Penny Hero (dot) Net

I’ve got a job interview in a few hours, and I’m nervous as heck. My stomach is threatening not to cooperate, and I have been half awake for the last 3 or 4 hours.

I also had all kinds of crazy dreams. Like, sitting in a lounge waiting for my name to be called when about 15 minutes before my interview, the reception desk calls me over and says I have a phone call. It’s a client from my previous job asking for SEO consultation. In my brain, this gets mixed up with my current situation, as if it’s the same company, and thus I really should take this call to impress my interviewers.

So I talk with this guy about EngineWorks services, his options, how to make a site-map, etc. Then he puts me on hold because he can’t remember the URL to his website and has to go find it.

Suddenly I realize that I’d been laid off from EngineWorks a month ago and that this call is taking a really long time. It’s now 15 minutes AFTER my interview should have started, and i glance into the smokey room of rumpled businessmen who are to interview me and see their disapproving looks and their impatient glancing at their watches.

It was an odd dream. First dream I’ve ever had where I could read a clock. I thought time wasn’t supposed to work in dreams.

okay. i better start getting ready. *is still nervous* I think I’ll turn off my cell phone when I arrive.

I had a dream that I was playing an acoustic base guitar that belonged to someone I was interested in hitting on. (the person was nameless/faceless in the dream. It was just one of those feelings of “I’d like to be close to that person through this guitar.”)

Maybe this means I should play base… replace my broken string, or invest in an acoustic base. :)

Last night I had a dream about visiting the EMP in seattle, although I’ve never been inside in real life.

I had dreams about being asked to audition for an amateur movie being filmed in albany. (albany? all the way in fucking albany?) A group of four or five of us (all girls) went to the neighbor’s for the audition in the middle of the night. I knew from the beginning that I wouldn’t be able to go even if I got the lead part. One of the girls and I were wearing the same dress because she was (borrowing my sister’s dress)… or something that explained it in a funny accidental sorta-girly-drama-way. At the audition, the directors and staff really liked me. I have visual images of the text on the script, with some of the lines bolded and italicized indicating how I delivered them. In the dream, I “printed out” the script in my head like that as I delivered my lines. I don’t remember what the movie was about, but I was perfect for the part, and I was confident and charismatic and I made all the other girls angry with me. But all along I knew that I couldn’t take the part because it cost $250 to be in the movie, and I didn’t have time because I needed to graduate.

I came home alone after my audition, and for some reason I’d forgotten that it was my mom’s and my birthday at the same time. It was belated, and I gave her a gift in my room. then she told me that my presents. (in this dream, plural nouns mean exactly two.) I opened one, and it was something lame. the second box was FULL OF KITTENS. They were orange an soft. There were around 8 of them.

For some reason, I felt like I should have expected this, and that it was sort of an inside-joke between me and my mom. Sort of like if your parents take away one of the toys in your room and wrap it up as a new gift in order to hide the fact that there is a hundred dollar bill at the bottom of the box. I started taking care of the kittens and I tried to name one but couldn’t decide.

At one point I was in the living room with the kittens (they had escaped their box and I had to catch them all) and they were playing games with me. They were walking in front of the projector and playing what looked like patty-cake with each other.

At another point, I had locked myself in the bathroom with some of the kittens for some reason. it felt like I was hiding them from “my stepdad” or something.

1.

I was making coffee. And it was somehow normal that no liquid would fall into the coffee pot. Instead, it was this dry substance that looked like coffee grounds. The pot was dirty, and it was getting too hot. A drop of coffee-crud fell in to top left-hand side of the pot and started to catch fire. I poked it to put it out. It caught fire again. I was annoyed. I wanted my coffee. I turned around to get the nearest glass of liquid to throw on it. The sink was full of glasses and bowls full of gross standing water. I decided to get a clean dish… but by that time, the entire coffee maker was on fire and I had a stab of terror like I was about to burn down the house. I thought I must be so stupid for not cleaning it, and for being too wussy to grab the dishes with dirty water. I reached out and slamed the coffee pot off th counter and it hit the ground cracking. The dry stuff inside really was liquid coffee afterall and when I tipped it over, the contents spilled and put out the fire. It was a sort of nightmare

2.

