Another Dreary Party

Hello, dream blog! I missed you, you know.

Point of fact, I dreamed this maybe two weeks ago. Things then came up, and this is the first real chance I've had to write it out. Also, I forgot it a bunch of times. The dream:

Yet again, this dream starts out at a party. A very ill-defined party at that, too. There's sort of a general "friend's house party" atmosphere in roughly half of the rooms I visit, while the other half have a "high society 1920's party" vibe to them. Also, there is a classical quartet playing strings music somewhere in the building in which the party is being held, but I can't find it. Oh, and the building itself where the party is being hosted is huge. It's a mansion. I think that I subconsciously based it off my friend's ex-girlfriend's house in Richmond Hill (Thorn Hill?) where I attended one New Year's party, then mentally added in a bunch of staircases from an M.C. Escher painting. Bizarre.

Anyways, the party is filled with my friends, some elderly relatives of mine, and the cast of HBO's Rome, in character, except that while they look and act exactly like their characters in the show, they are also the Montagues and the Capulets from Romeo and Juliet. That's not too much of a stretch, really; the Julii and the Junii of the show had the whole "Shakespearean Grudge Match" deal going on anyone, so it's not too much of a stretch to put them in those roles. But I digress.

My own role at the party is less clear. I wear a tuxedo and carry snack foods to people, but I don't feel as though I'm a waiter, as I also drink, talk with other guests, etc. Also, I don't really seem to receive this food from any concrete process; it just appears in my hand and I distribute it to people. Anyways, the main two people I keep coming back to on my food rounds are Rome's Atia of the Julii and Servillia of the Junii (rivals in the show; Montagues/Capulets in my dream), who inform me of their respective plans to poison the food of their respective opposites. I nod politely.

My elderly uncle Larry (actually my great-uncle, but I have never referred to him as "great-uncle Larry") is also there, looking MUCH more frail then in my waking life. In reality, he is a somewhat frail octogenarian with failing eyesight, but is still strong and self-sufficient. In my dream, he looks twice as frail and is confined to a wheelchair which must be pushed by a nurse. I make several attempts at conversation, but his hearing is also apparently failing, and I am unable to make myself understood.

The dream ends as I am in the middle of another interminable conversation with Atia over ways in which she plans to poison Servillia. I turn my head out of boredom and see uncle Larry's nurse is not paying attention to where she is wheeling him (she is engaged in conversation, possibly with Brutus) and is dangerously close to wheeling him down one of the reality-defying staircases in the middle of the room. I try to run and grab the chair, but I am too far away. I have a vantage point (think "internal balcony" or "verandah") where I can see both my uncle's starting point at the top of the stairs and his crash site at the bottom. It is a pretty bad spill, and he begins to cry. However, the sound is not "right". Rather than sounding like an eldery man crying, it sounds like a multitude of babies whaling, perhaps turned up to eleven. It sounded so anguished, so awful, that my last thought in the dream was "won't somebody put him out of his misery?", which is a pretty shitty thing to think about one's great uncle.

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So yeah, the journal's still up and running! No need to panic!

A Twofer

Well, here it is almost one month since my last post. As I said earlier, in the event of a "dream dearth", I would be posting "best ofs" from previous dreams. Anyways, I think that one month counts as a lapse significant enough to warrant "dearth" status, and thus was ready to post an old favorite after my Holiday break, when lo and behold, I have two memorable dreams in rapid succession! Credit it to all the sugar plums, I guess. Not that they were particularly good dreams, or high quality dreams, but they were memorable, and that's what counts! So, in the order I dreamed them:

1. An Archetype The classic, middle-of-the-Holidays "Oh Shit! I Forgot to Turn in my (insert course here) Paper!" I have this dream a lot, though it mostly happens at the end of the year and involves the final exams in courses I considered signing up for, but didn't. In this case, it was about having forgotten to turn in a French Lit. paper (a course I'm not taking) to Professor Lennox (A professor I DO have, in Canadian Life Writing). Interestingly enough, in my dream the paper was not yet late, but due on Friday, meaning that if I scrambled like mad, I would JUST be able to turn in a sub-par paper, though I would miss Boxing Day with my cousins. In any case, a fairly humdrum dream.

2. U of Hospital A somewhat more interesting dream I had last night. I'm in my high school, but for the purposes of my dream it's also my university. It's populated by a variety of faces from both those locales. Anyways, because of a mysterious illness (which doesn't seem to have any effects), we're all quarantined inside the building. It's nothing serious, but we all have to remain inside, and nurses will be coming with pills for us. Anyways, nurses show up carrying pills on refreshment trays, and the whole thing has a very "dinner party" type atmosphere; there's no instructions for how to take the pills (those gel-coated ones with the tiny medicine spheres in 'em), so the nurses just circulate around handing them out like candy as people in little groups discuss dinner-party topics like the environment, literary criticism, etc. Anyways, I'm having a fine time chatting and swallowing pills, until I overhear one guest talking with a nurse, and the nurse says that, "one of the main effects is that people seem to have difficulty swallowing". As I hear this, I try to pop another pill, but I gag it back up. Fortunately, no one notices this, but I begin to worry about what a faux pas it would be if I were the only one at the party not popping pills. With this in mind, I unscrew the top of my capsule from the bottom and start eating the horrible-tasting little medicine spheres individually. People, ask about it, and I say that it's just the way I eat pills, but the taste is getting pretty awful, enough so that I am forced to bolt out of a conversation mid-way to try to find a drinking fountain to wash the taste out of my mouth. The dream ends with me arriving at the fountain.

Well, there we are. Hope that these'll tide us all over!