The Locomotive

From 4/15/14 (I was re-reading archival data.)

There was a big, raggedy pile of cardboard and feathers and rags -- a huge heap.  There was a lady beside it; she had a big mop of wild grey hair and was also wrapped in brown rags.  And someone -- Lila? One of the kids? approached her and asked if she wanted to join in.  The lady looked surprised, and then pleased.  And the big pile of rags and junk started to move and shake and layers fell aside, and out puffed a giant locomotive, as big as a bear.  I thought at first it was made of cardboard, but soon became clear it wasn't.  It scooched along, accordion-ing itself forward, to and fro, sloughing off its layers and working its way out of the box / pile that had contained it.  I was dumbfounded but others around me weren't; they were pleased as they hadn't seen one of these in so many years.

The locomotive chuffed outside and turned onto the sidewalk.  It was a narrow sidewalk with a sapling planted near the curb, and I was sad because I could easily tell the locomotive was going to get stuck, there was no way it could fit.  And before my eyes, the locomotive kept chugging and shrunk down, condensed, so it could chuff easily between the tree and the building, with room to spare on the sidewalk.

The locomotive kept  having encounters with little animals, but the only one I recall clearly was the opossu.  There was an adorable baby 'possum, and the locomotive chuffed to it.  Again, I was worried, afraid he'd steamroll right over the 'possum, but instead somehow it picked it up and cradled it.  I heard someone -- I guess the lady who'd kept the lcoomotive all that time, explain that opossums had always been the locomtive's favorite.  And the 'possum grew, and then there were many of them, the cutest, tumbling-over-each-other 'possums you could imagine. 

There was some confusion as the locomotive chuffed on.  Something flying got caught in some strings & beads & birds.  Hands came in to help untangle everything and someone said, "Doesn't anyone have a light?" and a girl said, "Here!  There's a light here!" and she tossed me a pale blue compact, about the size of a Thin Mint cookie. 

I turned it over and finally realized that it had discs that could slide out and swing around, but instead of there being mirrors, as I expected, each one as a charm of some sort.  One that I opened had writing in a language I couldn't decipher, so I closed it again.  The next produced a girl, like a hologram, explaining what she could do for me.  I got freaked, closed it, and tossed it back to the girl. She laughed at me.

Tooth dream within a tooth dream

We were all staying in a big mansion – there were lots of bedrooms with adjacent bathrooms on the first floor, opposite a large ballroom and dining room.  The staircase was wide and curved, and gave a view over the ballroom, almost like a balcony, as it swept up to the second floor, where there were more suites of rooms, both large and small.

We'd come there for a party; some of us staying overnight in the suites and others just arriving for the celebration.  There were kids and grown-ups everywhere, enjoying the music and performances and food, laughing and singing.  It was a swirl of joy, and I wandered from spectacle to spectacle:   the Blue Men setting up paint-filled drums along the sweeping staircase; the tables piled high with fancy looking desserts, shiny and colorful.

When the party died down (faded away, really), I went into one of the en suite bathrooms on the first floor.  I had braces, and the wire on my back molars was uncomfortably poking my cheek, making it raw and bloody.  I looked in the mirror and tried to untwist the protruding bit of wire, but instead of just folding down the offending poking part, I removed the entire wire.  I knew right away that this wasn't going to be good, and sure enough, as I watched, my entire top row of teeth folded in, as though on hinges. 

I rushed out to the foyer, and frantically looked for someone to help.  Most of the revelers had left, and I couldn't find any friends or confidants in the dwindling crowd.  I ran to the dining room, and found a little cup, because I could feel my teeth coming loose and knew I'd need someplace to stow them.

My sister appeared, and I told her that I needed help – that we had to get in touch with my dentist and my orthodontist as soon as possible, because my teeth were all falling out.  She chuckled and said, "We're in New York – what could they possibly do for you down here?"  I urged her to call them anyway, and she did. 

Soon I'd filled the little cup with teeth and tooth fragments.  By now all the metal had been pulled off my teeth, and I left those aside.  My sister gave me a bigger bowl, and I kept feeling more teeth falling out, and spitting them into the soon-overflowing bowl.  To anyone who would listen, I said, "I told you this would happen.  I knew that this was going to happen some day.  I've been dreaming about it all my life." 

I pulled out my phone so that I could take a picture of my mouth, with the jagged nubs where teeth used to be, so that I could prove to anyone who wasn't there that I'd been right all those years, that all those tooth dreams had been prophetic, not paranoid.

Much to everyone's surprise, the dentist did turn up, with two of his assistants.  They co-opted one of the upstairs suites that had a sink, and set up a make-shift workstation.  One of the assistants applied some kind of paste to my upper gums, to take a mold.  I didn't know what they were going to do, but I didn't care – I knew they were going to help.  I asked the dentist if he'd be able to salvage anything, and pointed at the overflowing bowl of tooth fragments.  He said, "We'll check through what you've got there, to see if there's anything big enough to reuse.  Maybe the canines..."  I said, "Oh never mind – the canines were fake anyway.  Just make it all new."

