Dangerous Liasons with Snakes

Crotalus scutulatus ( Mojave Rattlesnake ), originally uploaded by Mr Nikon.

I was staying at grandma's house and finding myself frustrated that there were no toothbrushes around to use. I'm not sure why I expected there to be one since grandma hasn't kept one there for me in the better part of a decade.

I looked out the window and saw that the yard was flooded. It wasn't swampy like the last time (within the dream, I still recalled my previous dream), just wet. I could see a few small fish (a goldfish kept watching me as I moved around the window) and some water bugs. After some more searching in the house, I went outside.

There was plenty of room to walk around the flooding, so I went over and sat on one of the walls in the yard. Frogs were jumping around in some of the puddles, so I watched them. When I bent down, I realized there was a hole in the wall so that you could see under where you were sitting.

I saw the back end of a snake and froze. Rattlesnake. When I turned, I saw that I was right beside the front end. Sophie (one of our dogs) wasn't far away, and I didn't want to act too strangely because I was worried that she might come over to check out what was going on. Instead I started backing off slowly. Well, the snake didn't like that a bit and coiled up to strike.

Somehow I managed to grab it, but once I had it, I was too scared to cut its head off. I stabbed it a few times in the neck with my pocket knife, but it was still alive. It followed us, so I caught it again and held it so it couldn't bite. When I got inside, I was freaking out and explained to mom what happened. She chided me for not killing it and then chopped its head off herself.

We were then preparing to take a trip with grandma, and I was disappointed because I'd forgotten to bring any music at all for the drive. Before we got much further than that, the alarm woke me up.

Family and Lakes

A lot of my dream from last night faded when I woke up, but parts of it stayed with me. My grandma was staying at our house, and I was able to sit down and talk to her about some things one of my uncles did when papau was dying. She actually listened and absorbed and was as horrified as she should have been when I really told her.

On our way back up driving home to grandma's (it was just Wes and I in the car by then, I think), I was stopped by someone working on a road crew who had known papau. She was talking about how sad she was to hear that he had passed away. Somehow we ended up somewhere else entirely, and then papau was there. He was alive and younger and smiling. Unfortunately I woke up for a bit and when I went back to sleep, the dream had changed. 

At some point later in the dream, we were back at grandma's house. Looking out back, I could see that there was a huge lake in the yard. The yard itself had expanded somehow, not changing layout somehow but simply expanding in size. The lake had occurred naturally because of all the rainstorms that had apparently been happening in the area, and fish had even swum into it from someplace. Some were normal, but I could see some bizarrely oversized fish swimming around. There were also strangers down at the lake swimming. That made me mad, and I went outside to tell them to go away, but they were already packing up to leave by the time I got down there.

I'll Be Out Back Painting Gnocci

Yes, that's actually a quote from my dream last night, something Wes said to me. No, I really don't know why because it was right before I woke up.

The main part of the dream was only slightly more coherent. At first I was at a party where a lot of old high school friends were. I was mostly hanging out with Kristin and Riley, and it was good times. We were reminiscing, laughing. We decided to go to an after party at someone else's house, and I piled in with Riley to make the drive. It was late and rainy, but it was an easy drive, and we were joking and having fun the whole way.

We got to the house, and there was a host or something who told us about cleaning the place out. We were all kind of confused until a huge wave crashed down over us (the tent-like house was beside the ocean). At first I couldn't get up from under the water because the breath had been knocked out of me, but finally I surfaced. We were all shocked but not bothered for some reason.

The next thing I really remember is being at an apartment I was sharing with a girl I'd apparently gone to college with. A war had broken out, but it wasn't a modern war. It was like frontier war. I went outside and everyone was getting their rifles and getting into wagons and stuff. I even had a rifle, but I knew I wasn't a good shot, and somehow I knew that I wasn't supposed to go. So I ended up watching as most of the people I knew loaded up into the wagons and left. I went back into the apartment (doubly strange since it was normal and modern, not period at all) and started cleaning to distract myself. I found Ashley (my best friend)'s blanket and refused to put it in the wash since it smelled like her. It was her and Wes and Riley that I was really worried about since I knew that all of them were off fighting, and I didn't know when they'd be back.

Then I half woke up and the dream shifted, and I don't remember anything much after that.

No Swimming

Last night I had a dream that Wes and I were staying at someone's house. It was massive - more like an estate than just a house - and had a courtyard in the middle with a pool and hot tub. It was just us and a few other people when we first arrived, so we all hit the hot tub. After that, I was stripping down to my swimsuit (no, no idea why I was dressed again after the hot tub) so that I could swim in the pool since it's been literally years since I had the chance to go swimming. But Wes interrupted and said that he wanted us to go upstairs and see what our room was like instead. I was really disappointed and almost said no, but finally sort of agreed and went up with him.

There wasn't much doing up there, but it was almost like a small apartment since there was a little kitchen and such. We made something to eat, and by the time that was done, people were pouring into the house. Some of them I knew and recognized, a lot of them were strangers. And they were wandering everywhere, even into our room. I was frustrated by the lack of privacy and still pissed about not having gotten to go swimming. Eventually I wandered off and tried to find someone that I knew, and when I looked out the window, there was Wes, hanging out by the pool. I was furious and went down to confront him, and that was about when I woke up.

...yeah, not at all stressful.

Girl Time

Last night I had a dream that I was going with a group of other women on a "girl week" kind of vacation. Most of the women weren't people I know in reality - or at least not that I remember knowing - with the exception of a couple (my boss, Melissa, and one other woman who I couldn't recall once I woke up). In the dream, I knew them all and we did the vacation thing out to a cabin one of them owned every year.

Outside the cabin was a beautiful lake, and myself and another woman realized we didn't have suits. After we painted out the annual canvas (we painted over and repainted a particular canvas as a group every year), we decided to go into town and see a movie and get the few things that some of us had forgotten. Though the trip was planned, the exact departure date had been unexpected or moved up or something, so I had gotten all flustered and forgotten some things. Apparently I wasn't alone. We had just gotten to the really cool theater when I woke up.