Money and murder

I had this dream the night after Christmas.

I was going to NYC with two of my good friends.  Somehow we decided we were going to take a helicopter to get there.  (Rich folks sometimes take helicopters just to cross the Hudson without needing to take the bridge or tunnels, but I don't think many folks take them up from where I live.)

As we were flying in, I could see the skyscraper we were going to, on the south side of Manhatten.  It was a towering skyscraper sorta by itself.  The top floor was just a glass box giving you a view around you in 360 degrees.  The sorta place that would give you vertigo if you were there, looking out and seeing how high up you were.

Then we started maneuvering between buildings as we approached, like a video game, swerving right and left to avoid obstacles.

Then the helicopter landed on the close side of the river, unexpectedly.  We had to get out, and were going to take a limo the rest of the way.  But we were stopped in a dirty, industrial area, and I remember thinking that we were going to get scammed or kidnapped or something bad.

At this point things get fuzzy.  A driver showed up, but he was sketchy, and we didn't want to get into the car with him.  Somehow or another we witnessed, or just realized, that he had just killed someone and stolen $100,000.

He tries to get us into the car, and we keep refusing.  Now we're walking around this nice, grassy area, and then some walkways surrounding some beautiful pools, like you might find at resorts or high end hotels.  He's chasing us, but it's at a walking pace, maybe because there were other people around and he's trying not to get their attention.  He tells us he is going to call the police on us (maybe we were refusing to pay him?), and we tell him sure, go for it, and then we'll rat him out for the murder.

Somehow we manage to steal his keychain and keys, which somehow we knew were used to lock up the stolen money.  He notices, and demands them back.  I somehow slip the important key off and palm it when i return his keyring. 

Then we sneak off to a dirty garage and steal the money back.  Then the dream ended.

Recent dream snippets

My stuffed animal pig had turned a deep red (instead of her usual powder pink).  I said it was because she was sun-burned.

Was in a mall food court and saw an ex-boyfriend (looking exactly like his mid-20s self) even though it's been over 12 years.  But when I stopped him, he seemed bewildered.

Louis C.K. was in my dream, can't remember what he was doing.

Had a couple hairless baby pandas in my kitchen.  They started doing back flips all over the place, and I thought about opening the back door to let them outside, but then was afraid they'd run away.  So I try to get them under a cardboard box with holes cut into it.

A guy who created super-powerful scents, using his own bodily smell. He was constantly sniffing his own crotch.  His scents were sold black-market though, like drugs.

Peeing endlessly on the carpet.

Vincent Cassel wearing a Crips blue bandana do-rag on his head.  I was in France with him and a German girl backpacker -- I couldn't speak any German.

Hiding out

I was on a tour/ride in a big old mansion, but I wasn't paying much attention, and instead was busy texting.  Someone said something to me about it, and I said, "But I've seen this movie before." Somehow I knew what was about to happen -- that the "tour" people were going to give us some hallucinogenic substance and pull some crazy shit to freak everyone out.  So when an emergency siren went off and snakes started crawling all over the floors, I very quietly stuck down to the basement where there was an apartment, locked the door, grabbed a crank-powered flashlight radio and a plate of food, and crawled into a cubbyhole I had built into a closet.  I also left a note for Redneckhunter (who I had left upstairs on the tour) in case something went wrong and I died in the closet.

So I was happily eating my plate of beef stew, in the closet, when I heard voices and footsteps coming down to the apartment.  So I crawled completely into the closet - behind the hanging clothes and under a big black blanket.  It was my friend Joyce and some men, and they apparently were the bad guy masterminds behind the whole thing.  I must have made a noise or something because Joyce decided to look in the closet.  I tried to hide completely under the blanket, wrapping it tightly around me.  She was literally poking the blanket, and trying to pull it up.  I was amazed she didn't find me, but at some point she gave up, and they all went back upstairs.

After things calmed down upstairs and Redneckhunter came back down.  I jumped out and gave him a big hug.