What the soul looks like

We were all preparing for a presentation about how artists capture and represent the soul.  They had tried to get someone very famous – I think it was Seamus Heaney – but the soul he'd captured (his mother) was too big and hard to show.  So instead, we were using illustrative examples rather than real samples.

They decided that more of us needed to participate in the presentation, so instead of just a few of us going, they asked everyone in the school to come.  We queued up, and loaded into three giant school buses.  I kept moving from seat to seat, trying to find an open spot.

While we were on the bus, though, something happened.  At first we all thought it was a hurricane or a tornado – wind was blowing, bushes were flying through the air – but then someone shouted, "Look!  There she is!" and there was a colossal woman stomping through the countryside.  She looked like a little old granny, like the one who owns Tweety Bird, except for being more than forty feet tall.  I suddenly understood that it was Seamus Heaney's soul released.  Our presentation was, needless to say, cancelled.

We all piled off the bus.  There was a man there herding his goats back behind a gate, and I stopped to talk to him.  He seemed unfazed by the giant lady who had crashed through his meadow; he was very calm about helping his goats back into the field.  A young man (who looked like a young Daniel Radcliffe, so I'll call him Harry) was with me, and he casually plucked a leaf off a bush that the goats were nibbling at.  We walked with the goat-herd towards a large, ornate building and Harry popped the leaf into his mouth and ate it.  Before we got to the door, Harry's lips started to turn blue and he said, "I can't breathe!  What's going on?"  The goat-herd said, "I figured this would happen, though I didn't know it would go so quickly.  It's because of the leaf you ate.  It has traces of arsenic in it."  Harry collapsed to the ground, and died.

We pulled his body into the building, which turned out to be a library.  The room was filled with burgundy leather chairs and heavy, antique books and black and golden velvet couches.  Someone approached and took Harry's body away.  I sat on the plush couch, taken aback by the turn of events.

The person who'd taken away Harry's body returned quickly and handed me a clear plastic form, molded into the shape of a head.  Inside the head container was a hard object rattling around.  When I peered at it more closely, I realized that it was Harry's jaw that they'd cut out of the corpse, and tucked into this container for me.  I found it grisly, but knew it would be rude to refuse it.  I said, "Thank you.  I'm sure his family will be grateful for this."

I asked out loud if anyone expected his soul to be around, and it was explained to me that it was too soon.  One of the teachers idly picked up a book he'd been looking at – not one of the heavy antique books, but a small bedraggled paperback book.  He flipped it open to where he'd dog-eared the page, and out popped a tiny Harry (just from the waist up, as though he was sitting at a desk).  The teacher said, "A ha!  Not too soon at all!  I guess we will be taking this Calvin Trillin book with us!"  He smiled and handed it to me.

Laden with the plastic head containing Harry's jaw and the beat-up novel containing Harry's soul, I left the library.  I knew that I had enough now to bring Harry back.

Falling Stars

I was helping my Aunt Pam bring her suitcase down; there was a narrow staircase and a metal thing that was too small to be an elevator, but too big to be a dumbwaiter.  After I got the luggage, I led Aunt Pam to the information center, which was inside a really lovely building.  There were tall windows surrounded by ornate, old-fashioned, polished wood frames, and large glass cases with displays in them.  It felt more like the reading room at New York Public Library (the one with the lions) than a tourist information center.

We decided, while we were there, to do some arts and crafts.  I had some seasonal styrofoam creations I'd made -- a snow man, a heart.  Before I could focus on finishing those, though, I decided that I needed to clean up from the previous crafter's project, so I started picking up buttons off the floor.  There were dozens and dozens, maybe even hundreds, of colored buttons all over the floor, and I was contemplating keeping them to make a different project with.

I realized that Aunt Pam was no longer in the room, so I went to find her.  She was standing on the street, outside the fancy info center / crafting station, asking passersby if they wanted to buy her subscription to Law Weekly.  It turned out she needed some cash to get to New York, where she was going to be staying at Thing, the newest and best hotel in the city.  I gave her some money, and she walked off, apparently New York-bound.

I went back into the craft room, and two women were there, actively ignoring me.  They were jabbering on with each other, making a mess, undoing the neatening up that I had done, and worse, destroying my seasonal styrofoam decorations with their carelessness.  I tried to confront them about it, but they were so studious in their ignoring me that I gave up and left, leaving behind my now-broken snowman.

I went down to the subway platform to head over to meet David.  I kept trying to text him and phone him, but continually misdialed.  The train arrived, I got on, then was suddenly at the little restaurant we were supposed to meet at.

