Darren Criss-mas.

Before all the Darren Criss business, I was chasing golf balls for my Uncle Bob and cousin Pat. It was snowy and cold, and I rode away from the course in the back of my mini-van. I distinctly remember my aunt taking the highway exit towards my hometown. I even remember seeing the big green sign that said the highway name.

Next I was at this Christmas caroling concert with Uncle Bob and my cousin Katie. In the hallway, we saw a sign about the program that said there would be a special guest appearance by Darren Criss.

I was working there or something because I was wearing what looked like a boy scout uniform or a UPS uniform with a skirt and it looked kind of 50s and cute. At one point in the concert, Uncle Bob dragged me up onto the stage to sing along with a bunch of carolers who were up there and the audience was joining in, so I went up with him and we stood at the edge, near the curtain. Suddenly, the middle of the stage cleared and Uncle Bob disappeared and Darren Criss strode out, singing the rest of the carol.


I was completely starstruck and I kind of sank back into the edge of the stage, but then Darren turned and looked directly at me. I stared right back, and he was still singing and he came over and grabbed my hands and pulled me out with him and was singing to me, holding both my hands. Then he spun me around or something and then hoisted me up in the air, and so I played along and spread my arms out blissfully. When the song ended he put me down and we got separated in the crowd, but I looked over to my uncle and he said he’d been taking pictures on his crappy camera the whole time, so I had proof of my amazing experience to show my friends.

Of course I, along with so many other young women, share a crush on Darren. But I don't publicize it. This fantastic dream is about the closest I'll get to admitting puppy love for a random celebrity.

Here's a little Criss for my reader(s). (Yeah, I knew him pre-Glee. All of the cool kids did.)

Classic Thanksgiving Dream

I had this dream a few years ago. It was absolutely lovely.

In my dream, it was my mom's side of the family's dinner, and for some reason the turkey was lost.

So instead we cooked and ate my cousin Patrick.

The end.

Hannah

First, I was on The Biggest Loser, and I'm not a large person, so that was confusing. Also, since my new kitten has been pooping all over my room lately and it's really disgusting and stresses me out, there was a bunch of human feces everywhere on the Biggest Loser ranch.


This is my favorite Biggest Loser, Olivia.





This is a lot cuter than what my cat has been leaving around my room.




After the ranch, I went to a small neighborhood close by with a few friends. We took a walk and then I left again to go make a movie.

When I arrived at the movie-making venue, I made a shocking discovery. (On a side note, I don't think it was shocking for my dream self, it was shocking to my real self. My dream self obviously had already known about this.)

I had a daughter.

She was six years old, blonde, and her name was Hannah.


My dream self was only taken aback a slight bit about the sudden appearance of my daughter Hannah. We found ourselves in the little girl's section of a department store and I was like a kid in a candy store, running around and picking out outfits for Hannah. I found a little shirt-dress thing that looked like Rapunzel's dress from "Tangled."

After collecting Hannah and the clothes, we went to make our movie. However, we got side-tracked once again at an indoor public pool. I decided to teach Hannah how to swim.

Much to the astonishment of myself and the Hispanic family that was in the pool with us, Hannah caught on after less than five minutes of instruction, bravely pushing off the wall and swimming laps back and forth across the length of the pool. I was so proud of her.

We finally made it to the movie site. My old friend Kyle from high school was directing the movie, and I remember my friend Brian was in the movie with us.

We were all seated in an auditorium, getting ready to deliver our lines. Hannah and I were a few rows and several seats apart.

When filming began, most of the actors performed flawlessly, including my very gifted daughter. I, however, forgot my lines over and over again, and never managed to deliver them successfully before waking up from the dream.

And that's the story of Hannah.

College Nightmares

Since leaving college, I've had several different anxiety dreams about my experience there. I'm remembering only bits and pieces of each, so I'm just going to summarize a couple of the interesting parts.

The first stress dream I remember having involved me getting literally stabbed in the back by my orientation leader.



I spent the rest of the dream searching around the parts of campus my sub-conscious remembers to try and find the leader and get revenge. I remember she had short, dark brown hair and was wearing a navy blue polo shirt when the stabbing occurred, so that's what I was looking for.

There was also the standard "can't find the classroom" bit in that same dream. I was frantically trying to find my piano class in the hallways of the music building, and I had almost driven myself completely mad when I remembered - I dropped out of college. I didn't need to go to piano class anymore.


The second college nightmare was far more interesting, and far less stressful.