Lots of broken memories of walking from one house to another on Chehalem Dr where I used to live. I woke up early to work on my paper, but every few hours my hair would be too greesy so I’d go and take a shower. I was wearing a skirt for god knows what reason. I broke into my own house several times. I remember having to pick my way between bikes to get to the back entrance. An ex boyfriend of mine was with me studying, and he let me kiss him although it was a stupid idea. This dream had a narrative, but all that’s left are fragmentary images.

It sounds like things are about to explode for me. I tried to get up at 5 to work on my papers, but the 5:30 alarm was what pulled me out of my nightmare, so I slept a little more to rid myself of the scared feelings. I couldn’t get out of bed until now… 7am. fuck.

Time to go make coffee.

Among other things, I had a dream that I was explaining how awesome some new processor was to my mom. I explained that the old processor was “this big” and held my hands a few inches apart, and said that it could do “a whole bunch of calculations.” Then I moved my fingers about an inch apart and said that the new processor could do the same amount of work, but it was only this small. “Plus” I said, “the entire surface of the chip is in contact with the heat-sink, so it’s super cool.”

Bizzare dream… bizzare that I remember it so vividly, including what the smell of the heat-sink glue was like and the color of it. I had visions of electricity flowing slopily through the old processor and this impression that the new on was so efficient that I wasn’t able to psychically sense electricity at all.

Dream last night:

We took two vehicles to the beach we usually go to, and I arrived late. I couldn’t find my mom when I got there, but I found her stuff. There had been a big wave of people moving out of town last week so all these couches had been on sale, and when I arrived at the beach, I discovered where all the couches had gone: People had bought them to use at the beach. There were dozens of them near us. It looked like the MU lounge on campus. Our couch was blue and very ratty. everyone else’s couches were varying degrees of new or used or pretty.

I saw my mom in the water, so I sat on the couch and waited. I think my brother was there, but I don’t remember. Suddenly I realized that everyone had packed up their couches and were heading home, but my mom wasn’t back yet so I just stayed there. A janitor approached me, an older man with white hair and a humble and warm personality. He told me I had to go, that this area was about to start up as a Chinese restaurant and they needed to set out all the tables. I explained that my mother was still in the water and if I moved, she wouldn’t be able to find me. I was really distressed, but I was also unnecessarily annoyed and spiteful to the old man. Afterall, he’s just doing his job, right? After some argument, I think he saw that I had some unrelated stress on my mind. He reached out and gave me this giant hug and a sincerely sympathetic smile. He said I could stay, but could I just drag my couch closer to the wall? (the beach was slowly converting into a room… for the restaurant?)

So I moved, dissappointed that I had to wait there and couldn’t go to the water, but baffled about his hug.

Finally my mother returned and asked what happened. By this point, our couch was a bed, and we both sat down on it to talk. In conversation she said something like “it’s a good thing you’re going to be an [embassador] here at this hotel.” [I forgot the name of the job] and at first I almost said “yeah, I know.” but then realized I had no idea what she was talking about. I asked. She reminded me that I’d talked with her before about getting a job after I graduate and she had found me one. All I had to do was have two kids, and to bring them to work every day to sit at the edge of the swimming-pool-fountain with the guests and I could have the job.

I was incredulous. “So this means, not only do I have to have kids, but I have to be married?!”
“naturally, yes.”
“And these two kids have to come out of ME??” [I was really disturbed by this for some reason].
“yes, of course”
“This means I have to give up grad school, getting a phd, [I listed four distinct things, all a sequence but I can’t remember them now.]”
My mother didn’t say anything. We argued for a while, she being very polite and calm, and me being angry but stubborn. I was not going to get married and have kids just so I could have some embassador job at a hotel.

But, at the same time, it is a done deal and maybe I could enjoy it, I thought to myself. So I asked, “how much does it pay a year” This whole time, the old man was watching our argument and I came to understand that he wasn’t really a janitor, but he was possibly the owner of the hotel, and that he really cared about me and wanted me to have this job.
My mother hesitated, and then replied: $2,000 a year.
“WHAT?!” I was again pissed. I came to understand that this kind of job-structure was meant to keep the wife dependent on the husband but give her more official responsibility and public personality than him. And my own mother was selling me out to this.

