Fun Monday-Dreams

This week's Fun Monday hostess is Jill at LilMouse, and she wants to hear about our dreams. Specifically:

Do you have any dreams, particularly recurrent ones that you feel no one else has? I recently talked to my friend Stacy on the phone and found out that we’d had the same odd, recurrent dream. Or, just tell us about an odd dream you had as a kid (did you dream you were falling and end up on the floor?)

This one is a little tough for me because I rarely remember my dreams when I wake up. I used to, but now I don't. It bothers me a little, but I can't do anything about it. I guess I'm just a very deep sleeper. Goodness knows a tornado could blow through our house in the middle of the night, and I'd never notice. I'd just wake up the next morning in the fork of a tree in Kansas and wonder what the heck happened. I have had a couple of recurrent dreams in recent years, though.

For a while, I kept dreaming that I died a violent death, usually at the hands of a criminal and in the presence of my husband. I think it had to do with some fears I had at the time about his safety as a parole officer. We kept running into some of his "clients" on the street, and a couple of the the more hardcore ones unnerved me when Hubby told me later they had probably been carrying a weapon. Those dreams eventually went away. Thank goodness. I got tired of waking up in a cold sweat. My brother is a police officer, and a couple of times I've had dreams of him being in danger. Having law enforcement folks in the family works on your nerves sometimes.

The one dream I had consistently for quite a while was that my teeth were falling out. It always scared me, and I would wake up and rub my tongue over my teeth, convinced they were looser than when I went to bed the night before. I finally mentioned it to a friend, and to my surprise she told me she'd had the same dream, so I looked it up on the Internet (what did we ever do before Google?) and found that it's a very common dream. The most common theory about this dream is that you're feeling insecure:

"These dreams often occur at a time of transition between one phase of life and another. When we lost our milk teeth, we also gradually lost our childhood innocence. Loosing your teeth therefore show that today you have similar feelings of uncertainty and self-consciousness as you did in childhood. The dream could also highlight your worries about getting older or your sexual attractiveness."

This makes complete sense to me because I was about to hit age forty, was unhappy with the demands my job was placing on my family at the time and contemplating a career change. I've never had that dream again since I changed jobs. It's also entirely possible I was worried about getting older. The sexual attractiveness? Pffftt. I'm way past the point in life where I base my self value on whether or not people find me attractive. I'm downright close to the comfortable shoe stage of life. In fact, I may be there and don't realize it. Anyway, that's about all I have today, shotgun wounds and loose teeth, but that's enough don't cha' think? Follow me on over to LilMouse and see what everyone else is thinking about while they're sleeping.

Toe Shoes & Water Wings

Last Thursday I went to the ballet, dahling. I love that I can say that. I may live in rural Kentucky, but our city is loaded with the arts. A few years ago, some very forward thinking folks got together, raised a ton of money and built a fabulous performing arts center in our city. We have one of the most beautiful performing arts centers in the United States, and at any given time of the year I can drive fifteen minutes from my house and see a touring Broadway show, a ballet or a great concert, which is pretty incredible given the fact that the population of our city is 30,000 people. We don’t always know when to clap or what to wear, but we have taken to the arts like a duck on a June bug. Last week Mrs. Scrubs and I saw the New York Theater Ballet for just $11 each. Giddy up. How could we pass on that? It was their interpretation of Sleeping Beauty, so the audience was full of children, squirmy excited children in awe of their surroundings.

There were several hundred little aspiring ballerinas dressed in tutus, leotards and toe shoes asking questions too loudly and giggling at each other. Mostly, they were glued to the action on the stage. It was another one of those times when I wished I’d had my camera. I would have certainly snapped a picture of the little girl sitting on her daddy’s lap peering over the first balcony to the stage below. And the little girl in the center of the first row who stood on tip toe the whole time with her nose pressed above the edge of the stage. I don’t think she ever moved. For $11 we got a show and the show within the show. As we left, a little girl in front of us pranced across the parking lot imitating the dance moves she had just seen. Mrs. Scrubs and I giggled at her ambition. It whisked me back to my childhood and memories of the dreams inspired by dancers and celebrities.