In this dream, my classes were strange and warped, some even life-threatening. We did inexplicable things, and I know for a fact that either I or what I think was a foreign exchange student soiled a pair of pants and I had to run to my car to get a clean pair.

The exchange student was in one of the classes with me, and in the class we had a challenge that if we lost, we were eaten by a giant monster-machine. We were designing some sort of statue or figurine or something, it was really trippy. There was a lot of the colors green and pink involved.

The exchange student hadn't completely realized what was going on and so lost the challenge, but the student who was in charge (I don't think we had a professor) decided to spare her life.

Later on in that dream, around the time that the pants were soiled, I came across my old music theory professor, who I used to think was a huge dick but more recently found out that he's actually a sweetheart after he did something very nice for me.

He's late-middle-aged, and has a long, grey ponytail. He isn't necessarily attractive, but in my dream he was significantly hotter than I remembered. Also, he was dressed as Captain Hook from Peter Pan.



On a side note, I know exactly where my brain got the Captain Hook thing from. I was watching Ellen the other day and Neil Patrick Harris was on for the Halloween show, and he was dressed up as Captain Hook and it was adorable.



Also, his partner David dressed up as Peter Pan and their kids were Tinker Bell and Smee. Seriously, how cute is that?!?! I can't even stand it! Look at how cute they are!

Anyway, back to my dream. My Captain Hook Professor and I went on some sort of an adventure together and shenanigans were carried out. I do not remember any details.

Then, in a very shocking and disturbing surprise ending to the dream, Professor Hook dramatically threw himself off of an iceberg and into the freezing ocean in order to freeze himself permanently in a block of ice.



After that, my dream took me several years into the future to my future self, who was completely insane and had returned to the iceberg that Professor Hook had thrown himself off of.

I dove into the icy water and found Professor Hook's body, and the dream ended with me dragging him up to shore in an attempt to revive him so that I could have some sort of a companion in my lonely, spinster-y life.

And the Killer is...

My great-uncle, Jim.

I'll start by describing my great-uncle Jim. I really wish I had a picture to post. Maybe I'll upload one sometime in the future and tag it onto the end of this post. We'll see.

Uncle Jim is old and kind of looks like Ebenezer Scrooge.



He has a potbelly, bushy eyebrows, puffy cheeks, hair on only the sides of his head, and he smokes a pipe. He's never been anything but nice to me, but for some reason I've always had this weird feeling of uncomfortable dislike towards him.

In the dream, he was my father and about ten times creepier, and an annoyingly, overbearingly conservative christian. (The kind of person who really, really bothers me.)

My great-uncle-father Jim was raising us (I know I had siblings, I'm not sure who they were) with unnecessary strictness and regularly made me feel guilty for doing things that he didn't think fit into his "moral code." Also, we were all living the other side of my family's cottage.

I was particularly frustrated with him one day when I walked into the bathroom to pee. To my disgust and astonishment, I looked in the toilet only to find a severed human leg floating in the bowl. (I guess it was a really big toilet.)

I don't know why I thought this would solve the problem, but I flushed the toilet. The water started to rise and I stepped backwards cautiously, knowing it was about to overflow.



As the toilet overflowed, several body parts poured out of it and into the water-logged bathroom. I ran out to the main room and brought my family in to see the dead body parts. We realized that Jim had committed the murder and dismembered his victim, trying to hide her by flushing her down the toilet.




(Dexter? Ice truck killer? Anyone?)

With that discovery, I completely lost it and freaked out at Jim. (The climate of the situation implied that this was the first time I or anyone else had confronted Jim.)

I started screaming about hypocrisy, demanding to know how Jim could make us feel guilty day after day for doing completely normal things when he was a murderer.

I actually remember part of what I yelled word for word.

"Do you not claim to live by the ten commandments? How about DO NOT KILL? DO NOT LIE? Or DO NOT STEAL, how about that? Because you stole that girl's life!"

And that's all.

Ps I think that last part about "do not steal" was a throw-back to when we read The Kite Runner in AP Lit - Baba's philosophy about how stealing is the only sin one can commit, and murder is "stealing" someone's life.

edit - I found Great-Uncle Jim in the background of a group picture at my graduation party last summer. He's not as fat as I remembered.

Turkey Leg Blues

This is actually my SECOND anxiety dream about the Renaissance Festival. That's how crazy I am.

I missed the RenFest this year, unfortunately, because I was too busy failing at college. So a few weeks after the festivities were over, I had this dream.

