Dream for an Insomniac

You can’t make this stuff up. That’s a phrase we often use in the news. The story is so outrageous, so stupid, so unbelievable...it can’t be true. But it is.

That’s how the dream I just had went down. So many people were in it. It was so weird and unexplainable at times. But it happened. And I had to write about it immediately or I would forget. It’s 4:30 in the morning, by the way.

Pmo and I were living in a house (not a van) on the bank of a river, with a considerable slope down to the water. Next to us was another house, but it was a houseboat. And not your typical houseboat. Picture a mobile home with the floor cut out and plopped down on the deck of a boat. I’ll call it butter dish boat. You can see it now, right?

This next-door butter-dish boat must have been floating on a man-made pool of water, like a casino boat that’s legal in Indiana but doesn’t actually sit on an existing waterway. There also had to be some sort of canal from this pool of water that led to the river below because of what happened later. I’ll get to that.

In our house, we were getting up to make breakfast and coffee because we had friends stay over: Rachel, Nick and Andrea. I couldn’t find the coffee cups, someone had moved them (I’m looking at you Pmo). I could only find huge cups you would get in a specialty shop. Like the cappuccino at the start of the movie “So I Married an Axe Murderer” if you’ve ever seen that.

I think I finally found the normal cups and was setting them out, but then I realized I needed something else, so I went outside. We had some things in storage right next to our neighbor's property. But at that point, I discovered our storage was actually on the neighbor’s land and not on ours. And when I say storage, I mean a pile of things lying on the ground. Like a pile of trash you would bury at the landfill or a mound of leaves you would set on fire. I suddenly had the urge to move everything back to our property: each item, one by one.  

There was a group of kids playing nearby: tag or flag football or something. They pretty much ignored me. Then I remembered I needed something else from another storage area, which was inside the butter dish boat. Again, why am I storing things at my neighbor’s place and then realizing I shouldn’t be doing that? And why are they letting me? So I left the pile and went to the butter dish.

Once inside the butter dish, I started to pick apart the new pile to move back to our house. For some reason, my boss was there, Scott. He had two brothers who looked just like him, but they had Duck Dynasty beards. Scott’s wife, Shelley, was there, too. They were all helping me get stuff out of the boat and back where it belonged.

All of a sudden, we started to move. And I realized the butter dish was now in the river. I panicked and went to find someone to stop the boat. But it was run by the military (what?) and they couldn’t stop until they arrived at their destination, wherever that was. There was another boat in front of us that was on the same trip. So I ran to the front of the butter dish (there was room to walk around the edge with a railing, in case you were wondering) and yelled at them to stop. They had a megaphone and yelled back for me to back off the front of the boat, or else.

There was a large group of African Americans inside the butter dish. It was either a really big family or some kind of church congregation. I'm leaning toward church because I vaguely remember some pews. Scott, his wife and brothers had disappeared. Instead, there was a little Caucasian girl with blond hair by my side who would not let go of my leg. She had been sitting along a wall with my aunt Betty. They found a phone for me and I called Pmo. I told him what happened: that I didn't have my phone, or money, or anything but the clothes on my back. Yes, I distinctly remember using that cliché. I figured Pmo would panic, too, but he was relatively calm. Almost too calm. 

We eventually pulled into to a town, a touristy place like Gatlinburg, TN. And when I say pulled in, I mean like Venice, where the roads are made of water and there are buildings on each side of you. I thought they were going to let me off the boat so I could get back home. But just as I asked somebody and was about to find out whether I would be free, I looked up at those buildings and woke up.

Where did all of that come from?

Rachel and Nick did spend the night with us last week, but I don’t know what Andrea had to do with anything, except that she was off work on Friday.

The pile of stuff outside? I do have a tendency to get obsessed with something like that and have to drop whatever else I'm doing and tackle the new disturbance right then and there. Last night before I went to bed, I was flipping through an Eddie Bauer magazine, saw a blouse/sweater combo, and immediately went to my closet to match up my sweaters and blouses. If I don't act on an idea in the here and now, I'll forget. Or at least write myself a note.

The pile of stuff in the butter dish? I still need to get my Christmas decorations down from the loft in the garage. That’s definitely been weighing on my mind. And it's sort of in an out-of-the-way place. Like the butter dish boat.

I've also felt an overwhelming need to purge things from this house lately. With our birthday presents from Mom (and the tons of stuff she gives us every time we see her in general), recent trips where we've brought back things, Christmas coming soon, etc., we have or will have quite a bit of clutter. It's not like hoarding where everything is out in the open and you can't find the toaster. Believe me, everything is tidy and put away in its place. But it still suffocates me because I know there are things lurking in a closet/drawer or under the bed that I really don't need and should give away. And valuable things I still need to sell.

The rest of the dream: Scott, Betty, the church group, the military, the little blond girl, Pmo not being too concerned, Gatlinburg…I have no clue. I’ll chalk it up to having a brain that is constantly in action and a sleep schedule that is forever out of whack. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a craving for some toast. With butter.