My OCD comes out

I was masquerading as a teenager, hanging out with a bunch of kids who were trying to start a band. We got invited over to play for this older (40-something) Indian guy. But I was found out - a girl asked me, how old are you? When I told her to guess, she said 25, and I said, you got me (when really I'm close to 40...). Anyway, as the rest of the band was chatting with the Indian guy, I noticed how filthy the keys of the keyboard were, and I started wiping them with a Wetnap. The Indian guy called me out again, but I just had to keep cleaning it. While I was cleaning, they actually started playing music, so I was left out, but I was very happy when the keyboard was finally clean.

Water ride NYC

I was driving in with a couple people into New York City, and I decided to ditch them for the train at the last minute before going into the tunnel, so that I could go on this underground water ride. From the subway, you could ride on an innertube over rapids, while people tickled your feet and butt from below. It was a little odd having strangers touch you, but I was assured that all the volunteer ticklers had a strict ethos of non-groping -- it was a community and everyone looked out for everyone else. At the end of the ride, you exited out into a nice cafe with free snacks and beverages and mingling.

Bizarre Foods

I was with Andrew Zimmern of Bizarre Foods and we were in a boat in China helping our hosts pull up thousand-year-old eggs that had been made not by being buried in lye, but instead had been preserved underwater in a river.

My mom passed by somehow and asked what it was, and was surprised when Andrew Zimmern told her pi-dan (Chinese for preserved egg) because she had never seen them made this way underwater. I told him he should be proud to be eating something my mom had never even heard of.

Speechless with Tom Waits

Redneckhunter and I were at a funeral/parade out on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia. Then we head to lunch with some other funeral-goers. As we sat down at our table, I noticed Tom Waits sitting at the table across from us! Turns out our friends the Worthingtons knew him and introduced him. While I, the superfan, was just dumbstruck and couldn't think of anything to say to him, Redneckhunter was just chatting up a storm with Tom about some spot on the California coast that they both liked.

Underdressed and underwater

I had to attend a dedication ceremony for a dormitory at Princeton, and I looked down and realized I was wearing jeans with holes in them, and I needed to go home to change. It was a long walk home, and I was running late.

Then I found myself having to do a reality-tv-style challenge that involved wading into the ocean. Some of the other challengers chose to wear flotation devices, but I figured the water was cold and I'd probably last longer keeping myself warm by treading water. However, as I waded in, the water didn't get any deeper than a few inches. There wasn't enough water to properly do the challenge, the judges thought, so they decided to move the challenge to a pool. Since it didn't seem to be as fair or interesting in a swimming pool, they decided to change the challenge to having us choreograph an underwater dance routine in the pool.

Arab Chinatown

I woke up on a tour bus traveling through what seemed to be a Chinatown in a Muslim country (Egypt perhaps?). Signs were in Chinese and Arabic. I realized I was on a Princeton trip, and I still had work I needed to do. Someone wanted me to make an animated e-card with ET flying past the moon.

Then I was no longer with the tour, but instead with just my family in a van. My uncle was driving the van, and my cousin was navigating with help from the GPS. Looking out the window I saw someone dressed in a military uniform (in China, military surplus is quite popular attire) taking a dump on the sidewalk. When we got to our hotel, I decided to change out of the flimsy ballet flats I was wearing into more substantial shoes.

Cake Desk

I was in school with James Allan from the band Glasvegas. Then things got a bit horror movie-ish. I can't remember exactly...

Turns out though, it was just a movie, and I left the theater (a big theater, like Lincoln Center). As I was leaving, someone offered to show me a desk made entirely out of cake that apparently was a prop in the movie.

I met up with my cousins outside -- we were, naturally, on our way to go eat somewhere. Then I was in a hotel room, watching Italian television. The show on the TV was called "Lupo" and was some sort of gritty cop drama. The main character Lupo was a real asshole, and in the scene I was watching, he shoved his dick into a bad guy's mouth.

The Fortress

I was scaling a fortress wall of some kind, along with many other people. There were people on the inside of the fortress helping us over, and so a huge shirtless muscle-bound guy basically picked me up and lifted me over the wall.

