Secrets of the Subconscious Brain

So I had another dream last night (dang, is that all I blog about these days???).

The details aren't important, so skip this paragraph if you want to. I dreamed that Trevor and I were attending a formal dance together at BYU. Except instead of being in the Wilkinson Center, we were in the Chapel Hills Mall. And a lot of my high school peers were inexplicably there too. (Also, my red dress was to die for. Wish I actually owned something like that!)

Anyway, I ran into one of my old high school friends that I haven't seen since graduation. She said, "wow, Shelece, you seem so much more confident than you did at our homecoming dance when we were 16!"

I said, "well, I hope so! I'm twice as old now as I was back then." And basically that's the moment I realized I'm twice as old as I was in high school. I've never consciously stopped to think about that before. 

That makes me feel old, but also... awesome. Hey, I've got two high school kids worth of life experience now! I am more confident and smarter and braver than I was back then. I'm not perfect, but stopping to think about how far I've come feels good. 

Hopefully I feel as awesome about it when I'm 3 times as old as I was in high school! 

Beware of Dragons

Another crazy dream for the dream journal! 

I dreamed that my in-laws moved to a fantasy country that bordered a nation of dragons. They were planning a family trip for all of their kids/kids-in-law to visit Dragon country. It was a little tricky though because Dragons were easily offended and if humans did something wrong they would eat them. Fortunately living where they did my in-laws could teach us what to do. 

First: we had to always carry Dragon currency with us (sadly just paper money in my dream instead of gold coins!). 

Second: we had to buy fancy Dragon silk clothes to wear. Regular human clothes were disgusting to Dragons. 

Third: we needed to wear... wet swimsuits? I was baffled by this until we stopped at a Dragon store to get proper attire. Turns out, the swimsuits were tight costumes that looked like animals complete with a hooded mask to pull over our faces and built in gloves to cover our hands. I picked one that looked like a goldfish. It was so tight it made me hunch forward. I realized Dragons were so anti-human they couldn't bear to see us unless we were covered up. Of course they would smell us and know what we were. I didn't want to be in this place where it was so dangerous to be who I was. 

Lost at Sea

Crazy dream last night.

Trevor and I lived on an island in a chain of islands. I was on a Relief Society committee (Relief Society is the women's organization in our church). There were 9 of us, including a couple women I know from my real life. We wanted to go visit the sisters in our congregation, but they lived on multiple islands in our chain, so the only way to go was by boat.

Our boat was small--basically just a big canoe, although we didn't use paddles to move it (motorized?). I have a terrible fear of drowning so I didn't really like traveling in the boat, but I did it. We made our visits. Finally, towards the end of our journey, I got off on an island to run an errand or something. The other sisters continued without me. And... that was the last time anyone ever saw them. On their way to their next destination, they were captured and kidnapped by pirates. A ransom note was sent, but that was it.

Then the dream fast forwarded, and it was 2 or 3 months after the kidnapping. There was still no sign of the women, and no one knew what had happened to them. Were they still alive? Where were they? I plagued by survivor's guilt. I desperately wanted to find them and I thought about them all the time, but there was nothing I could do. I kept talking to Trevor about how scary it was that I was almost taken too, that it was a 100% certainty that I would have been kidnapped if I hadn't decided to get off when I did.  I couldn't believe that I'd come so close, and I was relieved I was safe, but also feeling guilty that I was safe and the rest were lost.

My dreams can be so random sometimes! I wonder what triggered this one?

Two Story Hot Air Balloon

Last night I had an awesome dream that I wish I could say was inspired by Around the World in 80 Days, but which was probably really inspired by The Chipmunks Great Adventure movie (my very favorite from age 2 to age 8!).

Trevor and I lived in a two story hot air balloon with a couple other families. It had everything we needed, including an open air kitchen on the top floor. We floated around wherever we pleased on a quest to tour the entire world.

I woke up desperately wishing those things were real! How fun would it be to live in the sky?

Captain America and Me

Last night I had an awesome dream that involved me hanging out with Captain America AND the Winter Soldier.

They rescued me from some team of villains. I had some super powers of my own, but they were "sheep powers" (?!?!?)--which apparently involved things like reading other people's emotions (think Deanna Troi on Star Trek TNG). Basically, no defensive abilities what so ever.

Somewhere along the way, Captain America and I fell in love and started dating (yay!). But... then of course I was even more of a target, because the bad guys knew we were together and that I was a pansy. So, they were constantly after me, because that way, Captain America didn't feel like he could ever leave me alone or else I'd die. So he and the Winter Soldier stuck around with me all the time to keep me safe, but meanwhile other attacks were going on with a lot MORE people in danger. Basically I had become a liability. And I was trying to figure out if I needed to break up with him, or hole up in the Avengers building for forever, or what, to help keep other people safe. You know, the classic superhero's girlfriend dilemma.