In the dream, I found out that they were extending the RenFest for one more weekend, so I decided to drive all the way to Nowhere, MI and attend the festival alone.

So I pulled up to the front entrance of the festival only to realize that not only was I completely alone but I was also not in costume (which is very uncharacteristic of me) and did not have any money for a ticket.

For some reason, however, there was a vendor selling turkey legs outside the entrance. They were only a dollar, so I decided to scrape together some of my loose change and have at least a turkey leg to make the experience memorable.

The vendor was an older guy, very tall and kind of fat in an old, tough man way. He was bald and had a grey/white mustache/beard combo. I think he was wearing a chain mail shirt. I gave him my dollar and he handed me a turkey leg. We made a little small talk, and he was very friendly.

I walked away and bit into my turkey leg, expecting juicy goodness, but instead got a horrifying mouthful of fat and gristle, which I immediately spit out but could somehow taste even into the next day after I woke up.

The entire turkey leg was fat, gristle, and bone, and I was not only feeling rather puke-ified but generally feeling like a failure, standing alone in street clothes outside the Renaissance Festival with no money and a piece of bone covered in fat in my hand.



Turkey legs. Fuck yeah.

Wedding Crashers

In this dream, my 16-year-old most-recent-ex-boyfriend announced he was getting married and sent me an invitation. Why he was getting married at 16, I don't know. Why he invited me, I don't know.

I decided to attend, with my younger brother as a date. (Keepin' it classy.) We showed up at the wedding, which was at my old church, in less-than-formal attire and went into the service well before it started.



I imagine this is what we looked like.



For some reason there was a lot of Halloween candy lying around, as if that was what they were serving at the reception later. (It was, after all, a 16-year-old's wedding.)



A few minutes after making this observation, I saw my ex in his tux, getting ready for the ceremony, and I decided we were leaving. My brother and I gathered up all of the candy that we could carry, I believe I shouted a few offensive things in the general direction of the sanctuary, and we left the church before I ever had a chance to find out who the bride was.


It would've been a dramatic exit if I had been able to find my car in the parking lot. However, my brother disappeared when we got outside and I was left alone in the cold for hours, baffled over where my car could be, my hands full of candy, until the wedding was over and everyone came outside to find me still there.

Rain After a Drought

Guess what? I dropped out of college and got a cat.

And I started remembering my dreams again.

Huzzah.

I've had a series of four dreams that I have remembered since returning home, each increasingly disturbing. The first took place at my old high school.

At my high school, the funding for a band director had been cut and so my arch-enemy, Mr. G, was fired from his position and they selected my almost-tone-deaf librarian mother to take over his job.

However, knowing only what she has learned second-hand from me about music, (which consists mostly of me complaining about other musicians) my mom was in need of some outside help. Thus, three young women were selected by some unknown high power to assist her - myself, my good friend Jami, (not to be confused with Jaimie) and the assistant drum major from the CMU Marching Band, Julie.

Out of the four of us, I was under the impression that Julie or I were the most qualified to run the marching band, as I had been the drum major in high school and she was a drum major in college. However, Julie was given the top music group, Jami was assigned to the marching band, and I was stuck with the freshman group, also known as "Kadet Band." Yes, "kadet" with a "k."

I freaked out and started screaming my face off at my mom, yelling about how unfair it was that I was stuck with the shit band when I obviously deserved the marching band, it meant so much more to me than it did to Jami, I was more experienced, I'd marching in a college band and she hadn't, a was a far better musician, etc. etc.

This went on for a while until I finally decided that if I couldn't direct the marching band, I wasn't going to direct any band at all. So I stormed out of the school.

I woke up angry and frustrated, which is how I feel most of the time now, and the dreams just get stranger from here.


Everyone's favorite college drop-out, signing off.

The Best Dream I've Ever Had

Interrupted, of course. As all good dreams are sooner or later.

The dream took place at my graduation party, which was a very, very good day. In the dream, everything was going as planned, as everything did the day of my grad party.

One of the boys across the hall from me, Joey, who has appeared in my dreams before for no apparent reason, was there and decided to buy me flowers and candy in an extremely nice and completely platonic way.

I got bored about halfway through my grad party, even though there were lots of people there and I was getting tons of presents. I decided to go online to a Relient K fan page thing, and I somehow acquired Matt Thiessen's e-mail address, to which I emailed something, I'm not sure what, but to my intense surprise, he emailed me back.