Then we were in a cafeteria getting lunch. I couldn't decide what I wanted. There was a special on pork belly served over a salad, but I was leaning toward the spicy chicken rice bowl.

After that, it was like I was in the world of Game of Thrones, in a cathedral that looked kind of like the Princeton chapel. There was a "champion" who was supposed to accompany the king - he looked like Alside from True Blood. But the king didn't like him, and instead summoned two dragons which appeared from out of the cathedral rooftop, perhaps gargoyles come to life. Everyone had to cover their faces with orange Shamwows when the King passed. There was also a "talking head" in the King's entourage - the head sat on a platter, but was fully alive, with no body.

Scary Pets

I was with my friend Tricia in my parents' basement, and she had her "pets" with her. The main pet was a huge snake -- Anaconda-huge. Only not only did this snake strangle, it bit too. I was terrified, but she just laughed at me. She also had a baby giraffe, and I finally was startled awake when the snake lunged at the poor giraffe's head.

Lost in Penn Station

I was supposed to go to New York for work with a couple of work colleagues, and I was walking through Penn Station with them. We were in a hurry - in my head, I was thinking that we were going to miss the train from Princeton to New York (even though we already were in New York). Even though I was a daily commuter through Penn Station for 5 years, things looked familiar but confusing to me now. I took them down a set of stairs to what I thought would be the lower level, only it went down directly to the tracks, and instead of being full of other train riders waiting for the train, it was full of homeless people, people just loitering, drinking, and doing drugs. Instead of walking back up the stairs to back track, we thought we could cut through to a staircase we saw down the line that lead out to the street. However, in order to do so, we had to step over homeless people, squeeze past scary looking men hanging out on the steps, etc. Nobody really harassed us that bad, though some dodgy people tried to talk to us. When we got outside, I saw it had put us out on 37th Street, about 4 blocks north of the main Penn Station entrance. Again, the city streets there looked completely different than what I was expecting.

Sliding and ripping my purse

I was at a New York City museum with a set a very tall, very steep steps. I'm talking scary, almost vertical steep (I think this stems from watching the Top Gear Bolivia episode in which the TG guys drive down an almost vertical incline of sand to reach the coast).

I started going down the steps on my butt step by step, only this was even getting difficult as the steps themselves started getting smaller and narrower. I saw a handrail, so I thought my best option was to move over to the handrail and slide down it like a fireman's pole.

As I started sliding, my handbag got caught on the railing. I tugged at it, and it ripped (though none of the contents came out), and I went on my way sliding down. When I reached the sidewalk, I surveyed the damage. It was a patent vinyl black sack, and one of the handles had ripped completely. Inside I had been carrying around (who knows why), this vintage fur headband that a friend's mom had passed on to me -- and that was ruined too.

Andrew McCarthy, pregnant women, and Peru

I was at a lecture with my mom and aunt. The room was sort of like the old lecture halls in McCosh at Princeton. Andrew McCarthy came up to me and said hi - apparently we had gone to high school together. When he left, I told my mom and aunt (in Chinese) that he was a movie star and we had gone to school together. They said that I should invite him to have dinner with us after the lecture. When he came back, he had notes scribbled on paper and gave them to us. He said these were his ideas for a movie script.

Then I was with my friend who was pregnant and wearing a gray seersucker sheath dress. She was thin and looked great - just the baby bump. I realized that I had been rude in not congratulating her sooner on expecting. Her 2-year-old was running around under the dining room table - he was proportioned like a 2-year-old but only about 1/2 the size, like a miniature kid. I tried to pick him up and he was tiny.

Then I was at some tourist site in Peru, walking along a trail full of other tourists. There were red llamas, and small buffaloes. There were also horses running down the mountains, followed by jockeys on foot running after them. I thought, I should take some pictures... Then the clouds broke and it started to rain hard, so I made my way into a building. It was a hotel, and there was a woman checking in who looked like a girl I went to high school with - at least from the back. She was pregnant and wearing a slinky black cocktail dress with cutouts, only because she was pregnant the dress didn't fit and she only had it halfway zipped up. She and her friend started talking to me - first about how quickly the weather had changed, then they also had a bunch of CDs of local pop music and wondered if I wanted them.

