A hostile boyfriend, a littered freezer

I think I had a fairly coherent dream in the middle of the night or early in the morning. However, later, after waking briefly and then going back to bed, I had one of those rambling, disconnected dreams that seems characteristic of that sort of late-morning nap, and it displaced any memory of the earlier dream.

*****

I am in bed, on the phone with my friend H. I am talking on a white, corded telephone; I have it in the bed beside me. I fall asleep talking to her. I wake up, listen to see if she's still on the phone, and hear what sounds to be she and her fiance K having sex, so I hang up.

Later, I come downstairs to find H sleeping (apparently postcoitally) on the couch. I think, "Didn't she realise [my boyfriend] D was here [at her house] too? He could have walked in any moment." A man comes into the house; I presume he is K, although he doesn't look like I remember him. D makes some innocuous remark such as "Good afternoon," and the man takes it as an insult and becomes immediately aggressive. "What did you say?" he asks. D prudently replies "I didn't say anything." I look at the man more closely, trying to figure out whether or not he really is K. I notice that this man's ears are not pierced, and I know K has probably about 2 gauge holes in his earlobes. [Another big difference is that the dream man has shoulder-length hair, while K is bald, but I don't think I made that connexion in the dream.] I start to realise that this is not K, but rather a disturbingly aggressive man that H had taken up with during a period that she and H were broken up. [No such thing happened in real life, and no such man exists.] I conclude that H and K have broken up again, and that other man is back in the picture. The man is already becoming somewhat threatening toward D and me. I don't want to be staying at H's house with him around. I see a cat that looks like my cat C and remember that C is here also and we have to take her home with us. I pick up the cat, and I'm not sure-- is this my cat C, or is this H's cat?

There is some problem with my refrigerator/freezer. I look inside the freezer and remove three large plastic pieces (are these interior pieces supposed to be removable?) There seems to be lots of dirt and debris in the freezer. I have to stand on a stepstool to reach all the way inside to clean it out. The bottom two steps of the stool are not firm when you stand on them but springy, so they depress under your weight and feel somewhat unstable. [In the dream, that seems to be a normal design for a stepstool.] With just my toes on the stepstool, hanging most of my weight on the top of the closed fridge door which is at chest level for me even on the stool, I reach deep inside the freezer compartment to clean it out. With a paper towel I sweep out a bunch of orange fluid. I remove some cotton, a Q-tip, some random detritus. I find a piece of blue felt that apparently used to line the freezer pushed deep in the back and pull that out, tossing it to the floor.

D's father says we are only renting and aren't responsible for the refrigerator. I come down off the stepstool and join a small gathering of D's family. A round table holds a small buffet of snacks and appetisers; a platter of chicken wings surrounded by carrot and celery sticks is the centerpiece. The chicken wings taste more like vinaigrette than buffalo sauce. I am collecting a little "bouquet" of alternating one- and two-bone wing pieces which I plan to fasten together somehow and save for later. D's father continues about some woman we should bring in on this dispute over the fridge. He says something like "You know she's good because most of the time they only refer to her as 'older;' only when they know they have someone coming in they say that she is 'better.'" And he adds something about her son living some place instead of Massachusetts, or maybe it was that the son lived in Massachusetts instead of some place else-- the logic here was something like the son is smart and knows how to attain the best lifestyle, so you can tell this woman is really good.

*****
The phone I talk to H on in bed is the telephone my grandmother had in her bedroom when I was very young. I remember when she got it; she had always had rotary telephones, and this new white phone was the first push-button phone she got. I think she got it before my parents got one, which would make it the first push-button phone we had in my family. When you picked it up, a light behind the buttons came on and illuminated them, so you could see them clearly even in a dark room. Later this phone became my bedroom phone in my room at our (my parents' and my) house. I think I took it while my grandmother was still alive because she got a new phone, but I don't remember for sure; it's possible I didn't get it until after she died. As I mentioned in another post, the artefacts of my early life have been on my mind lately.

Land shark

Another childhood nightmare. Again, the details of any plot elude me at this date; it is the final image that I have remembered all these years.

*****

I am being chased by a shark. I run into a parking lot to escape. I run as fast as I can, but the shark catches me. It closes its jaws around me from the feet up. Only my head remains when I wake up in terror.