We set up a place for us to meet that was actually not too far away from my house, and we met and started chatting. I was completely star-struck, and hadn't realized that I was wearing a Relient K shirt and so felt really lame, but Matt didn't seem to mind and we actually hit it off.



I told him how I've gone to a ton of concerts and I've met every member of the band except for him, and how I liked Dave Douglas better than the new drummer, Ethan. I got to meet a bunch of his friends and his grandmother.



Then things started to get really weird.
One of his friends had recently gone to the Renaissance Festival and had two of those giant pickles that you can get from barrels, and he gave me one because I love pickles.

I was eating the pickle with Matt, who thought it was a cute quirk, and we were at some sort of performance at an old folks' home.



The pianist started playing an accompaniment and I began absent-mindedly singing along with it, then suddenly realizing that I knew the piece because it was written for piccolo and I am a piccolo player.

To my surprise, a guy I knew from high school, Noah, came out next to the pianist and started playing his piccolo, but everyone began boo-ing. I felt awful for him, because he was an okay musician, so I decided to save him because he could no longer perform.

I ran up to the front of the room and started playing the rest of his piece on my pickle. Which is pretty funny, if you think about it.

I finished out the piece and Matt was really impressed with me. We went back to his place and were about to start making out, which I was totally cool with because having sex with Matt Thiessen would be awesome, but then my roommate made a weird noise in her sleep and I woke up.

Which made me very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very sad. I love Matt Thiessen. With all of my heart.

I woke up happy, though. :)

Grace the All-Knowing

I discovered that I had the power to read minds.


I would take my hand and make a weird symbol with it, something that resembled the letter F, and I would point the symbol at myself and take several deep breaths to focus my mind.

Then I would point the hand symbol at the person whose mind I was reading and it would take a few moments, but then all of the sound around me would become muted and I would hear the person's voice saying what it was they were thinking.

Unfortunately, I didn't come across any interesting people in my dream and so the thoughts I heard were all nonsense and a few dirty limericks.

Morbid Dream No. 2

In this dream, my dear grandmother passed away and the family was gathering for her funeral. It is the second of three dreams in a row I have had predicting the death of someone close to me.

I remember my brother and I walking out of the visitation together. I was wearing my black heels. Ethan was alive again, and Aunt Janet was too because in my dream, she had died as well. Ethan had a stuffed animal with him, and they were like a human version of Calvin and Hobbes.

Mom and Dad ditched Joe and I at the funeral home and so we had to walk home. We ran across the street and I almost got hit by two speeding cars, I only survived because I ran out of the lane just in time. They had no intention of stopping for me.

That's all.

Morbid Dream No. 3

To be directly followed by morbid dream number 2. This one is just fresher in my memory because I just woke up.

I have this horrible feeling that I'm going to lose someone close to me soon, because I keep having these dreams and I'm afraid they're premonitions. There was the one with my mom, then one with my very dear grandmother that I'm going to post soon and this one with my close childhood friend.

My friend Jody and I were assigned a project in school that required us to have a body of water that was exactly one foot deep. We went searching for such a body of water when we came across her neighbor's pool and hot tub.

We somehow ended breaking the pool, and were discovered by the mother of the household and several small children. However, she did not figure out that we had broken their pool and instead invited us inside.

We had a lovely time visiting with the mother and children, but I felt really guilty the whole time about breaking their pool. Just as the father was getting home (and I was sure he would discover what we had done) we left and went back to Jody's house.

This is the point in the dream at which I got extremely angry for no apparent reason and stayed that way for most of the dream afterwards.

I was so angry that I began throwing Jody's stuff around, then packed up my stuff and stormed out of her house to walk all the way home.

I decided to do laundry, so I packed up my laundry bag and marched to the laundry room at my college, which in the dream was a Bed, Bath, and Beyond store. I then attempted to use the model washers and dryers to actually do a load of laundry before someone told me that I wasn't supposed to be using them, I was in the wrong place.

At this point my childhood friend had shown up. He was a combination of my friend Jonah, Bryan, and a guy named Tyler who I just met three weeks ago. He hung around while I did laundry and made everyone else around the house feel pissy because I was so pissy. He somehow stayed in a good mood.

Then I went back to Jody's with my childhood friend and I went and did more angry things around Jody's neighborhood. While I was doing this, I lost track of my friend.

A little while later, my grandmother called and told me that my childhood friend had drowned in the neighbor's broken pool. I felt horrible that I had been so mean to him earlier and distinctly remember writing a tearful apology on his facebook wall in the futile hope that he might somehow read it from the beyond. A few other people who had already heard the news had posted their goodbyes as well.