Anti social vampire me

I was on a flying bus with a bunch of other people whom I didn't know. The bus landed itself in front of a city hotel, and I started to get up to get off, and the other people on the bus looked at me like I was crazy. We need to pull into the garage first, they said. This, I realized, was because we were vampires and we would have fried in the sunlight.

So I checked into the hotel, and had to share a room with another fellow vampire stranger. We were next door to more of our kind who were throwing a big party, and I hated them all.

Random snippets

I ran into 4 people from work at a local cafe - they had just come from bible study at the University chapel, and asked if I was interested in joining.

My stuffed animal pig turned into a fat, little pink baby.

Conference or sleepover?

I was at a conference, only at times if felt like I was a kid there with other kids. At meals, it was a bit like worrying about whether you were sitting at a "cool" table in the cafeteria. I had the vague sense that some of my high school girl friends were there, but I hadn't found them. We had one workshop that was in an art studio, with a bunch of artists. Then when it was time to spend the night, we all slept in sleeping bags in the art studio.

Black Swan skin

I had little red wormlike spots all over my shoulders and down my arms. Kind of like Natalie Portman's budding bird feather skin in Black Swan. And on my back were growing a few huge barnacles with fluttering gaping mouths. It still makes my skin crawl just remembering this dream...

Wierdness at the movie theater and in the dining hall

Redneckhunter and I were walking through a big McMansion-type house. The house had an actual movie theater built in the house. A movie was starting so we tried to grab some seats - the theater was pretty full. We had to end up sitting separately, and I sat next to an African-American girl. After a while, I realized she was rubbing my leg. I started looking around for another empty seat, and I saw my friend Jim down the row across the aisle.

Later I was in a college or high school dining hall, wandering through trying to find a seat. I saw the guys from the band, The Walkmen, only they were really young. I must have been staring at them, because they noticed it and started joking about me.

After I sat down, I looked up and noticed an Asian girl across the room, who had a haircut like mine, with blunt bangs. Then I saw another girl like this, then another. They all had different faces, they didn't look like me, but they all had the same haircut, though blunter and more helmety than mine.

New neighbors

In my dream, a cool old brick building at the end of Nassau Street in Princeton had been converted to luxury apartments, and we lived in one of them. There was a courtyard in the middle, and when we looked across we could see directly into the house of one of our neighbors. This was a huge place with a 2-story vaulted ceiling room, that was hung with medieval art, with a stage and lecture seating. It looked like some sort of chapel, but it was just a room where they did their daily things, like getting the kids off to school with backpacks and lunches.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Billy Connolly were also our neighbors apparently. Princeton, the town itself, also seemed much hipper and more urban. We were sleeping one night and one of our neighbors was out on his balcony in the courtyard talking loudly on the phone. He had an annoying nasal voice, and he was saying "I'm the wine guy, that's my thing."

Dinner with President Clinton

My family was at a dinner also attended by President Clinton. There was one very nice well-appointed room, and a second less formal room with a long cafeteria-style table. Clinton was supposed to sit in the nice room, of course, but instead he wanted to sit in the informal communal table. My family sat on one end, and of course, everyone was speaking in Chinese, and laughing and being loud. I kept giving "I'm sorry" looks to Clinton's aides.

Then a female Chinese Army officer came in, and demanded to see everyone's papers. I was wearing a quilted silk Chinese jacket, and she made me take it off. She also wanted to know why I was wearing an outer jacket indoors - it was suspicious. I tried to explain that it was just because I was cold - I was only wearing a tank top underneath...

Disconnected half-remembered dreams

I was back in pseudo-British-Asian colonial times, and I was unhappily married to Peter Petrelli (from Heroes), only Peter was kind of a dick and acted more like his brother Nathan. We had a Chinese servant, and she was my confidant.

In another dream, my friend Jocelyn and I were roommates -- we had separate bedrooms connected by one large closet.

