Since I didn’t have a broad foundation for the blog, I didn’t continue writing. I’ve still had some dreams that I think are significant, but have been recording them the old-fashioned way (pen and paper).

I’m happy to say that this little venture didn’t discourage me from blogging altogether, in fact I really enjoyed it and have decided to make a new blog. I’ve been ‘cooking up’ an idea for several months and started writing last night. I hope you like it!

The dream takes place at a beautiful lake. There are a lot of people that I know there having a good time; I think it may be some kind of work function. We are all milling about chatting, tossing frisbees, etc. when a minor celebrity pulls up in a huge truck with an expensive-looking little boat hitched to it. He lowers the boat into the water and his entourage gets in the boat, but he decides to come and chat with the ladies attending our function. He is very charming and says he wants to swim so he invites us all to get in the lake and cannonballs in.

We all follow him- me, A and R who are very close friends, and T, who also knows A and R. A, who is a very boisterous and exuberant young lady, follows him in first and dives into the water followed by T and myself. R hangs back and stays on the shore; she is one of those young women who can completely capture almost anyone’s attention with her beauty and charm if she wants to, and she already seems to have captured our celebrity’s attention; he quickly swims close to the shore near her despite a collecting throng in and around the water near him.

T and myself start to make our way over to all the action when one of us notices that A hasn’t come up for air yet. We wait anxiously for a few seconds, then I dive down. No sign of her. T stays and I swim over to the crowd; I have no idea how good a swimmer A is and think that perhaps she could have dived deep, swam underwater and surfaced near to where all the people were gathering. I can’t see now whether she has joined the crowd or not; there are too many people. I look over my shoulder to Twhere we entered the water. She is diving and coming up with a panicked look on her face. I yell to R, “Is A over there?”

She looks at me with a frown; I guess I interrupted her. I yell louder, undeterred, “Hey! Can you see A from over there?We can’t find her-”

“Why do you think you’re better than me?” she says, “You think I don’t care about her too?”

Puzzled and irritated by her reaction, I blurt out something about A not coming back up for air after what has now become, horrifically, about two minutes. I swim back to T, who has now come up out of the water with news, “I just felt something!”

I duck under the water, using the man-made wall at this edge of the lake to force myself down deeper than before. I feel my foot kick against what must be a human limb and somehow, though I am no great swimmer, manage to release the wall, swim down and grab her arm. I grab and pull and it feels like I am pulling her out of something- a hole in the wall?- it doesn’t matter, she comes out as I push away from the wall holding her little, cold arm crossed in both of my arms tight. I look up- or what I hope is up- and kick, kick, kick. At first I think I’m going to make it ok but then my chest starts to get tight. It gets tight and then it starts to burn. The burning continues and grows in my chest until it has to explode, there’s no way it won’t, but I know I will keep kicking up and up, holding her arm tight even if my lungs demand to be filled and as I open my mouth in answer to the demand, gambling on the chance I will hit the surface in the next few moments as I have to breathe now, anything to fill the burning, imploding lungs now, I wake up in my own bed with my chest burning.

Last night I had a long, multistage dream. The last part of it seemed significant to me so I thought I’d share.

I am a counselor at a large youth camp with high-school age attendees. At first I think it is a youth camp for girls, then I realize there are young men there too, but there is only one boy for every ten or fifteen girls.

On the second day of the camp, we come under demonic attack. I don’t know how we know, but everyone just feels something bad is going to happen. We all go to the chapel/sanctuary to pray.

While we are praying, two of the young men stand up and start shouting and waving guns in the air. They are sitting very close to one another but I don’t think they planned this together because one of them seems very surprised. The surprised one gives up his gun right away, but the other one- the one who stood up first- is still threatening people. I don’t know what to do but then i realize I am one of the oldest ones there and need to take responsibility, so I grab the barrel of the gun and push it up in the air just as he fires it. I wonder how I got the strength to do that b/c he is stronger than I am.