I was still with Jody and now also Anna and a few of my family members when my childhood friend suddenly, miraculously showed up.

He told me that the doctors at the emergency room had brought him back and everything would be okay after all.

I was happy.

If Only

I don't remember most of this dream, but I have the highlights.

My mother was dying of a debilitating disease. We knew she didn't have long, and so she was helping us make funeral arrangements ahead of time.

I decided I was going to play flute at her funeral and asked her what piece she'd like me to perform. She told me that she wanted me to play the song "If Only" from "Holes." It goes like this:

If only, if only, the woodpecker sighs,
the bark on this tree were as soft as the skies.
While the wolf waits below, hungry and lonely,
howling to the moon, if only, if only.

I vowed to her that I would somehow find out the tune of the song and transcribe it for flute. It was very strange.

Tortured orphans, Batch, colitis, murderers, and Happily Ever After all in one night.

I was a foster mother in this dream, which is something that I think I might want to do with my life because I've known a lot of fantastic foster children and parents over the years, including some of my near and dear foster family members.

My foster children were three or four girls, including one who never showed her face and never spoke. She had been abused and for reasons unknown, there were some assassins who were out to get her. They had killed her previous foster mother.

I assumed that there was something wrong with her face, but the foster girl eventually began showing her face and it was normal looking. Eventually, when she felt safe around me and the other girls, she began to speak, too.

However, the assassins were still out to get her, so we were never safe. Bad guys kept popping up in the most random places, and the whole middle of the dream was a series of close calls.

We were in a grocery store when one of the close calls happened, and on the way out I saw Corey from the dream two nights ago. He was wearing a light blue button-down shirt and khakis. (Just like he was wearing at rehearsal yesterday.) I stopped to say Hello to him and for some reason decided to poke him in the stomach, but I poked something hard plastic under his shirt instead.

He got annoyed and explained that he has colitis. (People with colitis sometimes have to use colostomy bags.) I don't know why my brain put this in my dream. Maybe I'm worried about getting colitis and having a bag of poop connected to me.

My foster girl finally seemed safe, it had been a few years since an attack. My girls and I were loading up our truck to go somewhere, and a younger-looking man whom we all trusted was helping us. I was finally okay with leaving my foster girl alone with another person for short periods of time because it didn't seem like anyone would be trying to kill her anymore.

However, as soon as I let her and the young man out of my sight, he kidnapped her, threw her in the truck and drove off. I followed frantically, but with no idea how to save my girl without getting myself killed.

I followed them to a clearing in the woods. He had her tied up and was going to light a fire nearby.

I ran into the clearing with my friend Josh, Jillian Michaels, and my band director Batch. The young man wouldn't release my girl and threatened to kill us and her if we didn't leave the area.

I left to protect my foster girl, and Josh and Jillian, who had just wandered in by accident, left with me. Batch appeared to leave also, but in reality he snuck behind a little grove of trees and pulled out a handgun.

When the young man went to light a fire near the grove, Batch popped up and shot him.

With that, my little family was reunited and we lived happily ever after.

So Handsome.

I'm in a college marching band, and I have a wee bit of a crush on the drum major. His name is Corey. We do this thing when he gets up on the podium where we go "Corey! Corey! Corey! Corey!" a bunch of times in really high pitched voices and when he gets to the top we all sigh and some of the girls go "SO handsome!" or "SO sexy!"

Which is true.

And he was in my dream last night, along with a mysterious red-head with whom I had a brief romance.

Corey was in a movie that was made of a popular children's book. He already kind of looks like Michael C. Hall, but he looked even more like him in the dream with a little bit of Sean Maher thrown in. Olivia Wilde was also in the movie.

All I remember about the movie are some vague details, and one specific scene.

There was something with cartoon-looking birds in the beginning, but the part with Corey was when he was on some sort of adventure and leaped/fell off of these tall train tracks and landed directly in front of Olivia Wilde. It was a romantic moment because they turned out to be soulmates and that was how they met.

Then there was this tall, broad-shouldered red-headed curly-haired man whom I was in a relationship with after meeting only days before. It was NOT my friend Joey, a tall curly-haired ginger as well, because he was actually also in the dream.

The red-head and I were cuddling at some sort of concert. He had his arm around my waist, and it felt wonderful.

Several uncomfortable situations and one awesome situation all wrapped up in one beast of a stress dream.