Then I was riding in the back seat of a car, with a hitchhiker that we had picked up. The hitchhiker pulled out a ginormous spliff, and we got high.

Then there was something with a small Asian girl with glasses, and hiding in a closet.

Cannibal zombie rowers

Redneckhunter and I going on a speedboat ride. We were just on for a few minutes, and it was crazy fast jumping, swerving. We stopped momentarily and I knew I had to take Dramamine if I was going to make it any longer. Then we realized that we were being followed by sculling boats with ominous cannibal zombie rowers. We took off and they chased after. We realized there were other boats escaping the scary rowers, and we banded together to figure out the best way to evade them. The waterways were like a grid, and we turned left and right trying to lose our pursuers, but got very confused as to any sense of direction, and kept getting cut off by more scary rowing boats. At one point we decided to break off from the others, and turned down a waterway on our own. We realized we were close to where we had started.

Mods vs. Vampires

I was a vampire slayer - with a stake and everything! I had a gun too. I may have been some sort of undead myself, I'm not sure. But it was easy to spot the vampires because they wore plaid. The good guys wore stripes. It was like a Quadrophenia-like mods vs. preppies rivalry.

Snowy car chase

It was an early snowy morning, and Redneckhunter and I were parked in the parking lot of an office building on Route 1. Redneckhunter was trying to track someone down in the building, so I waited in the car. I locked the doors, but then I noticed an older woman outside. Suddenly she came toward the car with a hammer and tried to smash my window! There was also a man with her. Someone else came up to the driver's side, and I freaked until I saw it was Redneckhunter. I let him in, and said go go go go go ! He started the car, but it was icy and slippery, so it was slow going... He also had trouble finding his way out of the parking lot. At one point we had driven into a dead end. He said, oh no and looked like he had given up, until I said, "What's your problem?! We're in a car, they're on foot, just drive - reverse!!"

So we found our way back out to Route 1. It was snowy, so we were going fast, but not super fast. Then I heard a loud motorcycle coming up behind us. It was the old couple still chasing us! I thought I saw a gun! Then I woke up.

Rich ladies and monsters

I was at an event and started talking to a very well-dressed blond woman. I didn't realize it, but at some point she was called to a podium - apparently she had made a huge charitable donation and was being feted for it. Redneckhunter and I then found ourselves at her mansion - a very well-appointed British country estate. We were on the terrace looking down over the gardens - there were some deer roaming around, and then suddenly I said "Whoa, what is that?!" There was an enormous squirrel monkey - probably around 8 feet tall. Then I saw an equally large blue-skinned creature with crazy orange hair. 1000yregg was also there, so I asked him if he had his camera with him. I borrowed the camera and tried to take a picture, but every time I pushed the button to snap the picture, the camera reverted to viewing mode. I couldn't get a photo of the crazy monsters - they weren't scary at all, more like the big creatures from Where the Wild Things Are.

A Riot of Sorts

Redneckhunter and I were inside an upscale city mall, and there was some sort of riot going on. It looked like a mall, but it was supposed to be a school, and the students were out of control. As we wandered around, there were a lot of people running around - we weren't sure what was going on. Then we saw the principal, who we seemed to know well (perhaps we were teachers?). He looked like a human version of Redneckhunter's Little Big Planet sack person, with a big handlebar mustache and wearing big gold-tone 1970s sunglasses. After talking to him a little bit, we realized he seemed stoned, so we asked him if he was, and he said, yeah, it's been rough today, I had to smoke a bowl.

We wandered around a little more, and Redneckhunter passed by a display case of fancy expensive glass vacuum coffee makers and was looking at them, and I said, go ahead, just take it, who's gonna know?

I passed by a little kid with a long pointy hook, and was a little wary of him, and kind of gave him a look. Suddenly he lashed out at me with the hook and snagged my forearm with it. He started pulling on it and it cut a long gash down the length of my arm. Furious at him, I grabbed the long hook away from him and started beating him with it. I was shocked at my own viciousness.