I start talking to the young man. I tell him how great it is that even though the gun went off, no one got hurt and really everything is going to be ok now if he will just give me the gun. He ends up giving me the gun, then he breaks down screaming and crying. The girls around him grab him and restrain him, praying and trying to calm him down.

One last thing I noticed is that there were no older male authority figures at this camp. This was especially obvious as I held the gun that I had wrestled away from the boy, wondering what I would do with it, what would happen if one of the young men tried to take it from me, etc.

I wonder if this dream is significant. Obviously, there is something to be said about the culture of violence in America and how much of our entertainment (movies, TV, video games) is rich with violence. I am not sure how I feel about whether or how that effects young people or people in general- what do you think?

More significant, in my opinion, is the lack of male authority, therefore I think the dream may also be a representation of what could happen in America/ the American church if the current trend of fatherlessness and lack of male spiritual authority/ leadership in the home and church continues. What do you think?

That being said, I just want to say something about my church, Every Nation Tallahassee. I am so proud of the pastoral staff and basically all the men who have stepped up into leadership roles in my church. They are all great men of God, strong leaders, and are fulfilling a role that is so necessary and unfortunately vacant in many churches today: they are godly role models for our young men and boys. I have never thought about this before, but now I realize that in the event of emergency there would be plenty of men in my church willing and available to step up and lead, that gives me great comfort; not that women cannot lead, but I know there are some things I just wouldn’t feel comfortable or safe doing and appreciate the fact that I will never be left with a job that is not right for me just because the person that is better suited for that job is unavailable.

An employee has been straightening out the area and she tells me to please put everything back neatly once I am done looking. This is kind of irritating because she says it in kind of a whiny way and because isn’t it sort of my job to look through the stuff just like it’s her job to straighten it up? Also, who said I wasn’t going to straighten things up once I was finished?

I brush it off and continue looking. Looks like there’s not really anything I want. But then I try on this cute green hat… uh oh. Here she comes again looking all irritated. What a brat. She tells me again to please put things back nicely once I am done with them. I tell her I’m not done, that ‘s the whole point and go complain to her manager.

Then I am in a high school and some girl is getting married. All of her party’s dresses look awful as does hers but she looks so happy I don’t want to tell her.

Then I go outside and Sam and I along with one of Sam’s sisters get in this flying machine. It is like a little, tiny wooden prop plane and Sam is flying it. We are flying around this big wooden structure. It is like a large hallway on stilts that is shaped like a square. Some parts are completely or partially enclosed by either wood or glass or a thick plastic sheeting or a combination. Others are completely open. Sam’s dad is in the building and we are playing a game where we have to hit each other with our hands or sticks. We in the ‘plane’ are one team and Sam’s dad is on a team of his own consisting only of him.

I gain a point when we close in on Sam’s dad and I hit him, but he says it’s his point because he actually hit me. Then we fly away and I find a long bone hanging off one of the trees and use it to try and hit Sam’s dad, but he grabs it and the head of the bone breaks off. Then Sam takes the bone and tries to hit his dad with it. I keep thinking of how Sam’s dad kind of reminds me of a monkey climbing around in there, leaning out and trying to hit us.

Brittany was annoying me because she had grown taller than me and was teasing me about being short. We were measuring each other. I remember feeling that in my past if I had looked up at people more, maybe I would have grown taller as well.

There was a piece of artwork in the home (I think it was Margie’s home) that I then tried to look at and figure out. It was made of metal and string, thin metal posts sticking up out of the circular base with strings attached and criss-crossing everywhere inside of the area between the posts.

There were charms hanging off the strings that were all circular like a small coin and had a shape engraved on both sides. For example, one had a butterfly or moth symbol engraved on it. Another had a shape like a head of wheat. I think they were all natural symbols.

When you looked above the ‘sculpture’ you could see the seasons. What I mean by that is that when you looked above it, packets of paper appeared that rotated and had landscapes representing different seasons on them. They were not there until you looked at them.

Suddenly everyone was holding kittens. The kittens were trained to go poop in a toilet, but not to flush. We all thought this was hilarious. Somebody also had a baby with them, and I got to hold him and babysit for a while. My mom arrived and helped me. He was a really, really cute little baby.