I'm leaving for college tomorrow. Thus, I had a really crazy dream last night and it's probably going to take me all day to type because I'm super distracted but it had a few amazing parts in it so here goes...

The amazing part was right near the beginning. The general idea of the dream was that I was at school, attending different classes and weird things were happening in each of them. However, I started out the dream as Robin from How I Met Your Mother before turning back into myself and going to school.



We were filming a scene between Robin, Ted, and Barney (Again, it is obvious that I watch far too much television) and Barney was trying to seduce me. After Ted and Barney were done playing a practical joke on someone that I can't remember clearly, Barney left and I, on a whim, decided to run after him.

This is the amazing part where Neil Patrick Harris and I kiss. (See how my mind made that loophole? He's gay but he HAD to kiss me because it was a t.v. show! I'm a genius, I tell you.)

I was still Robin and I was finally going to give in and make out with Barney. We were standing on the sidewalk in front of a strip mall in my town that contains the movie theater, if any readers are familiar. (I forgot, no one reads this.)

So Neil Patrick Harris and I kissed several times. It was awesome, but then at the end I laughed and said something that made him laugh, so we messed up the very end of our kiss, but the director said he could still use it so I didn't get to do another take. But I got to kiss Neil Patrick Harris! Even though it was in my subconscious!

NOW the school part started. I went to school and to my first class, which was band. We still had Mr. R as our teacher, (he left a few years ago) and it was a younger year for me because a girl I know, Sarah, who was in my flute section, was still at school even though she's two years older.

In band class we watched a movie with Sarah in it. She's not really the acting kind of person, but she was actually really good in the movie, although she made us fast-forward through some embarrassing parts.

After band, I couldn't figure out which class I had next. I got out my schedule, but I hadn't written the class names down, I had written random sentences that were somehow supposed to tell me which class it was, but I had completely forgotten what I had been thinking when I wrote them and so they were completely useless.

At this point I need to give some background info. In real life, I have a lot of issues that mostly spring from my fairly severe Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. (I'm not just saying I'm OCD because I like things to be clean, I actually have OCD and it's a huge part of my life, unfortunately.) I constantly wonder why me, why was I born with it?

In my dream, I answered my question with a fabricated event that apparently happened to my dream self. I drowned.

I don't know however many years ago it was in the dream, but I had drowned and then been brought back to life, but had suffered some mild brain damage in the process because of the lack of oxygen to my brain. The result of that was hypersensitive hearing, severe anxiety, and all of my other OCD symptoms. Somehow this made people feel more sorry for me and be more understanding than they do in real life where I'm just born with a weird brain.

Now that you know this, I had continued on to what I dazedly thought was my next class, and found my mother and my female math teacher making glasses of iced tea in the classroom, and no one else was there.

My mom figured I was probably lost and let me stay there with them because, like everyone else, she felt sorry for me and my poor oxygen-deprived brain.



They did not explain why they were making iced tea, but they started breaking glasses and making a huge mess. Somehow, a glass of iced tea slipped out of one of their hands and smashed the windshield of a car that was passing through the classroom with an obese woman with dark hair in it. (I'm so weird. I don't know where this stuff comes from.)

The obese dark-haired woman got out of her car angrily and smashed a bunch of stuff in the room to get back at them before getting back in her car and driving away. I then decided to leave that classroom and go to what I was pretty sure was my science class, which I probably wasn't supposed to be in.

I showed up in my class and we went on a field trip to the huge, shallow jungle pond in the lower level of the school library. (Obviously that doesn't really exist.)

Our assignment was to go swimming in the pond and find an animal. I was not really cool with this, but I got in the water anyway.


There was a huge, creepy turtle to my right which I tried very hard to avoid, and a couple other creepy Muppet-looking animals that I was trying to avoid. My heart was beating really fast, like panic-attack fast.

They looked like these little fuckers from Sesame Street.

There was this manta ray that was swimming around me, too close for comfort. I was surrounded on all side by pond creatures, so I didn't have anywhere to go to get away from it.

My genius mind decided it would be a good idea to go underwater, so I held my nose and went under. When I surfaced again, the manta ray decided to latch itself onto my head like a really gross hat.



I was freaking out, and the manta ray was holding on to my entire head and there were eyes on its underside that I could see staring at me when I looked up. I was afraid to try and pull it off because it could sting me. (I don't know if manta rays actually sting or not - are they the same thing as sting rays?) It started inching down my face, and I opened my mouth to yell but its nasty fin-flap-things started to get too close to my mouth so I had to close it again and just sit there with a manta ray on my head.

