The Murder House Dream

Every once in awhile, for a week at a time, I have what I call the "Murder House" dream. In it, I dream that my family (or a big group of people I love) moves into an enormous mansion. They all have bedrooms in the main part of the house, but mine is in the tower, or the attic, or the basement. It's always a gorgeous room -- more of a suite in size and fanciness, sometimes even a full apartment. But it's separate from the others who are usually all on the same floor. There are tons of stairs in the house and it's in a gorgeous location.

And then I find out that the part of the house that my room is in is haunted. There are one or more creepy ghosts who seem okay with me, but are malevolent against everyone else. Whenever I have someone over -- apologizing the whole time for the ghosts and praying that no one gets hurt -- it ticks the ghosts off and then pretty soon I start fearing for my life, too.

It doesn't take a genius analyst to interpret that I feel apart from a lot of the people in my life. They love me and include me as much as they can, but I am having a very different life experience than they are. It isn't anyone's fault. I just feel alone sometimes. And that's when the dreams emerge; when I resent my situation. When I am jealous of people who have what I want. When I feel pain when people talk about or post pictures of their families or vacation. When I have a tough time sympathizing when they complain about their home life.

When I'm having those dreams, I want to be left alone, and at the same time I wish I were more included. I wish I had a reason to get out of bed on Saturdays.

I don't know who to talk to when I feel this way. Actually, I don't WANT to talk about it, because I don't want people feeling sorry for me, because there is nothing they can do. I don't want them to change, or walk on tiptoe around me, or feel embarrassed by their good fortune and hard work and any adjacent struggles.

Worse, I don't want them saying "I wish I were in your shoes" or "At least you don't have to worry about..." and then making it about themselves. I don't want to have to take care of someone else when I'm already feeling sorry for myself. That definitely doesn't help.

I know that even when I marry I'll feel like this from time to time. Sadness. Loneliness. Everyone does. It's part of life. And that's okay.

I guess I just need to give myself a break and allow myself to feel sad. It'll pass. It isn't in my nature to stay sad for very long.

I really hate that dream, though.

My Mirror of Erised

She believed, of course... because without something to believe in, life would be intolerable.

- Rosamunde Pilcher

Last night, I dreamed that someone mentioned my baby. I started talking about him, and then stopped and realized that I hadn't seen him in a long time. My son was living with another family and I hadn't even though about him for months. I couldn't remember what he looked like. I tore my house apart and couldn't find a single photo.

My mom had a photo of the day the little boy was born, but she didn't want to show it to me because I had a terrible look on my face. She said that I was very unhappy the day he was born. She showed me the photo (apparently developed by wizards because the baby and I were moving in it), and I was crying and complaining. That's when I started trying to figure out who the father was. (Why am I never married in my baby/pregnancy dreams?) I knew who he was but I couldn't remember sleeping with him. Of course, it all wrecked the proposal from my actual boyfriend (who apparently was going to propose to me at a regency ball).

I ended the dream trying to decide if I should let the family who was already caring for him adopt him. I knew I didn't want to be a single mom. I didn't want the baby to ruin my chances yet again. When I awoke, it took a while to clear away the cobwebs and remember that I don't have a baby of my own. I've never been pregnant. I've never given a child away.

* * * * * * * *

I have a great life. I have a fantastic family, tremendous friends, and amazing opportunities to work and serve and learn to be a better person. I am grateful. Should nothing ever change, I know that I am a lucky woman.

But there's always a part of me that longs for the husband and children I've always wanted and planned for. My often-content brain won't let me be so happy that I forget there is more than what I have now (hence, last night's dream). I enjoy the life I have now. I hope to share it with a family of my own in the not-too-distant future.

I've wanted for a long time to draw a picture of the image that would appear for me in the Mirror of Erised. I finally took the time to do it today:

"I show not your face but your heart's desire." - JK Rowling

It isn't a perfect picture, but life isn't perfect, either, even when you get what you think you wish for.

Not a bad dream to hope for, though :)

Crushes and dreams

Have you ever had a crush on someone that abruptly ended when you dreamed your crush was a jerk to you?

Or, have you ever thought of someone just as a friend (or been trying to avoid a crush) until you dreamed the two of you got married and your crush was an absolute doll?

Remember how dreams are the subconscious just messing with you and your conscious mind can't be blamed but do have to deal with the unsettling consequences??

Well played, subconscious. Now I can't figure out how I really feel about this guy.

Mean, but well played :P

 

or

????

In other news, while searching for images this morning, I somehow changed the languages setting on my Google account to another language and I don't know which one. And since I don't know which it is, I haven't been able to successfully figure out how to change it back. This is going to get obnoxious really fast!!