Then we all went to the mall, but it was a mall on FSU campus. I started to have a fever and had to go to the doctor, but for some reason since I don’t actually have a primary care doctor yet, I had to go to Thagard. Luckily there was a Thagard clinic at the mall. Unluckily it was crappy.

When I went in the doctor said (this is where you should stop reading if you have problems with blood) he would have to draw two tubes of blood. Now I am not a wimp when it comes to that kind of stuff, but they do have a really hard time getting blood out of my veins bc my veins are so small. It’s not out of the ordinary for them to stick 2 or 3 times before they get it in the vein.

So I let the guy know, hey, I’m a hard stick. Use my right arm b/c people tend to have more luck and use a small needle please. Well, homeboy goes and gets the type of needle they use when you are DONATING blood. Not only that, because we are in a crap clinic he takes me into this little back room and there is no place to sit down!!!

So I am standing up and luckily he gets it in on the second stick (oh yeah, maybe my brain just filled this in when I woke up, but if you ever read this post I made where I said you can’t feel pain in your dreams? yeah… LIE!!!) but after he gets it in, the dude LEAVES ME!!! So for a while, I’m like, ok, this is not too bad. But then things start to go wrong.

For one, I actually have to hold the tube of blood in my hand and the blood starts leaking. That’s not so bad. It’s a big mess but hey, I am not going to have to clean it up. It is going all over my hand and dripping down onto the floor, and you know how blood is, it smears everywhere and even a little looks like a lot.

Second complication. My blood stops flowing through the needle. This always happens when I give blood. They tell you to keep squeezing something like a tennis ball or to make a fist and keep pumping it, so I do. Which brings us to the third and final complication, which is that it FREAKING HURTS.

I don’t know what to do, so I start to cry. It’s not that it hurts THAT bad, it’s more just the injustice of being left here without even a place to sit down with a huge needle in my arm making a mess with my own blood. It is running from the injection site down my arm now. At one point I call out to the doctor guy, who makes some BS response I can’t remember now. I decide to leave the room and go find my family.

On the way I decide I’ve got to pull out the needle or people will think I am a crazy woman. So I steel myself and pull the needle out. It hurts but not as bad as I thought. However since I didn’t have a tourniquet, it is already bruising. Lovely. A fat purple nightcrawler squirming up my arm. I find a bathroom and wash my hands and find some Woody (from Toy Story) bandaids randomly and put a big one over the site. It must be Toy Story 2 because Woody has the little dot on his head from when the kid burned him with the manifying glass.

I don’t even get the little piece of cotton. I am upset about this. My arm still hurts.

I am on the top level of the mall, so I try to go downstairs. There is an arrow pointing which way to go. I follow it but am mostly paying attention to my arm. Then I look up and realize I am about to walk off the upper level of the mall. You know how there are usually guardrails? Well in this mall they don’t believe in guardrails. The floor just ends.

But all of a sudden I hear a voice from the bottom level of the mall. It says, “Don’t worry, the stairs are right here! Just keep on coming!” It is the voice of Senator Hillary Clinton. I walk slowly to the edge, and sure enough, there are the stairs. I climb down. The Senator smiles at me warmly. I find it very odd. I’m still not voting for you, but thanks! I think. Then I wake up.

I am in the woods somewhere, catching bugs. The bugs I am catching are supposed to be really good to eat and I am going to take them to some sort of banquet which is also in the woods. Someone also gives me a platter of octopus to take to the banquet. I trap the bugs in a cage and leave them in a shed and take the octopus to the banquet first. When I go back for the bugs, they start attacking me because they don’t want to be eaten. There are also bats that are attacking me. So I tell the bugs I won’t eat them, I will let them go.

Then somebody gets married. I don’t know who the person is but she has red hair. I have no idea whether this is what the banquet was for or not.

