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.