goes by and says, proudly, "We spent $24,000 on the hulls alone!" In my dream, I got a little indignant about why they'd spend so much on model boat hulls, but I shouldn't have criticized, because the next scene was in the school dining hall/assembly room, where there was a ceramics show going on (what was with the arts and crafts?). This, apparently I'd had a part in, because the dream-Catherine (kind of like the dream-Laurey in Oklahoma!) is excellent at crafting jade-colored vases and japanese folding screens made entirely out of porcelain. At the end of that particular dream sequence, we switched to the outdoors, where I was running down an enormous field, jumping over imaginary hurdles in the manner of a gazelle.

Dream two: when I'm feeling awkward or nervous, I have a habit of stacking people's change. You know, all the quarters together, heads up, topped by the nickels, topped by pennies and then dimes? So last night, apparently something was going on, because I dreamt that I was in a field, sitting in a pile of spare change that I believe belonged to my best friend from third grade. I had coin sleeves and was gleefully gathering quarters to stack in them (I remember counting 101 before waking up). The strange thing about this dream is that I started to wake up in the middle of it and tried to stop myself because I was enjoying it so much.

Then, after I'd fallen back asleep, I returned again to teaching, where I was giving a lesson on fractals to sixth graders, but instead of leading the class, one of my students was teaching me. He gave me an exercise sheet with half circles printed on it and told me to create fractals, then went off to assist the rest of the class. Lite FM was playing on an in-school stereo system that, surprisingly, I hadn't noticed during my two years at the actual school. When he came back to check on my progress, I hadn't been able to complete any of the exercises.

Gene, beat those!

Multiplying by the Reciprocal in Iraq

Ways to tell that you feel a sense of concern and lack of control over current events: you dream that you have been sent to the sand dunes (?) of Iraq to teach people how to divide decimals. Thanks to a huge flood that passes through the dunes approximately every fifteen seconds of your dream, you are constantly thrown off track, being forced to deal with small American school boys collecting colored bottle caps and young girls collecting sea shells as you are thrown from dune to dune. Your parents are trying to arrange a midnight brunch at which the only thing on the menu is calamari, and you have just been evacuated from your plane, which has crashed into the ocean. Also involved: a red and yellow tricycle.

Interpretations?

Money for my Grandmother

I am about to leave my parents' apartment to go to a casino, unclear why. My grandmother stops me, gives me three nickels, and says to bet them on "x, y and z" in the nickel slot machine. At the time, this makes sense. In the casino, I scurry around betting my own money, always winning, and am about to leave when I remember my grandmother's three nickels. I bet them, one at a time. X, nothing. Y, nothing. I go to hit Z but type in the wrong letter (because it is a "typing" slot machine) and begin to worry that by mistyping, I have now messed up fate--surely z would have won! Luckily for me, the machine claims an internal error and asks me to enter it again. I do so, and win $10,000, which comes out in a thick wad of 20s. Jumping with glee (oh, grandma will be so happy!) I ask the women behind the desk if they have an envelope (despite the fact that the wad of bills is a foot thick); they give me a blank check. And then, as I'm preparing to skip out of the casino to deliver the cash to gma, a brilliant idea hits me: I should start a line of underwear with a small velcro patch on the front, that corresponds to a penny/nickel with a small velcro patch on its back, and then you can call them your "lucky underwear" and wear them whenever you go gambling.