Her Majesty's Crumpets

Woohoo! After all these years of being a huge Beatles fan, I finally had a dream in which they made an appearance. It's a nice change from all the weird fish and death-of-humanity dreams, sheesh.

Anyways, I was at a house with somebody (can't remember who) and we went out on the back porch and suddenly George Harrison was there. His hair was very curly/kinky, and he was also overweight (why??). I gasped and silently freaked inside, and then ran up and shook his hand.

"Oh my god. George... Harrison?" I whispered.

He smiled and nodded, then turned to this pile of stuff and began sifting through it. I got the feeling he was looking for a painting or something.

Since George was there, I immediately wondered if the other Beatles would show up, too. But apparently Paul and Ringo had other plans; they never showed up.

Then I was out on the front porch talking to some random, unidentifiable people when John Lennon walked up to me. He was holding a framed canvas in his hands, and he said something on the order of liking the painting. I was sort of puzzled as to why he wasn't being totally sarcastic and rude. I looked at the painting and silently freaked inside again: the painting John was holding is the painting of him I did that's currently hanging with the other Beatles on my bedroom wall (oooh, how eerie and cool!). I was so shocked and happy and stumbled around for words and eventually came out with how I didn't like the painting all that much because I messed up on a few areas, and pointed out one area in particular-- the lower right corner. The paint or part of the canvas was peeling off there. But John didn't seem to mind; he was very calm and sincere and said that I could fix that part. However, I jumped in and said that I would just repaint the whole thing for him.

And that's about as much as I can remember. How sad. Hopefully the Beatles, or some of them at least, will return to my dreams more often. It was a very happy time.

SAM i AM

The Impressionist exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum was quite interesting. It was amazing standing just inches away from some of the world's greatest pieces of art, but other things didn't seem to fit. Like the complete lack of any Van Gogh paintings. I'm pretty sure he was an Impressionist (about as impression-y as it could get, actually). The presence of paintings that were clearly not Impressionistic also baffled me. Especially Titian's Danae and the Shower of Gold.

This could've been part of an Enlightenment or Renaissance exhibit if there was one, but not part of this particular exhibit. Also, I don't remember seeing any sort of figure in the right portion of the painting, so the one on display must have been an alternate or something. I guess. *confused* According to the story, Zeus became angry over something (probably that Danae had yet to be ravished), so he came down to her disguised as gold and knocked her up, after which she gave birth to Perseus. How terribly sexist.

Which brings me to another observation: I don't recall any female artists on display in that exhibit. Perhaps there were a couple in the Family/Kids/Kitch gallery (which is related to Impressionism how?). That would figure. It really surprised me to see no Bouguereau paintings in this gallery, though, considering the majority of his paintings consisted of women, women holding babies, babies holding babies, naked girls, naked girls posing in suggestive ways, and so on.

Tell me what isn't wrong about that painting.

And this brings me to yet another thought: Now that I think back on everything I saw at the museum, if there was a naked figure it was always a woman. The only naked men on display were little sculptures and statues down in the Africa/Middle East/Greece/Rome galleries. It's nice to see this idea of female exploitation reinforced so strongly in American society.

Aside from all the sexism inherent throughout the museum, I managed to have a fairly decent time there. I saw one of those typical medieval egg tempera paintings of the Madonna holding her child, but this one was different from all the others in that it included one extremely long, boney, alien-like finger on the woman. I wish I could find a pic of it. Pretty hilarious. I also found it interesting how most of the figures of that medieval gallery were depicted with a sickly green/grey hue to their skin. Maybe egg tempera changes color over time, or there's some sort of color theory in religion. But I'll stick with my first thought and say it was due to the Plague.

the darkness is coming

Weirdest dream ever last night. I should've blogged this down sooner, because now I only really remember the last little bit of it. Oh well.