But then there was the old man, who seemed to really care. He genuinely thought this was a good opportunity for me. I felt guilty for being “ungrateful” even while I felt angry that no one seemed to think that I could go out and get a phd.

Basically I refused the job, and refused the chance to have a family. [and it was like a package deal. i take the job and I find love and kids with it].

A strange dream. Obviously connected to the stuff I was thinking about with geek girls. the characters in the story weren’t really from my life. my mom was nothing like my real mom, and I’ve never seen the old man before.

Anyway, dreams will be dreams.

I had dreams about spiders again last night. Only this time, they weren’t attacking me. I was killing them. I distinctly remember two spiders. One that looked like a smaller, more translucent hobo-spider, and a second one that was rounded and furry like a tarantula, but was gray and soft sort of like a kitten. The brown-hobo was on a wall somewhere, and I don’t remember killing it, but I know I did because when I killed the gray fuzzy one, I knew that this was the “second” spider I’d killed in this manner.

In my dream, I was trimming the green bushes that were growing in an alternating green-yellow-green-yellow hedge in the back of someone’s yard. The green hedges were dying, and the yellow ones were still growing, so the hedge looked a little like the edges of castle walls. There were cobwebs and sticky materials that I had to clean out before I could trim the green bushes. And at one point, I reached in with my shovel/broom and scouped out a bunch of sticky webs, and the gray spider crawled out slowly from under my shovel. I pressed down on him and felt his body give way. I saw liquids and skin smashed together, and saw his legs curl up until he looked like he was made of paper.

His texture and softness is what I remember most. I don’t know why. It was like I was killing an animal until he was dead. and then he was just another frightening spider.

Dream stuff:

1.) I went home to hawaii and my mother was pregnant. But since she was “so old” her skin looked like black nylons and the baby hung from her belly like it was suspended in a net. It was awake and conscious, and it looked at me through my mom’s skin. It sort of waved I think.

2.) I was in a hotel with a really big burly handsome man. We were trying to find a way to deceive everyone in the world so we could “have an affair”. For some reason it was very difficult. The hotel room directly above us called us and it was his friend. He told us something about a girl who died in our room. There was some confusion over whether or not it was a prank. I took him home and tried to “have the affair” on the back porch but both my mom and my dad came back with my brother and I had to introduce him to them. I remember he was huge. Tall, round, but handsome. Dark features and clothes. Warm.

3.) They decided to force Mt. St. Hellens to erupt and empty its cauldron under controlled conditions because it was a threat to portland. I only found out about it because my mom said something about “no, let’s go do X on tuesday because Sunday the volcano is going to erupt”. Then I asked for more explanation (perhaps I was only visiting). In the dream, I had an awesome view of the volcano and all the small compact bombs that they’d laid in a line around what looked like a zippered seam in the earth. They exploded in a chain reaction and the land opened up like a pussy moist wound. Lava looked like blood, bright and glowing earth guts. It seeped out slowly at first, then gradually it flowed faster. At one point pressure built up in some part of the “wound” and there was this massive volcanic explosion. The authorities started to panic. My view shifted and I skidded across the ocean and watched shrapnel fall sizzling into the water. (for some reason mt st hellens was located in a body of water/ocean and my house was on the other side of it.) Then, because it was portland, I saw views of freeways darkened by the ash in the air. In the end, the authorities realized their mistake and I “saw” (from the same point of view that had revealed that the eruption was a wound in the planet) that this was a fatal blow. They’d opened the hole in the cauldron too big and they didn’t know that it was directly connected to some important layer in the earth’s structure and they’d damaged things beyond human repair. Basically the world was about to end.
___

I don’t remember the order of these dreams. it was like they came all at once, but they were still separate. For some reason I woke up happy and relaxed… relieved even. But then I took a shower and remembered yesterday. I think it’s a good sign that dreams/sleep are relieving enough stress to let me wake up happy. I’m still feeling sick though.