A cluttered room

My boyfriend D and I live in what in real life is my parents' house; in the dream it is our house or apartment. It is a Saturday. My bedroom and the living room are a chaotic mess; stuff is just everywhere. I say I am going to clean all this up today. My cat C perches on the rim of an empty litter pan and pees in it. I comment on how strange she looks, hanging her ass over the edge like that. I notice that this is not her normal litter pan. This is a bright orange, uncovered pan with no litter in it; her normal pan is grey, covered, and full of litter. [My parents' cat's litter pan in reality is bright orange with no cover.] I look around the messy bedroom and see her normal litter pan a few inches away. However, the room is so messy that the pan's entrance is not accessible to her. In the dream, I observe more than one instance of C "hanging her ass over the side" of an empty pan and peeing in it. The absence of litter makes the sound of her peeing rather distinct as well.

Among the many items covering the messy floor is a very large grey plastic uncovered box. It contains a jumbled assortment of items belonging to D-- an unfolded shirt, some keys, et cetera-- that he is going to be storing. C is perching on the edge of this box too, and then she steps right onto the surface of the water it is now filled with. Then I see the box is filled with a transparent gelatin that C is walking on. D's items are visible at the bottom of the box, now encased in gelatin. Apparently it is one of those boxes that comes with this powder that turns to gelatin when wet. [?? This seemed a perfectly common item in the dream.] I tell D that C must have peed in that box and activated the gelatin. D is annoyed that now he has to extricate all his things from the gelatin. However, it turns out to be easier than we thought to free the items; the gelatin is firm and peels away from D's things with no problem.

*****

I am slightly compulsive about tidiness. I insist on having everything in the apartment "just so," and D and I are constantly in conflict over this. In this dream our home is "littered" with out-of-place articles. The only place that doesn't contain litter is C's litter box! This is the opposite of "a place for everything and everything in its place." This dream shows my preoccupation with keeping a tidy home and my perception of D as an impediment in this regard. Perhaps I wish all his clutter were neatly "encased," as in a block of gelatin.

I'm sure there are hundreds of ways my subconscious could have represented this concept. The particular choice of C and her litter box probably is due to nothing more than her recently having had a medical procedure that required me to retain her used litter in a sealed container for several weeks before disposing of it. Just the other day I finally threw out all these weeks' worth of used litter, so cat litter was on my mind. Additionally, D's and my apartment is small enough that when it is quiet, you can clearly hear it when C pees. It is possible (though I have no way of confirming) that as I slept I actually did hear the sound of C peeing in her box just outside our bedroom.

Wriggling and squirming

I am wrapped in a blanket lying in the grass at some kind of animal park. Many other people are there as well. Lots of different animals are wandering about, including a number of large and small snakes. One large snake passes by just beyond my feet, then turns and goes back the way it came; I pull my feet up slightly to try not to block it. I notice quite a few very small snakes, mottled yellow and black, also milling about. I pull my blanket tight around me to keep these snakes from getting inside. I feel some itching or wriggling at the small of my back though, and wonder maybe some snakes or something is in the blanket anyway.

I'm ready to leave. I stand up, dropping the blanket. I am wearing a (yellow?) sheath dress. I realise something definitely is inside the dress. There is a little space in the dress, but it is tight enough around my hips that I cannot get my hands up it. I shimmy and wriggle, trying to shake out the animal(s), but they are trapped at the tight part of the dress. I see a couple getting up from their own blanket near by and ask them please to get the snakes out of my dress. The woman reaches in and pulls out one of the skinny yellow and black snakes. It is injured, apparently mortally; one end of it is bifurcated for a couple inches of its length. The woman casts it over to the corner of the park. I wonder aloud if maybe we should finish killing it, but we don't take any action. I feel an itch/pain in my ass, and the woman from the couple confirms she sees an injury there; probably I was bitten in the snake's struggles to free itself. As I walk through the park to leave, I manage to dislodge two or three more of the small yellow and black snakes. The small cut in my ass continues to irritate me, and I rub at it as I walk.

*****

Snakes don't bother me. In fact, I really like the larger snakes; small skinny snakes freak me out a little, though. However, one of my colleagues, K, is so intensely afraid of snakes that even any mention of snakes upsets her. Knowing this about her, any time I see a snake in a movie or on TV I think, "K wouldn't like this." In the dream though, K did not come to mind.

The obvious reading of this dream would conclude that I find something to be a "pain in the ass." However, I am certain there is more going on here than just that. Snakes may have been on my mind after seeing the Harry Potter clip on the Academy Awards Sunday night. But why the snake divided in two partway down its length? Why the sheath dress? I don't have any good interpretation at the moment; I will post one later if anything comes to mind.