Then my cousin Melissa tells me she is pregnant- which I know cannot be true unless she has all of a sudden decided to marry her boyfriend and/or start a family, which i HIGHLY doubt. Also I meet another one of my friends, Andrea, who is pregnant. (In real life Andrea just had a baby- congratulations!!!) We talk about Melissa being pregnant. Then Melissa starts to have her baby. She was going to have her baby at home for some reason, and I think our grandma was going to be like her midwife or something. It was WEIRD. So I was trying to get a hold of Grandma when I woke up.

We go in to the store and go to a place in one dark corner mostly sectioned off by bookshelves. My brother and parents are with me. There is a lady at the desk who is helping my parents. I see an urn in the corner that I want to get. It has a picture of a frog on it and a poem. I can’t remember the words to the poem, but basically they are saying that since God made all creatures with such wonderful complexity, he must care for them all when they die, even things as small and seemingly insignificant as an insect.

I wake up crying.

I go back to sleep and drift off into an episode of sleep paralysis. I sort of dream while I am in the episode that I am petting Ivan, but he starts to turn to ash while I am petting him. I try to grab him but he slips away and my hands are full of ash and his hair. He had such gleamingly white, brilliant hair. When he was outside it caught the sun… It doesn’t seem right that he was burned; I don’t understand why my parents did that. I started to hear crackling noises… then I was back in bed trying to wake up, but I couldn’t move anything but my left foot. I couldn’t breathe. My breathing was too shallow. I was suffocating.

I panic, as I always do when this happens. I start to try to breathe more heavily, hoping that the lack of oxygen will force my body to wake up all the way or that the sound will wake up Sam. I start to move my left foot up and down, up and down, like I’m pumping the brake in my car. I try to move my legs but they are so heavy and I am powerless. I think the movement of my foot tickles Sam. He rolls over in bed. I wake up gasping for air.

In real life, not in my dream.

Anyways, here was my dream from last night.

I’m home visiting my family. My parents decided to go ahead and adopt ‘Spanky’:, so we go upstairs to meet him. Mom must have just given him a bath because he was in her bathroom, where she usually bathes the dogs.

Spanky is fat and lazy. He doesn’t want to play, he just wants to be petted. He is a deep disappointment to bull terriers everywhere.

I’m sure in real life Spanky is not like that. But no dog will ever replace Ivan.

Then the woman goes away. I think she is trying to sell us her house. It is very old and decrepit-looking from the outside but clean and nice on the inside. Sam appears and I tell him I could probably take of the lawn by myself since it is so small. We go inside and all of the walls are painted very bright colors (blues, pinks and purples). I like it.

We come back outside and look at the outside of the house itself. We notice there is a huge owl on the roof of the house. It is almost as big as a man and looks almost human. Sam puts on a long beard and climbs up onto the roof of the house. He puts on sunglasses too. Now Sam and the owl look like brothers.

One of the boys goes and tries to make himself a grilled cheese sandwich, but he doesn’t know how to use the stove, so he toasts the bread and then tries to melt the cheese between the toast slices. It’s sad. Then I try to make them all real grilled cheese sandwiches, but I can’t find the stove.

All of a sudden I realize we aren’t in their house anymore, we are in some kind of school or camp cafeteria. I really want to get them grilled cheese sandwiches so I ask the cafeteria worker if I can use her stove and a pan (I already have the bread and cheese). She says yes but then her boss comes and makes me fill out paperwork. Brenda (the kids’ mom) comes and picks them up. I never get to make the sandwiches.

Then Sam finds me and we leave the kids to travel to Atlanta. We watch the sun rise as we are driving and it is beautiful. It seems like we are driving high above everything. We have to go through a long tunnel even higher up in the air, REALLY high, that is only one lane. It looks almost like a roller coaster that you drive through. It is scary and we are going real fast and the way Sam is driving is freaking me out.

Anyways we are in the bed of this pickup going down a long country highway. We need to hijack the truck and get to the place where the real research is kept so we can make this thing public. We start attacking the driver two by two, biggest ones first. I am the second smallest so I attack last with the smaller guy. We somehow end up getting to our destination but I don’t remember how. The researcher guy is having a party and we eat birthday cake when noone is looking. It is really good and somehow we all get little tiny party hats.