This must be why Steve Rogers only dates women who can defend themselves. :)

Anyway, it didn't end on the happiest note, but I still give this dream 10/10 for getting to spend so much time with Steve and Bucky. Here's hoping for a sequel! :D

Dream Journal: Terminator + Back to the Future

So, here's another one for my crazy dream collection. I should note that I've never actually seen the Terminator movie (any of them, actually). My basic understanding is that the internet came alive and took over the world, and it sent back robots several times to kill Sarah Connor and John Connor to stop the resistance from happening (but they always fail). Oh, and John has to send Kyle Reese back in time [spoiler alert] to save his mom, knowing full well that Kyle will die in the attempt.... but also that Kyle will father him, so he has to go back or else John won't exist.

Somehow in my mind that got mashed together with the plot of Back to the Future... Guy goes back in time, accidentally prevents his parents from meeting, and has to convince them to fall in love after all.

The dream:

I was part of a time traveling agency, stationed in a secret bunker somewhere. I was constantly being sent on missions to go back in time and save the world. We were battling some kind of evil robot army (robots which looked eerily similar to the evil robots from the Lego Movie), which kept going back in time to try to alter history. It wasn't as straightforward to fight them as (to my understanding) it was in the Terminator. History was in constant flux from our efforts and theirs. We were never quite sure how the time stream would be effected and what they would try next. We just did our best to go back to key times and try to patch things together. We were happy when we got somewhere before the robots did, and we were also happy to get there after they had arrived, because then we'd made a correct guess and we could correct what they did.

We were led by a brave female Captain, whose name I never learned. One of the key members of our team was a guy... I never learned his name either but let's call him Kyle-Marty. We got sent back in time to help KM's parents meet. A difficult operation set sometime in the 1930s, I would guess, but we pulled it off, despite a lot of interference from the bots. Then for some reason we activated his parents as operatives and took them back to our headquarters with us.

Our next few missions were dicey. They passed by in a blur. Each time we'd go back, only to find that the robots had altered time in a way we hadn't expected, and we were scrambling to figure out how to fix things.

Finally we received specialized orders. It was time for KM to be sent back in time to go meet his future wife, Theresa (time travel is complicated. Also, in a time travel society, apparently you can come from anytime or marry someone from any time). So. First we acted out the plot of Back to the Future, why not throw in the Terminator, too? KM's parents joined our team to help out. (How weird would that be? The twenty something newlywed version of your parents coming along to help you in your dating life.) The Captain and the parents went back first to get things in position. Then KM and I tried to jump back... but we were attacked by robots and our time machine was damaged. We were supposed to meet everyone early in the day, but we didn't arrive until 10 o'clock at night, and by then the robots were in place to catch us. All we could do was flee back to headquarters.

And in the shadows behind us, one of the robots followed. She (it?) transformed to look like a human girl named Kim. Her mission was to try to keep KM from ending up with Theresa, by falling in love with her instead. In one of those magical all-knowing dream moments, I knew that she was a real threat. KM believed in the work that he did and he was committed to our time traveling cause. But, he hadn't met Theresa yet. She was the best woman for him, but if he met Kim first instead and fell in love, he would end up resenting being pushed into marrying Theresa because the time travelers said it was the the right thing to do. Then he'd turn to Kim instead, never guessing that she wasn't even a living person, and ruin the time stream by not traveling back to get together with Theresa. (Oh, the strange drama of dreams!)

At this point, I became an observer in the dream. I saw KM rush back to headquarters, a woman colleague (representing me, I think) at his heels. The guard at the door tried to wave them both down to ask about Kim, who was following along behind them, but KM was too stressed to stop and talk. I caught a glimpse of Kim morphing into some kind of monster, about to attack the guard, and then we were inside the building, and KM's parents were mad that he hadn't shown up in time to meet Theresa. KM apologized, we started to regroup a new plan, as meanwhile Kim broke into the building and made her way towards KM...

And then I woke up.

Crazy, right?

Frozen + Aladdin

So I had an interesting dream last night (don't I always?) It was some weird combination of Aladdin and Frozen. Aladdin and Jasmine were there, as well as the Sultan, but the Genie had been replaced with a large snowman (who didn't look or act like Olaf at all). Jasmine built this snowman as a child, and he'd been with the family ever since.