I slept an hour later than I intended… but I had these really really funky dreams.

In one, I was in love with a zombie. Like, we’d been in love, and then he DIED. but somehow he came back to life and we decided to continue our relationship in secret. We went shopping at Fred Meyer’s before his body started to decay, and we talked often about how glad we were that we said “I love you” before he croaked. (lots of vivid memories of saying that, saying goodbye… and lots of saying it again as if we’d lose each other at any minute) I told him how lucky he was, that he had both a body and a soul that he could separate. His body was decaying, but the rest of him was very much alive. He could even leave his body if it got too gross… I, being completely alive, was stuck with the two merged. We laughed about how gross it was going to get when he started to rot, but I loved him so much. We kissed often, and I didn’t care about the taste.

In another dream, I met a real-life friend of mine for the first time. Remember vividly the walk to his place, the color of things… the people who went with me. He had a black and white cat. his apartment was very messy… something was rotting in the bathtub. ha ha. I remember the colors, and that there were like, 8 people with me… all aparently mutual friends that neither of us knew the other had.

In another, there were lots of animals. Rodents in cages, and 5 caterpillars came out of the bodies of dying butterflies in one cage, and I didn’t know what to do with them. The “owner” of the “store”, which was actually my bedroom or my apartment, wanted to give me a gold coccoon that was about to release a butterfly. I carried it around on this string as carefully as I could, but when I got home, someone had thrown away my cage full of the right kinds of leaves. The thing kept bouncing on things because I was too clumsy, and I was afraid I would kill the butterfly before I could get it into a cage with leaves.

I’m not sure which dream this cat was from, but I seem to remember the black and white cat in all of the dreams… running through my legs. In one, we’d locked the door for so long that she came to get me so I’d let her outside to pee. She ran through my legs and bolted out the door. I remember thinking how smart she was, and feeling confident that she could open the door to let herself back inside… after this, I think I went and made out with my zombie boyfriend… a piece of his leg came off in my hand…

In all of these, there were these odd themes of death and decay, but not in a negative way. And they all had things that I LOVE and long for very much. (cats, butterflies, zombie boyfriends) There was one more along these lines… about me hooking up with a real life person who in real life won’t have me. He said that he really was a closet “attention whore”… that dream merged with the zombie-boyfriend dream… I think maybe that was my subconscious playing a little joke… I’m bitter, so I want him dead, and was just kind of running with the idea. The zombie boyfriend didn’t look a thing like him though. But dreams about certain people usually recast them in different skins, or so I’m told.

Anyway. off to campus… rush rush rush.

I had a vivid dream last night where I was some kind of extra-solar body orbiting a quasar. I think I had intelligence. I wasn’t just a rock. Perhaps I was myself, I don’t know. Who I was wasn’t the vivid part. The vivid part was how the quasar seemed to communicate it’s “anatomy” to me. It told me how its physics worked, and I watched it swirl and spin with my vision apparently filtered so that I could see color and texture. Now I don’t remember what it said, or how it specifically communicated with me. If I had to explain that, aside from the fact that it was a dream and wierd shit happens in dreams all the time, I’d have to say that I don’t comprehend it now because the Quasar didn’t “speak” in words, and my brain can only understand communication in some kind of word/language form (duh).

It looked like a translucent eggshell of swirling plasma, but it glowed white, blue and purple. I have no idea of its size, but I had the impression that the shell of energy/gas was large, like Sol-solar system large. If that was true, then my “orbit” must have been far beyond pluto. It took up only about 1/4 of my vision, but even at that distance, its swirling motion was pretty rapid, almost like the speed of water flowing down a slow drain… or closer to the speed of 2-foot ocean waves breaking on a beach. It didn’t seem to necessarily rotate…. maybe more like how the surface of the sun “rotates” in different sections at different speeds. The whirl-pool style swirling within it’s eggshell structure was it’s most distinguishing feature. That and its colors. It was like milky crystal or opal… and mostly egg-shaped.

The sky around it was scattered lightly with stars. Not many, I assume because we were so far from the rest of the known universe.

It was beautiful, and I felt intense awe…

I want to go back out there… and see it again.