The next day we steal away in the researcher’s backpack to some coffee shop where he is going to meet a lady that has the real research. I meet one of the therapists at the place I work (in real life) and somehow she recognizes me even though I’m a mouse now. She’s down with helping us. So we create a diversion and she steals the paperwork. Then we go make lots of copies.

I think I am attending the school. They are going to show a movie in one of the classes this afternoon and I am really looking forward to it. I know one of the people in the movie. She is my aunt ‘V’. (In real life this person is ‘homosexually-identified’)

All of a sudden I am in the movie. V is dressed up as a blue cat with her hair dyed blonde (remember Zoobilee Zoo?), but it is her. She is filming in front of a live audience and they are all laughing at her. She likes that they are laughing, but the thing is, I don’t think it is funny. She has hooks in her skin and tiny lines like fishing wire from the ceiling are connected to the hooks. Twice during the performance the lines lift her off the ground and she wiggles around lying in midair. Everyone laughs a lot like this is the funniest thing ever. It doesn’t look like it is hurting her but it should.

Anyways, the first time it happens they put music on when they lift her up and treat it like a dance. There are people dancing around her like she is the lead dancer, but she is just wiggling in the air suspended from these hooks. The audience is laughing so loud.

The second time they take her away. It looks like they are taking her into some sort of factory. The lines carry her into one of a series of tunnels. You can hear machinery inside the tunnels but can’t see it. The hooks carry her in and rip out of her skin but you can’t see any blood on her because of the makeup. They are doing the same thing to lots of other people that are dressed like cats. They are screaming but it’s coming out like cat noises. Because it’s coming out like cat noises instead of human noises people think it’s funny, but it’s not funny.

There is a lot of water in the factory, almost like it is flooded but it’s supposed to be this way, I think. I am sitting on the edge of something like a big slide. My brother is with me higher up on the slide. I want to leave. Before I can leave something jumps up at me from the water. It has a white face like a skull with the skin stretched too tight around it. It has eyes that are so black and its mouth is so black and it opens its mouth and it screams at me. I put my hand out and shove it back into the water, but it scared me, somehow my hand ended up in its mouth. it frightened me so much that I ran away and I left my brother with the thing.

I become lucid and I try to go back but I can’t. It is like I am between waking and sleeping now. So I try to fight it even though it feels like the thing is gone. I start speaking in tongues, which I didn’t know you could do in a dream. Then I start to rebuke it loud. I tell it to leave me, my brother, my husband alone and get out of our homes. My voice is loud and I can see it carry through our apartment and then it goes somewhere else too. I am not sure where it is but it is a house or apartment. Then I wake up.

Here are some tricks to help you remember your dreams.

1. Sleep, People!!!

This is my favorite one. Getting enough sleep at night is essential to improving your ability to recall your dreams. As long as you’re well rested you’ll find it easier to focus your intent on recalling your dreams and your mind won’t be clouded by fatigue. I’m a big proponent of getting enough rest and taking care of your body. Here is just one more reason to do that.

2. Autosuggestion.

Verbally stating your desire to remember your dreams while falling asleep is the best way to accomplish this. It may sound silly but all you really need to do is talk yourself into remembering your dreams. Our minds are powerful instruments and even though it may seem that we lose control of them when we enter sleep, that does not at all have to be the case. I’ve never done this, but then again I don’t typically have trouble recalling my dreams.

3. REM Cycle Recall.

Many times during a night of restful sleep, I will wake up two or more times. Now that I know more about dreaming and sleep, I realize that this actually helps me to recall my dreams. Instead of being frustrated when I wake up at night, I lie still and try to recall what I just dreamed about. What happens when you wake up on your own in the middle of the night is that you have just ended a REM cycle, which is the stage of sleep in which dreams occur. Do you typically sleep through the night without ever waking up, even though you are getting enough rest? Drink a lot of water before going to bed.