Well, Jasmine and Aladdin decided to get married. Her dad and the snowman were displeased because, after all, Aladdin was a thief, but they respected her wishes and they hired me as a wedding planner. (???) Jasmine wanted an ice themed wedding, which her dad thought was dumb at first, but once we started picking out crystal decorations, he got behind the idea.

So there we were, me, her dad, and the snowman, busily decorating a Church gym with crystal (because that's where princesses have their wedding receptions too, okay?). The snowman started opening up to me. In this realm, snowmen weren't something you built one day and it melted the next. Kids built them, and they went on to live normal human lifespans. (A little creepy now that I think about it). The snowman was saying that you don't get to pick the kid that makes you, and some snowmen don't get along very well with their children. But there's a saying among the snowmen, "If you don't like them now, just wait until they get older." He said most kids, as they got more mature, would get along better with their snowmen. "And if that doesn't happen, just talk to someone else. Talk to a grasshopper, or something." (Because grasshoppers are abundant when there are snowmen out?)

He told me all this while we were decorating... and then all of a sudden he got very very depressed that Jasmine was all grown up and getting married and moving away. He wanted more than anything else to just go back in time to when she was a little kid and they played together all the time.

I tried to console him, but it was to no avail.

And so I woke up. Weird dream, and it left me feeling a little sad this morning... Weird how dream emotions can seep into real life like that.

Don't mess with the Joker

WEIRD dream last night.

I was spending time with 18 (I think?) small children. I'm not really clear on their relationship to me. At one point, I'm pretty sure they were all my siblings somehow... but at different points of the dream, they were from an orphanage or something like that. Most of the dream was fairly innocuous... but towards the end, the Joker made an appearance. And he'd amassed some kind of child army he was training to do his bidding.

Anyway... at the end of the dream, I was in a barn with all of the kids and all of my coworkers from HRC. Then the Joker showed up and let us know he'd set up some kind of explosives, so the building was about to burn down. He left. We were all a little startled by how bluntly he gave us that news. But of course there was nothing else for it. We started evacuating the children and clearing out the furniture (??? in the dream this seemed like an important step).

I grabbed five little girls (including a baby---maybe one year old, but who could speak as well as an adult) and herded them outside, but I wasn't sure where to take them. I didn't want them to stay too near the barn, or they might still be hurt by the fire. But I didn't know where the Joker was. I didn't want to leave them somewhere he could snatch them. I was really stressed out, trying to find a place to take them, knowing there were still several other children I needed to go back for (although in real life, with that many other adults present, they would all have been taken care of). Finally I took them to another building across a field... some old abandoned pioneer house.

One of the little girls said, "But... you know the Joker never says what he really means, right?" All of a sudden I remembered how he worked, and I realized by evacuating the children from that building, we were playing right into his hands somehow. He was probably going to kidnap them or worse. I needed to go back and warn the others, but I didn't know what he was really planning and I wasn't sure how to protect the children. I was stressed out of my mind.

The baby discovered a trap door in the house and crawled down some stairs. When I followed her, I discovered Joker's child army doing drills in the basement.

Weird, yeah? A random dream, but I wonder a little bit... am I feeling helpless in some important aspect of my life or something?

My own version of Ironman 3

Last night I had a dream about Ironman, of all things. My own version of Ironman 3.

Somehow in the Avengers movie, he'd developed the ability to time travel. It was really hard to do and took a lot of energy. I assume also that he'd age faster if he kept time traveling. He didn't like to do it.

But, he felt like he had to, to save lives. He was working with a military team assigned to him. He sent them in to explore an alien spacecraft, which he had scanned and was pretty sure was safe. It wasn't safe. It blew up and killed all 4 soldiers.

He felt awful. He hated to time travel... He felt like he couldn't keep going back in time over and over again, at some point he had to just live his life... but how could he not go back and save them? It was his fault they had died--he'd sent them on to that ship.

So, he goes back and saves them. But he's feeling depressed and overwhelmed with his responsibilities. (Side note: There was no Pepper in this dream... She'd been replaced with an attractive young redhead soldier, who Ironman insisted on calling "Popcorn". "That's not my name!")

His mom comes to visit. She was alive in this dream, and some kind of weird supernatural or alien being. Anyway, they get to talking about his dad... and all of a sudden, Tony hatches a plan to go back in time and prevent himself from being born so he can stop stressing about time traveling all the time.

And... that's when I woke up. It's amazing the kind of stories our brains can cook up while we sleep, yeah?

I think part of why I dreamed this is last night I was going through GoodReads trying to find something new to read, and I read some reviews on the Time Traveler's Wife a little before I went to bed...