The Time I Kidnapped the President's Daughter

(I had this dream because I'd just watched Spooks.)

Last night I dreamt that the elder's quorum president and I were terrorists. We dressed in black and put on balaclavas and kidnapped the president's daughter. I shot a bunch of her bodyguards, but then one of them who was on the ground bleeding raised his arm and shot me in the hip. It hurt a lot and I couldn't move very well but I still heaved the president's daughter over my shoulder and limped to the car to stick her in the trunk. I was exercising my hip but pulling my leg from side to side. And then I woke up at 3:15 a.m. and couldn't go back to sleep.

The Time I Was Attacked by an Alien Parasite during a Dead People Party near the Garden of Eden

  Last night I dreamt that I lived on a small, rocky island in the middle of a blue, blue sea. An old beige Eurovan flew down and landed in my side yard. Inside were three aliens who looked like people and spoke with English accents—a plump, white woman with long, light brown hair; a thin white man with a brown beard and long brown hair; and their eleven-year-old daughter.
  The aliens tried to pretend that they represented a very wealthy planet, but their spaceship/camper van was old. Inside the van were little crumbs, worn upholstery, and a sour milk smell. To prove to me that they really could teach me something about my own planet (which may or may not have been Earth), they took me up in the Eurovan and flew above a little barnacle-covered rock that I could see from the shore of my island. Two ugly mermaids perpetually sat on top of the white rock holding apples, and the rock itself was infested by electric blue sea snakes and neon green regular snakes. The sun was high and made the blue water glitter.
  "See," the alien woman told me, "this is where Adam and Eve came down from my planet." (Apparently my dream consciousness is Scientologist.)
  Then we went back to my house, where I invited the family in for dinner. I got the impression that they were running from their home planet, not representing it. There was something about how they disliked being out in the open and avoided questions about home.
  After dinner, we sat in my small living room (my house was more like a beach cottage) to chat. The man started singing "Libera Me Domine" in a deep baritone, and two older men with gray faces who were dressed in white suits and ties appeared beside him and started singing with him.
  "Who are they?" I asked the woman.
  "Those are men who are dead. My people can call up the dead whenever we want."
  All I could think was that they looked like Jacob Marley without the chains. The dead men smelled a little strange too—perhaps the sour milk smell from the van. Still, it was kind of nice because the men just looked like the really old men who serve in the temple—harmless.
  Then the woman did something and a lot more gray-faced people appeared in the room. Some of them weren't even human. One especially looked like Watto—Anakin's owner in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. (Yes, I did have to look that up.) He snarled rabidly. I asked the woman if all of these dead people/aliens were safe, and she assured me that they were. I figured that was because spirits, as I understand them, cannot actually touch a body.
  The Watto-like character ran up to me and scratched my palm with his sharp tusk. The mark turned red and bled a little. So much for intangibility!
  "Oh, no!" the alien woman ran to me and looked at my hand. The Watto snarled. "He's injected you with a deadly parasite."
  Whether from the parasite or from the news, I started to feel very weak and shaky. I fell to my knees on the carpet. The woman asked my dad (who was suddenly there) for a pair of tweezers. He took forever getting them as I felt sicker and sicker. Finally he returned with a pair of pin-nosed tweezers. The woman started digging into the flesh of my palm with them. The pain was excruciating. Finally she came upon something small, round, and yellow that looked like one of those antimicrobial microbeads that float in some hand soaps. Down in my hand, it also looked like a pocket of pus.
  "Just as I thought!" the woman cried.
  "Get it out! Get it out! Please, just get it out!" I screamed back. The dead guests had crowded around me, looking down at me on the floor, intensely curious.
  She applied pressure with the tweezers, and the thing popped out. She held it up with the tweezers to show me—it had a head and little legs, like a shiny yellow tick. Several seconds passed, and she was still staring at it on the end of the tweezers.
  "Kill it," I said.
  "We have to use something special—"
  "Squish it with the tweezers!" The thing was squirming free.
  She shook her head, "No, you have to get something from ___________." She said the name of the Watto who had started all of this, but I forget what it was.
  I got up to confront my attacker when everyone in the room yelped simultaneously. I turned around to see the yellow parasite leap from the tweezers to the floor and scurry under an armchair, and then I woke up.

The Time I Watched a Fire Truck Drive into the Pacific

This afternoon I dreamt that I was going to school in Hawai'i. To get to class, my friend Chrystal, another friend who was a Hispanic guy I don't know in real life, and I would cross a big concrete bridge from one island to another. (The islands were very close together.) The channel between the islands was very shallow, and a series of concrete seawalls and levees controlled the flow of sea water in and out of it. In the morning as we crossed the bridge, we saw that the local government had drained the channel down to only a few feet deep and had authorized a manufactured restaurant to be erected on stilts right in the middle.

My friends and I went to a Spanish class, where I found I could speak Spanish better than the teacher. My Hispanic friend and I had a long conversation in Spanish about who of our friends would get married next. I was especially proud of my use of past subjunctive during this conversation.

When class was over, all three of us started walking back over the bridge. My guyfriend said he'd like to move to Hawai'i next semester (which was confusing because I'd thought we were in Hawai'i already). As we crossed the bridge, we looked over the side and saw a large fire engine/ambulance on stilts in the middle of the water. The restaurant was gone. The red fire engine had its lights on, but not the siren. A bunch of paramedics sloshed around up to their necks in the Pacific. A huge crane hovered over the scene, explaining without words how the fire engine had gotten out there in the first place.