The restaurant was tiny -- only two rooms.  The vibe was pure hipster, and I felt uncomfortable.  Suddenly I got a text from India, saying, "Do you see what's happening in Maine?!?!"  I had no idea what she was talking about, and looked on Facebook.  There were tons of posts about the star that was falling, crossing Maine.  I ran outside and looked up, and there was a huge star, shooting across the sky.  Huge.  Like, in real life, I've never seen something so big in the sky.  I only knew it was a star because I'd been told that it was, but it looked like a moon -- a rocky orb the size of a stadium -- zooming across the sky.

I called in to the hipsters in the restaurant, "Come quick!  You're going to miss it!" but they didn't get outside fast enough.  The star shot over my head, and I turned in time to see it crash into the bay of water below.  (I was high above the bay, as though we were up on a cliff).  Instantly, the water started to boil, then steam, then all the water was gone.  There was a crater where the star had landed, and the rest of the bed of the bay was dry and cracked, like the Playa at Burning Man.  (Or, come to think of it, like photo in my blogspot profile pic...)

Joan

In last night's dream, I was back working for Joan.  She wasn't exactly doing theatre -- it was more like packaging, some advertising, some film, some television, a total hodge-podge. But she looked great and was bustling around, making phone-calls, calling out commands to people across the office, always on the move. I followed her as she traveled, trying to keep up and scribbling notes, and thinking to myself, "I'm so glad I was wrong, and that you aren't dead after all."

Houses, Wedding, Work

In last night's dream, we went to our new place. (In real life, it's been recently renovated, and is quite pleasant.)  The walls were either ripped out or ragged or nonexistent.   I realized we had to figure out, quickly, how to make the place livable before we moved in.  I suggested we contact the person who redid our kids' preschool, and asked the folks who were with us if they had any good ideas.  I realized that, though I thought there were only two bathrooms, there were actually three, and one was totally decimated.  I knew that what we'd gotten was not what we'd signed up for, but also knew we couldn't get out of it.

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Also dreamed that I had decided to go work for McKinsey & Co.  I wasn't very excited about it, and knew that I was taking a demotion.  It was proved out when I went to my first meeting, which was a presentation by Ellen DeGeneres. I was excited about it, until I got there, and realized that I was supposed to be, basically  the usher.  Handing out programs, directing people to their seats.  When they were all seated, Ellen was going to deliver an inspirational speech (which she did do).  At the end, she asked me how I came to join McKinsey.  I told her that I just felt lucky that I had worked in theatre, so I could read a ticket and figure out where  person was supposed to be sitting. (And I now I remember that there was some oddness with the seating  e.g., a person was seated in C4, and it was to the stage left of C1 and 3, as though they'd realized after the fact that they had to add extra seats in the same row.

Just remembered that also in the Ellen thing, I--or maybe it was later, when I was trying to do salesmanship in the odd shop?)--was chewing gum, and i twas pulling out my teeth  as per usual, and I was thinking, "Ugh, now my teeth are coming out like they always do in my dreams."

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Also dreamed that Leslie Schaffer was a designer, and was making me a shirt that I'd wear to represent my wedding (to some unknown swain), which is to say the shirt had, as cutouts and quilted over and stitched in, images of the wedding dress and tux on the sleeves of the shirt.  She was also going to make the wedding dress and groom's outfit   The shirt that she made, I thought (at first  was completely wrong...mis-sized and uncomfortable and not at all what I was thinking   So I want to see her, and she explained that I was wearing it wrong.  I had my head through the sleeve-hole, and everything else when wrong from there.

Sleeping at work

In last night's dream, I got to the office to discover that people were clearing out the cubicle next to mine.  (In real life, the colleague who occupies that cube is taking a personal leave, and has been out of the office for more than a month.)  They were removing the desk, the files, everything.  Then my colleague appeared, and she was transformed: she had lost weight, her skin was glowing, she looked peaceful and healthy.

I said, "Wow!  You look great!  What's going on around here?"  She explained that she had found a new job, one that was better, more flexible, closer to home, easier to do.  She told me that she weighed only 100 lbs now; I was shocked, she was pleased.  She took her personal things and left.

My manager showed up, and explained that since there was an empty cube in between our cubicles now, we'd be able to move cots into our cubes.  I decided to put in bunk beds in mine.

My best friend and her family came by; I showed them where I work, and the new layout with the bunk beds.  We had planned to go out to eat, but she explained that, unfortunately, there had been a change of plans and they had to leave.  I got angry, and said, "Oh FINE!" in a petulant tone.  I decided the best thing for it would be to take a nap on my new bunk bed.

I curled up on the bottom bunk, and tried to go to sleep.  I felt uncomfortable, and pressed, and gave up on trying to sleep.  When I climbed out of the bed, I saw that the top bunk had collapsed down, nearly crushing the bottom bunk.  My best friend was sitting in a chair, waiting for me.  I said, "I thought you said you had to leave?"  She said, "They had to leave; I have been waiting for you.  I thought when you were done with your nap that we could go get something to eat."  I felt silly for having made a fuss.