Finally, the ray decided he had had enough of scaring the shit out of me and swam off again, releasing me from his grip. I got out of the pond quickly, narrowly avoiding the giant turtle. Everyone else was fine and had found a cute, friendly animal to observe in the pond. I was the only one who had been attacked by a manta ray.

The Fall of the Chicago Strangler

I got yelled at by my mother this morning for sleeping too much. By the way.

This dream began at camp. It wasn't music camp or church camp, I'm unclear on exactly what kind of camp it was. All I know is that we were in a large, co-ed cabin. The row of bunk beds along one side of the cabin was for girls, the other was for boys.


There were several dark-haired, attractive boys there including one particularly cute guy, younger than me, slightly curly dark hair. (He was not Curly. In the dream, Curly was Zach Braff, but I still somehow knew that he was Curly.) There was another distinctive guy who looked a little Hispanic, and a somewhat obese boy about my age, maybe older. I don't remember which other boys/girls there were.

The boys decided to play a really, really mean prank on me by stealing my flute and nailing all of its pieces to a tree on the main-stage hill. (Apparently it was also partly Ichthus.) It was there for a few days and got rained on and rusty. When I found out I freaked, naturally, and went and pulled out all of the nails while sobbing uncontrollably.

Apparently I forgave them, because we went back to being friends shortly after. This would probably not happen in real life, because they would owe me a great deal of money to replace the flute.

That's about the time when the Hispanic-looking guy was kidnapped by the Chicago Strangler, then was let go again. I don't remember this happening in the dream, but he talked about it later.


After he came back, I was abducted by the Strangler. He was the Trinity Killer from the show "Dexter." (Yet another sign that I watch far too much television.)

However, I managed to escape and then lead the police to the Strangler, thus becoming a hero. I remember running over to talk to the Strangler as a policewoman, namely Mrs. Miller from my church, led him away in cuffs. I think I was gloating or something.

During all of this, I was still living at the camp and the curly-haired boy and I had become make-out buddies. Zach Braff and I were still dating, but I didn't feel an ounce of guilt while I was cuddling with the new boy.

When it was time for us all to go home from camp, we piled into the van and curly-haired make-out buddy and I sat by each other. I was contemplating how to break it to him that I had a boyfriend back home and we couldn't keep fooling around when he said something about how far away he lived from me and that it was going to be a pretty long drive for me when I went to visit him.

I took that opportunity to tell him that things weren't going to work out between us, it was too long of a distance between us. He was mad, but I only felt bad for a few moments. (Apparently I have no heart.)

When we got back, my grandma was there to pick me up but we had to take a boat from our van to the parking lot because they were separated by a rivery-pondish looking thing.

We got back to shore and my obese friend started having some sort of crisis. I comforted him saying, "You have a big heart, that's why people like you." and several variations of that.

Then I hung out with Zach Braff, and he commented on how I seem to have had a good time kissing the curly-haired boy at camp. I didn't really answer him. I just had a "meh" moment, and after that we forgot about it.

A Dream about how I'm Crazy.

I started out with a bunch of my band friends from last year, we were at an outdoor venue having a party or something like that.


In the dream, I appeared the way I sometimes feel. I was a recluse, wrapped up in a big ugly brown coat even though it's nice outside. (Brown coat? Firefly? I wish?)

I didn't talk to anyone, but instead I obsessively drew detailed pictures of the people who were at the gathering.

My friend Liz noticed that I had drawn several pictures of her that were kind of unflattering in a teasing sort of way, and told me I'm weird but funny. It made me happy.


Then I accidentally did something that made her really angry, I don't remember what. But suddenly she didn't find the pictures so humorous anymore, and turned the other band kids into an angry mob which started chasing after me.

I ran away, eventually ending up on a dock with a tower. There were a few younger adults there, who looked like camp counselors or something, and who attempted to help me hide the pictures.

I ended up inside a building, and Liz's parents were there. Usually, Liz's parents love me. But they were turned against me by Liz, and were trying to locate my pictures and burn them. I was freaking out because the drawings were a safety blanket-ish obsession to me, and I couldn't bear to let them go. I was also feeling ashamed and rejected because people who used to love me now hate me.

Before they could get ahold of my pictures, my parents and brother drove up in the family van and rescued me.

The drive home was really long, longer than was realistic. About halfway home, we stopped at a rest stop to use the bathroom.

The bathroom was a huge circular room with another large circular pillar in the middle of it. There were hundreds of stalls lining the room and the pillar, and they were only the size of lockers.