"What's going on?" I asked Chrystal.

"They're testing the emergency response in the middle of the channel," she said.

"Hmm," I said, and then I woke up.

The Time I Got Extra Bonus Points for Entering a Tongan Wedding Reception through the Kitchen

Last night I dreamt I went school shopping at a really nice mall Target in southern California. I looked at a lot of nice dresses, but I'm not sure I bought one. I did buy a cool ring and a charm bracelet with a teeny pencil and pencil sharpener attached.

After I bought the jewelry, I left the store. Outside in the bright sunlight were concrete paths leading through pristine grass to countless salmon-colored stucco buildings. Then I realized that I had left one of my purchases in Target, so I went back.

Inside the Target, a Tongan wedding was wrapping up. (By Tongan wedding, I simply mean a wedding in which the bride, groom, and guests were Tongan.) I stood behind the green carpet on which the ceremony was taking place and looked on. The reception was to be held in a Mexican/Tongan restaurant across the way in the mall. The restaurant was called something Spanish, like Muchas Gracias, with two Tongan words below it. (One of the words was haveli, which is Hindi and not Tongan, but I guess my sleeping brain thought it sounded like Havili, which is the Tongan last name of a USC football player who is related to my mission companion.) Basically, the restaurant was run by the owners of a local Mexican restaurant chain who decided to open a Tongan-themed location.


The wedding party proceeded to the restaurant. This blind white guy was standing near me trying to sign an order form for something the Target didn't carry. "Does anybody have a pencil?" he asked. I thought pens were better for signing order forms, but I still offered the tiny pencil from my bracelet. When the blind man reached for it to try to use it, the pencil and the sharpener broke off. I knelt on the floor to get them and the blind man tripped over me.

A bird appeared and told me that I'd get extra points in the game if I entered the Mexican/Tongan restaurant through the kitchen and talked my way into the private reception. I would have to use my Spanish skills because the kitchen staff were all Mexican and Guatemalan.

An evil white witch clouded over sky and zoomed down on a broomstick. She was coming straight for me. I went downstairs and zoomed through the food court labyrinth avoiding her. I tried to go into one restaurant, but I didn't have enough points yet so it just looked like an empty Jack in the Box. Finally I got enough points to jump through a magic well in a whirlwind of white sparkles that transported me to the back door of the Mexican/Tongan restaurant, and then I woke up.

The Time I Got the Most Out of the County Fair

Last night I dreamt that a friend, Kendra, from middle school—now grown up—and I were at the county fair. It was the afternoon of the last day the fair would be in town, so we rushed from booth to booth and from exhibit to exhibit making sure we had seen everything we wanted to see and bought everything we wanted to buy. Kendra was meeting her boyfriend later to do the exact same thing with him, but at this time she wanted do go through with another woman and look at the girl stuff.

For example, we both stopped for a very long time in the clothing section of the fair. Some of the clothes were so pretty and cheap and unusual. I had to keep reminding myself that I have no money.

Finally, in one of the more established stores, we ran into my mother and brother. My brother had bought presents for everyone in the family, which was very sweet, except that the presents were dragon designs made out of poor-quality gummy candy. He was trying to be nice, so I thanked him profusely.

Then we came upon a hat section. I've always liked the idea of hats and scarves even though my head is large and round and wearing things on my head just makes me look like a stumpy lollipop. Some Muslim women were there looking at these large gypsy headscarves that some of the carny women wore. The scarves were so pretty, with different layers of cloth textures. I wanted one.

I spent a while going through all of the possible color schemes—Kendra getting bored all the time—when I finally found one with blue calico and gold-patterned green. I tried it on and looked in the mirror. I looked horrible! A swollen, zitty face surrounded by a wimple that made my head look like one of the Pyramids. I took off the headscarf and found black specks in my hair.

"They're too small to be bedbugs. They're too small to be bedbugs," I told myself.

Then I heard my mother talking to Kendra about me: "I'm not sure I want her running around with stewed hair," my mom said. By which she meant she didn't want me to look Muslim and confuse people. And then I woke up.

The Time I Drove the Wrong Way after a Blizzard

Last night I dreamt that I was on a roadtrip, possibly with my family. It was winter—the sky was gray and cold and the world was brown. We had gone a very long time with clear weather, when we heard on the radio that a blizzard was coming like a hurricane. We stopped at a motel, which had brown blankets on the bed and windows on both sides of the room. We hurried to bring our bags inside before the snow started. My feet were bare, and I could hardly move fast enough. Finally we hunkered down in the room and watched the windows go white.


The next day the storm was gone, so this guy and I got in the car. The roads were clear. Everything was clear and snow-free. I was driving. At an intersection, I turned left. Suddenly I realized I had turned onto the left side of the median rather than the right. Cars sped around me going the opposite direction. I wanted to get over, but the median was in the way. Heart racing and brain panicking, I kept driving, hoping to find somewhere to turn off the road entirely. Finally a white police car appeared with lights blazing and siren screaming. Even though I knew I was in the wrong, I was more scared of getting a ticket, so I tried to turn around on the busy street in order to flee. The police approached me head-on, their bumpers drawing ever nearer to mine, and then I woke up.