My roommate, Sutton

Last night I had the loveliest dream. I had a dorm "room" in the corner of a huge, huge, unfinished basement. I was trying to figure out how to arrange things when my roommate came in. It was none other than Sutton Foster, who was much shorter than I had expected (isn't she really tall?) In spite of my being nothing like her besty, January Jones (who may not actually be her besty, but she was in the dream), Sutton and I got along famously. We spent the rest of my dream slowly taking over the rest of the basement with our stuff, and getting dressed up in matching baby-doll dresses, jewelry, make-up, and fancy hairdos. The best part was that Sutton was the nicest person in the history of the world. Now I wish she were REALLY my roommate :D

Crazy, jumbled Broadway dream

Last night/early this morning I had a really cool, really weird dream (I know, what's new, right?)

Larissa and Keri and I were staying in some hotel in Miami, FL, but it wasn't really a hotel. It was patterned like my old elementary school (L-shaped with long hallways) and seemed to be attached to the airport somehow. We were exploring the place when we realized that they were having rehearsals for How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying there. Some of the actors would come out of the classrooms from time to time and sit around in plush chairs and rehearse their scenes. Imagine how excited we were when Daniel Radcliffe and John Larroquette came out! I didn't want to interrupt the rehearsal and thought my chances were slim, but I wanted a photo with them (hopefully together) and thought, "Well, it doesn't hurt to ask, right?" So, I walked through everybody to Dan and sat down and started talking. He seemed uncomfortable at first and then started opening up to me about some very personal stuff. He agreed to a photo and went into a corner where Keri and Larissa were waiting (and started taking photos). I then went to John and he was very polite about the whole thing and immediately agreed to a quick photo. As we were walking I told him I was a HUGE fan of The 10th Kingdom and his reaction told me he wasn't terribly proud of that show [photo courtesy of playbill.com].

Anyway, we took the photos, and then the men went back to their rehearsal.

Well, we went back to our hotel room to check out and I looked at the pictures and my photo of John didn't turn out at all. I was pretty upset, but what could I do? I'd had my chance. I tried interrupting the rehearsal again but the director chased me out and called security on me. 

We checked out of the hotel room, and then I realized that I had left an expensive photo in our hotel room. Larissa checked through her back and the only keys she could find were large Alice in Wonderland-type things -- she didn't have the room key anymore. So I left my friends where they were and spent the rest of the dream trying to find someone to open the hotel room.

INSTEAD, I discovered that the hotel was also a mall/Broadway theatre!

As I was walking around, I found stairs leading to a theatre where Sutton Foster was performing. I don't know what show it was supposed to be and I had already, but hadn't had a photo with Sutton, so I went looking for the green room or stage door so I could hopefully catch her while she wasn't onstage (still looking for a janitor, too). I went down a really long, steep staircase, and ran so fast I almost fell down those stairs and barely missed crashing into the usher at the bottom. I don't remember if I got my photo -- I don't think so -- but I did see her looking all gorgeous and long-legged in an emerald-green flapper costume [photo courtesy of stamfordadvocate.com].

I continued on my quest to find someone to open my old hotel room, and came upon another How to Succeed rehearsal. John wasn't friendly at all, but Dan definitely was. He started kind of following me around -- wearing his jacket from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and suddenly he shouted "Stop!" I froze, and peeked back at him and saw he was standing in a spotlight and noticed there was a crowd of people around us. "We're in a play!" I thought. "We're in some play and he has a different girl every night act as his love interest and tonight it's me!" He proceeded -- while I was frozen -- to sing a song about how incredible I was and how much he loved me and then he was singing to me begging me to tell him how much I loved him back. I thought, "How the heck do I respond? If he really loves me outside the context of the play, I don't love him in the same way and have to say 'No' and if it's just a play does he have a different ending for whether I say no or yes?" He ended the song kneeling at my feet, where my still-frozen head could see him. 

Then some musical underscoring came up for my reply. I had to say no, so I made up this long, flowery speech (to fill up the music) about how I thought he was a great guy and I'm glad I met him, but I just couldn't give him what he wanted. By the end, I was crying! I overheard an old lady say that my response was waaaay better than any she'd heard the other nights she'd seen the show. Dan was hurt, and sang an angsty song, and then moved onto the scene with "Brotherhood of Man." I guess he rallied ;-) I tried one more time to get a photo with John, but since hearing that I liked The 10th Kingdom, he wasn't very cooperative and I decided to give up. 

I left the stage/crowd of people to, again, find a janitor and get the photo from my hotel room. I came upon a place where there were a whole bunch of conveyor belts going up and down (instead of escalators). Dan was behind me and calling to me, but I jumped on a belt going up (lying so that my head was angling down) and rode through a rough-hewn tunnel to the top where Larissa and Keri were waiting.

Turns out, they had caught my performance with Daniel and taken a ton of photos. I was so glad to find out I hadn't imagined the whole incident! They also offered to pay me for the photo I'd left in the hotel room. They just wanted to get out of there, and I guess I can't blame them. I gave up on my quest to get a photo with John and that photo from my hotel room. It was about that time that I woke up.