Apparently my parents were okay with this, because they got right into their stalls and did their business.

I hunted around for a suitable stall. They were all equally tiny, and there were some... leftovers on the seats and floor. I could not find a clean stall.

Before I could find a decent toilet, I reached into my pocket and found a key. I couldn't figure out what it was for. I assumed it was for something nearby, like hopefully a private bathroom.

Suddenly, a door that was within the circular room opened and my friend Jody walked out.

She said something to me about finally coming home, and I realized that my key was for one of the rooms within the circular room.

Then I found out that the room was a part of a mental hospital, at which I was a patient. My parents had been dropping me off, not stopping for a bathroom break.

That's how the dream ended. Me realizing just how insane I am.

Unidentified Flying Object

This dream was SO vivid and SO awesome. I love having amazingly amazing vivid dreams, especially those that involve flying.

The premise of this dream is that I needed a ride to Michigan Youth Arts Festival, which already happened months ago, and I did not, in fact, need a ride. In this dream, I apparently did.

I went to my friend's house. She was going to the festival too. I do not know who this girl was. She was a combination of my friend Jami, (who was actually at MYAF) a girl I know named Molly, and a random asian girl. I don't know what her name was, but I'll just call her Molly because that's who she most reminded me of.

So I got to Molly's house and we went into this room that was specifically for boarding this spacecraft-thing that we were going to be taking to MYAF. It was huge and looked kind of like a flying saucer, but more sophisticated. The outside reminded me of a tent.

The way of boarding the UFO was really strange, one had to go through a series of rituals, even be in the right mind-set, and when everything clicked the UFO would pull the rider up into it with some unknown force that the person would feel in his or her hand as they touched the doorway of the UFO.

Molly only took a few minutes to get into the UFO because she was used to it, but it took a frustratingly long time for the UFO to accept me. When I was finally pulled up into it, it was like a cross between a tent and a trampoline on the inside. The UFO could travel so fast that it would take about twenty minutes to make the three hour trip to MYAF.

However, we did not go to MYAF. We went to the Old West for a potty break, because I really had to pee. (I really did have to pee in my sleep, because when I woke up I went to the bathroom and peed for about a minute straight.)

The Old West town was very suspicious of us, and we were trying to blend in because for some reason, they wouldn't approve of our real identities. I got in the long line to use a gross little wooden-walled bathroom. There was no door on the one toilet stall that men and women had to share, and the girl toilet was right in the doorway. (This may stem from my anxiety about using the toilet when other people are around.)

I never got to do my business, I think the villagers ended up turning on us. I distinctly remember meeting a bright green bird who told me a legend about a bird that could shoot flames out of its butt and fly enormous heights, then claimed to be the bird in the legend.

I believed the bird and got on its back when it promised me it could help me escape. It took off over the water, which resembled a wave pool, flew about halfway to the big wall, then crashed and burned.

Instantly, I was back in the UFO with Molly and another guy who was reading a magazine in the corner. I started going through my luggage for MYAF and realizing that I had forgotten the majority of the things I needed for the weekend, including all of my linens and my outfit for the performance.

I started asking Molly if we could run back to my house. After all, it would only take us about twenty minutes to get to MYAF, so we had time. At first she refused, but then we were instantly back in my house and I was stuffing all of the things I needed into my bags.

Finally, we were going to be on our way to MYAF, but the UFO would no longer accept me and pull me up into it, so the dream ended with me trying futilely to get up into the UFO as Molly and her mother stood by and put added pressure on me.

America's Got Talent Live

I was in school, in an aerobics class. However, the class didn’t take place in the gym, it took place in a normal classroom with rows of desks. The class changed and suddenly I was inexplicably in an empty biology classroom, then the school’s swimming pool.

In the pool I immediately dropped all of the important things that were in my pockets and they sunk to the bottom, so I went underwater to get them. I’m not sure how this happened, but I ended up locked in an embrace with this boy who goes to my high school, Cooper.


He said he was just trying to be chivalrous, but from that point on we became engaged in a passionate love affair that included him taking me to see “America’s Got Talent” live, and I was very excited to see Howie Mandel. At one point I asked him, “What about your girlfriend?” but he claimed that they were breaking up anyway, and I’m not sure why I didn’t also consider my current boyfriend.


Then I was with Jim and Pam from the office and we were trying to get Michael to go to the hospital because he was obviously ill, but he kept avoiding it and tried to go into a sleazy Thai restaurant instead.