I didn’t dream much about being a ballerina. Oh, I was always fascinated by toe shoes, and I remember sticking tacks in the bottom of an old pair of Mary Janes and jumping around on the sidewalk at grandma’s trying to create some makeshift tap shoes. My dancing moves were inspired by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. I loved those dance scenes in the old movies. I even remember doing my own version of Singin’ in the Rain with an umbrella, but those were just fun and games. What I really wanted to be, WHO I wanted to be, more than anything in the great big whole wide world was Esther Williams. I wanted to be the Million Dollar Mermaid. The Bathing Beauty who starred in those big, showy Busby Berkley water ballet movies and swam in a flaming pool.The one who slid down a huge water slide while standing up or dropped from dangerous heights into a ring of bobbing beauties. As a kid, I stayed up late many a night watching her old movies. For me, she had it all. She was beautiful. And athletic. And she got to swim all of the time. My swimming time was limited. When you grow up in the sticks, you don’t get much time in the city pool. Our city pool was less than a block away from my grandma’s house, and in the summer I spent plenty of time standing at the fence watching the swimming, but we were rarely there long enough for me to jump in. I think maybe that’s why I was so fascinated with Esther and her movies. We always want what we can’t or don’t have, and Esther had a big fancy pool at her disposal all of the time. She had great swimsuits. Cute swim caps. (Yes, I’m old enough to have had one of those.) And she always got the man. By the way, she always got the man in real life, too. I read her autobiography a few years ago, and she had quite the love life. She was one hot mama.

Yep. You could keep your toe shoes, I wanted the fancy swimsuit. I wanted to be a mermaid. And ya’ wanna know a secret? I spend a fair amount of time scouring TMC, AMC and all of those other old movie channels for her movies now. It’s one of the few things that will keep me up past 11pm anymore. Well, that and eating popcorn too close to bedtime. But that’s another post.

*Images courtesy of DVDTalk.com and HollywoodBlog.com

Amen, Sister, Amen

"Don't put an age limit on your dreams."

Dana Torres, 41 year old Olympic silver medalist swimmer

August 16, 2008

For all of us middle aged women and men out there, thank you Dana for reminding us to keep our dreams alive. Thank you, VERY much.

*Photo from swimmingworldmagazine.com

Boxing Springs

I’ve talked in my sleep for years. Apparently, I don’t squeeze in enough words during the daylight hours and have to ramble throughout the night to catch. No surprise there, right? I’ve been known to twitch a little and flail my legs occasionally. But I’ve never walked in my sleep, gotten up and eaten something out of the fridge or tried to beat up someone while asleep…until last night.

I sleep soundly. Really. Soundly. As in a tornado could roll through the middle of our house, and I wouldn’t notice. Tornadoes rolling through our home in the middle of the night are a real possibility in this part of the country so the weather radio sits on the nightstand right by my head. Anyway, I was in a deep, deep sleep last night when I started dreaming that a serial killer was sneaking up on me to attack me. (I’m such a drama queen, even in my sleep.) In the dream, I pretended I didn’t know he was there and waited until his hands were starting to close around my neck before I started fighting back. I smashed his nose with a right jab, and hit his chin with a left uppercut. Only problem is that I was really swinging, and I did it just as Hubby rolled over and laid his arm across my waist. If he hadn’t have moved quickly, I would have Sugar Rayed him to the other side of the Posturpedic. I don’t know if it was the dream or the movement, but I woke up to find myself kicking and swinging both arms with all my strength. Hubby was stunned to say the least, and so was the dog that jumped up from his spot at the end of the bed and started running for cover. I came within a hair of punching Hubby in the face. When I stopped I was wide awake and stunned. I couldn’t believe what I had done. Fortunately, Hubby was so tired he shrugged it off and went right back to sleep. However, I laid in the dark for a long time wondering how I could be so out of control and cursing myself for spending time on the internet because in my dream my attacker looked like this.

A little BraBABY karma perhaps?