4. Sleep Position Recall

When you wake up in the morning, stay in the same position and run your dreams over in your head a few times before getting up. After you have remembered your dream, move to a different position (with your eyes still closed) that you normally sleep in, and try and remember other dreams. The position that you are in may help your brain remember what dream you had while sleeping in that position. I have tried this and it actually works very well. I am not sure of the science behind it, but it has something to do with the motor neurons.

I know the first part of my dream was pretty awesome, so here’s that.

It feels somewhat like watching 24; somebody (a fictional dream dude) is trying to save America from South American terrorists. There is a helicopter capture scene.

That’s all I remember from that part. Yeah. Sorry.

Then I am coming out of the mall and I see a former coworker/classmate (M) cross the street in front of me. He is talking to a little boy on a bike. It seems like he is trying to convince the boy of something. Then he sees me and we talk for a bit. I think he agrees to go somewhere with me because next thing I know we are driving and he is following me in his car. Except now M’s car is red; he actually has/had a blue car.

We’re on the highway and I go under this overpass when I see Sam! So I get out, but I didn’t put the car in park and it keeps going and kind of crashes a bit. It’s ok though. Then M passes us both and keeps going in the direction my car was going.

Next I am at a work function, some type of dinner or banquet. I remember Sam and I sitting near my boss and his family. I was eating a baked potato. My boss was laughing a lot and was happy.

Then, I am working and my coworker looks at the sign in sheet and starts freaking out and going, “Who is Elliot Pervinich? We don’t have an Elliot Pervinich in the computer? OMG who made his appointment?” But it was just Elliot, he had come to pick up his girl scout cookies and had signed in to I don’t know, be funny or something.

We walk to the elementary school I used to go to (which is down the street). Inside the building the have made a miniature football field. It is open to the sky. My dad starts to play football with me. By with me I mean he is using me as the ball. Other members of my family then join in, but some of the younger girls are trying to play and having trouble since I’m bigger than they are and they can’t really pick me up or throw me.

Then we leave and I end up going to my house. I have to go to church and work with the kids (it’s now Sunday morning) and my mom wants to ride to church with me. We take a big green truck that looks like a mix between the Nissan my dad now has and the Sport-trac I used to have.

Like almost always happens in any of my dreams where I have to drive, the brakes don’t work well. It’s hard to reach the pedals and almost impossible to push them all the way down to make the truck stop. Even backing up, it is hard to stop the truck and I have to aim it uphill into our neighbor’s brick mailbox to make it stop. Oops. My mom sees no problem with this, which is wierd.

It’s getting annoying because I need to be at church before 8, and the clock in the truck says 8:11. But I think the clock is broken so I’m not even sure what time it is. My mom wants to skip church, so she purposely tells me to use a ‘shortcut’. We end up going to the lake and I drive the truck off this peninsula thing that goes out into the lake. But we get out because it’s going really slowly, we just can’t stop it. Nobody seems to care that the truck is now gone.

My grandma is on the peninsula thing and she is wearing a bathing suit. She jumps into the water. Then we all jump into the water and splash around.

Next we go to my grandma’s house and my cousin Melissa is there and we start looking at these books my grandma has in her house, but they are not her books because they are dirty and she does not need those. But we are looking at them and laughing, and then Kayla Gaye randomly shows up and says she does not need that stuff in her mind b/c she is single. So she leaves.

Then Sam (my husband) and Angel come in, so we put away the books and Angel and Sam start drawing their computers and comparing them. Angel has a new computer, it’s a Mac and it is black.

After that we go back to my house and eat, but then Blake and Keila go out into the backyard. My backyard used to have a lot of trees in it but they all got oakwilt and had to be pulled out, but in my dream the trees are back. Blake tells me to come out on the porch because there is a big vulture in one of the trees and he is feeding it.

I go out to look at the vulture and it is not like any vulture I have ever seen. Blake puts a roll on the edge of the porch and the bird stretches its body out to grab it without having to leave the branch. It is big, bigger than most dogs, and it’s all bluish green and looks like a freaky muppet. It comes onto a branch closer to us and I get the distinct feeling that it is carnivorous.