As I lay in bed this morning, I thought it funny that my dream had allusions to all of the plays I saw in NYC:

• Wonderland - keys and conveyor-belt tunnel
• Catch Me if You Can - Miami and the airport
• Billy Elliot - Dan in the spotlight and me turning him down
• How to Succeed - do I even need to spell this out?
• Anything Goes - Sutton Foster and the hotel room
• Harry Potter Exhibition - Dan's Prisoner of Azkaban jacket
• I think the whole elementary room thing came from my walking to my elementary school earlier this week. It's being torn down in the near future, and I just wanted to take a look at the yard. So many happy and not-so-happy memories! I'm sad the building won't be there much longer.

I was also doubly annoyed that it seems all of the notes I'd saved in my draft folder on BlogSpot seem to be gone, as is another post I'd been working on. Grrr! Oh well. At least it's still all in my mind and I can rewrite them. They won't be the same, but my posts never end up the way I think they will anyway!

Battling the Dragon (a dream journal exercise)

Several months ago, I bought a Dream journal, which I have subsequently decided was a mistake. Not that I don't remember my dreams -- I remember a LOT of them and in surprising detail -- but it turns out this particular Dream journal has activities. It wants to help me learn to take control and be an active participant in my dreams. The thing is, I'm already pretty active. I may not always be able to tell it IS a dream while I'm in it (so many mornings I wake up disappointed to discover I don't live on the U.S.S. Enterprise and Kate Austen and I aren't friends in real life), but I can usually predict what's going to happen. Also, sometimes I don't WANT to remember my dreams, or at least I don't want to record them for posterity. Some of the stuff my unconscious mind comes up with are too embarrassing. (Yes, waaay more embarrassing than admitting that I dream sometimes about living on the Starship Enterprise. Actually, I'm not that embarrassed about the Enterprise.) 

But lately I've been having some dreams I do want to remember... and I realized that I didn't want to write them in the journal because I reached a point where I was supposed to do an exercise and I never did it. I didn't want to ignore and skip it and I couldn't ever remember to do it at bedtime, so I just stopped using the journal.

So, last night, I did the exercise.

And it worked! Well, sort of.

The Exercise
Before I fell asleep, I imagined myself as a medieval (didn't even have to spell check that word - ha!) knight. I visualized my "obstacles" as a dream dragon and imagined that I fought the dragon back so that it would have to retreat. I managed to keep this image in my mind as I fell asleep, thinking about the things that have been troubling me lately. The idea is that as I dream that I'm overcoming this adversary, I gain confidence in my waking life.


The Dream
[I should mention that this is only the second half of the dream. However, I spent so much brainpower trying to remember this half that I can't remember the first half anymore. It probably had something to do with war. Most of them do lately.]

I was on State Street at night and my friend's dad was supposed to take us to our destination. When he arrived, he picked up my friend, but refused to take me and drove away, so I had to walk.

I dreamed I was at a cocktail party in the lobby of the Centerpoint Legacy Theater. We were all young-mid single adults, and I looked like Kate Middleton and was wearing a dress like her engagement dress, but black. Then I realized it was actually a callback for a play Rosalie Richards was directing. People were passing around character descriptions. There was a part for a mousy, awkward, best-friend type who eventually gets the guy. There was a part for a gorgeous bombshell, and one for a gorgeous dream-boat guy who starts off being attracted to the bombshell then realizes he's really in love with the mousy best friend. My friend Mr. K was up for the guy, but didn't get it. The bombshell part went to a tall, gorgeous brunette. At this point I looked like me again. There was never a formal audition, but I knew I was up against friends A and B. After a bunch of mingling, I overheard who was cast in the roles. After that I didn't see A again in the dream, but B and Mr. K were still there.

I got the part!  I won the part of the girl who wins in spite of her own insecurities and bad odds. I won the part of the girl who gets the awesome guy even though she's not the bombshell. I won, I won, I won!

And then I woke up.

My Analysis
I badly need a win in the very near future.

I feel like I can't do anything right lately, and things haven't been going well. My last few dates have gone okay but nothing came of them, I've auditioned and been rejected for six plays in a row, and then I was sick for so stinking long. The friends that I dreamed I was up against don't even know that I sometimes feel like I'm competing with them. It's frustrating to see others seeming to have it all when I am not.

In the dream, I was reminded that I CAN and WILL get what I want eventually. I won't always feel left in the dust as everyone around me succeeds. I can win the part and the boy that I want, figuratively and literally. In the dream, I was accepted as I was and my hard work was recognized. It felt great! The exercise really did help build my confidence!

In conclusion, I'm glad I finally gave the exercise a try! I may visualize the same thing again tonight, with even a bit more hope. I've had a rough time the last month, and it can only get better. I have a vacation coming up, there are some fun shows, and rumor has it more men are funneling into my ward in the next few weeks. Things are looking up!

Sweet dreams tonight, my friends. And I hope your day is a great one tomorrow!