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.

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.

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.

Tickle monster at the Chinese market

I was wandering through a Chinese market in a narrow winding alleyway with my mom. As the alleyway got smaller and more empty, I started getting nervous, but my mom insisted on going on until the alley dead-ended. So we turned back at that point -- I was pushing a shopping cart, and she was walking behind me, but she was kind of slow.

We got back and needed to take an elevator, so I got in the elevator and pushed the button to hold the doors open. I saw a shadow coming around a corner and thought it was her, but when the person rounded the corner, I saw that it was a huge guy - like 7 feet tall - with a bright red crazy long-haired clown wig. I started screaming "Mommy! Mommy!" but I didn't know where she was. He got in the elevator with me and I was screaming in horror as he reached out to tickle me in my armpit since my arm was still extended holding the button. Then I woke up.

Beetles in the rice!

I was back at my parents' place, hanging out in my room with my childhood next door neighbor. I noticed that my mom had hung up on the walls of my room a variety of photo frames in different sizes. These were the large frames that had mats for multiple photos, and my mom had left in the sample photos of random people that had come with the frames when you buy them.

I went downstairs for breakfast, and many members of my extended family were there. I went to get some rice out of the rice cooker and we were out, so I went down to the basement to get more rice to make another batch. In my parents' basement is a storage closet in which they have kept all our toys - only when I walked in, the toys were gone, and instead there were stacks and stacks of Kleenex boxes. I had a container and was scooping rice out of our big rice tin, and then I noticed that I must have scooped from the wrong tin because there were a bunch of almonds in my container. I started scooping the almonds out of my container, when I noticed a bunch of huge beetles inside my container. They freaked me out a little, but there was one that was just a skeleton, so I started with that one. I picked it up with my fingers and then it started to move! I dropped it and really freaked out and woke up saying "AAAAH!"

My hero

Anthony Bourdain was doing a bunch of live shows. We were friends, and he wanted to try to do a smaller show - like 700 people - but said his managers kept pushing him to do stadiums. (The likelihood of Tony Bourdain filling a stadium in real life is pretty much zero, but clearly his hero status in my eyes carries through in my dreamworld).

So I finally got a smaller show together for him - it was for a Chinese audience. I sat in the audience wearing a red college sweatshirt. The person next to me asked, is that where Bourdain went to college? And I said yeah, it seemed like an appropriate thing to wear. (In real life Tony went to the Culinary Institute of America, hardly the kind of school that would have "fan" attire, but again... some people like football stars, I like food writers)

There was a vertical banner hanging from the rafters on the side of the stage welcoming Tony in Chinese, along with some great "Engrish." Tony came onto the stage to cheers and roaring applause. My dad was serving as translator. Only when the act started, it seemed like my dad was more in the spotlight than Bourdain.

Al-Jazeera TV

My battery for my laptop had exploded (in real life), so it was in the dream. Redneckhunter had it, along with various other computer and electronics devices dismantled in our bedroom. I found an old TV in the corner. It was a 1970s era wooden frame TV set with the side speakers. When I turned it on, all that played on it was Al-Jazeera television. Our landlord is Muslim, so I thought maybe he had left it here. The TV set itself though was Chinese-made, and had Chinese characters on it.

Banquet for Two

I was at a Chinese banquet, except that only myself and one other guest showed up. But it was enough food for the standard table of 10. There were many courses, but the ones I remember were lobster and giant prawns. I was taking pictures, naturally, for the blog. Then I had a thought akin to "If a tree falls in the woods," if a Chinese banquet is amazing but not really eaten, then was it actually delicious?

Geek Olympics & Being a Homebody

I was in an enormous lecture hall, sitting in the front row of a very high balcony - it was so high, and the rows were so steep and narrow, I was a little afraid of falling. It was the college math/science Olympiad, only they were parading the competitors on stage and introducing them to cheering crowds as if it were a sporting competition, though in reality, people were cheering but also laughing a little at the massive geekiness. One of the announcers introduced everyone in Chinese, even the non-Chinese competitors, he would read their bio out in Chinese.

Later in the evening, I dreamed I was living at home in Newark, Delaware, with my mom and dad. I wasn't married, and my parents kept getting on my case to go out more. They told me I needed to go out to the bars and meet people, and I just complained that I didn't want to. Instead I got on my computer to check my e-mail. Almost all of it was spam. Instead of being able to delete it message by message, I had to highlight the entire body of each message and cut it that way. A lot of the messages were for vacations and travel and were long and full of text and pictures.

Map of Princeton

Don't remember much of last night's dream, but it did involve drawing a map of Princeton for a lost parent. It was quite a detailed map - I remember even drawing a little Nassau Hall, spire and all. Though the guy argued with me that he couldn't find a building that looked like that anywhere on campus. I was like, c'mon...

Oh, and there were Chinese students in the dream too, on Poe Field.

Terrorist and Trinkets

Last night, I dreamed I was in a house with many other women, and I had a baby. Somehow, a man threatening us with a nuclear device got all of us women to lie down on rows of mats, and prepare to meet this nuclear blast that would kill us all. I held the baby as I lay on my mat.

Of course, he was full of shit, and we lay there a while as nothing happened, until someone realized that he had just left the house and run away. So we all got up and went outside. The house was not a house I had ever lived in. It looked like the typical southern California housing developments that you always see in movies (like on Weeds). Some of the neighbors starting coming out, and one of our neighbors was my high school boyfriend John. Only he seemed a little on the slow side.

Having to Go to the Bathroom

Don't know about other people, but when I dream about having to go to the bathroom, it's because I have to go to the bathroom in real life.

For most of my life, these dreams took a predictable form. The need to pee would become the most important concern in the dream, but invariably, all I'd be able to find would be the world's dirtiest bathroom (Trainspotting style). But then on top of that, the door won't close, or there are no doors period and tons of people (including men) around, or the toilet is up on some kind of platform that I have to climb up, or I have to stand on a platform and aim and pee down into a toilet from far above. And I'd try to go, but not be able to release, and then I'd wake up.

I always used to think, if I ever did actually go in my dream, that maybe I was wetting the bed. Well, recently, the dream goes exactly the same way, but I do actually start peeing in the dream. The last one a couple days ago involved aiming for a little bowl from a high platform under the watchful eye of a mean old Chinese cleaning lady. I did start peeing, an no, I didn't wet the bed. What happens now is that I can't stop peeing in the dream. So I wake up mid-pee.

Is it age? What's next for me in the world of pee dreams? If I stop peeing in the dream, does it mean I've wet the bed? Is the next milestone total incontinence?

The Chinese Looking Out for Me

Dreamed I was involved with some shady characters. I don't think I was a prostitute per se, but I found myself in a convertible with some small-time hoods being friendly though I didn't really want to. I was sitting on the lap of a Joe Pesci-type in the driver's seat, and another guy was in back.

Can't remember when things started to get unfriendly, but at some point, it became apparent that I should get out of there. The guy in the back seat made like he was helping me to escape, and got me to crawl on my belly in the gutter. I also happened to be quite scantily clad by this point. After a while of crawling, I realized I was going in circles, and he was basically doing this to humiliate me and not actually let me get away.