Following the death/destruction theme of my dreams, this particular one involved some sort of meteor shower thing that was destroying Earth. It was night, and my mom and I were in the van, driving down the freeway. All around us comets were crashing to the ground, and people were fleeing on foot or by vehicle. And then we suddenly hit a patch of lava on the freeway and the van melted, and my mom carried me over to the side of the road, her feet burning off in the process. And then we began to walk south down the freeway. I thought of turning back, returning home, or maybe going all the way north to Alaska to escape the destruction, but I knew there was no hope. There was no safe place to go anywhere on Earth. So we continued to walk down the freeway.

Then a cloaked woman walked past us, going north. We asked her what was south, and in a Russian accent she replied, "There is nothing this way; it is darkness." And she walked on by. I looked south, around the bend in the freeway which led into complete darkness. There was nowhere to go; no place to escape. Everyone would be dead soon. We continued down the freeway into the darkness.

have you seen this child?

So apparently I'm on a Cheerios cereal box. Or at least it's a female who supposedly looks just like me (according to everyone who's seen the box). I'm not sure whether to be flattered or offended by that because I look nothing like the woman on the box.

And here's the really weird part: The box is way up on top of the fridge, so when one walks into the kitchen it's not going to get noticed. However, when my friend came over to work on a project, she walked into the kitchen and immediately was like, "omg, is that you on the cereal box?" Why she honed in on the cereal box was just a bit scary.

I can't stand weird social phenomenon like this.

grocery list: tomatoes, lettuce, bombs

It has come to my attention that the majority of my dreams have some sort of death/destruction theme to them: dying fish, being destroyed by blackholes or the sun, space shuttle crashing. And last night's dream was no different.

I was in an supermarket searching for something or somebody when bombs started falling through the ceiling and killing everyone. Then I was outside running, trying to find shelter. The place seemed like a desert, or maybe the place was just barren. More bombs were falling all around me. I looked to my left and saw a bomb hit a group of people, their flesh and blood splattering everywhere, even on me. Then I looked to my right and saw another bomb hit another group of people, splattering them everywhere, too. And all around me this kept happening until I woke up.

For some reason I got the feeling I was in the middle of a war. Maybe this was all due to me having just finished reading Persepolis. o_o;

Houston, there is a problem

This dream was all over the place. But here goes:

I was out in a field with my parents and brother and I looked up to the sky to watch an airplane fly overhead. It was pretty normal, the whole seeing-an-airplane-in-the-sky thing, so I returned to whatever we were doing in the field. Suddenly the airplane changed into a space shuttle and headed straight for the ground. I could hear people talking calmly over a speaker of sorts as the shuttle crashed into the ground not too far from where we were standing. Then we all had to evacuate the area, which turned out to be the town where my grandma lives, and she appeared there with us as we left.

The evacuation route took us to a water slide, so we proceeded to ride down the slide in innertubes. Somehow, for some reason, I ended up in a long, wrinkly black skirt sitting down in a shallow area of the water slide, and then... I don't really remember anything else, except playing the jungle course on Mario Kart 64 and discovering a really awesome shortcut.

[insert Batman theme song here]

Oh dreams. You silly, weird, scary figments of the mind.

So last night I dreamt that I was Batman, or at least some sort of female superhero equivalent. And I'm not sure why, though, because I've never been into any of those comic book superheros. But anyways there was something big going down in town and I was at Bat HQ (which apparently was some old, abandoned-looking cottage) when I got a call on my awesome cell phone. So I ducked into this little crawl-space to take the call, but then I figured, "pffft, wtf? I'm Batman. I don't have to answer my phone." So I handed it off to my assistant (who I'm sure was supposed to be my art teacher from college) and she proceeded to discuss business with the person. There were a few other people with me in HQ (I'm assuming more assistants), including Kevin Spacey. But when I went up to talk to him he just sat there against a wall looking all paranoid and useless. Next thing I know we end up outside on the old, creeky deck but I sneak back inside to spy on somebody. And then I can't remember anything else.

At least it wasn't a fish or outer space dream.

The voices keep following

I seriously thought I was hallucinating today. I was watching the Superbowl but I kept hearing other sounds not in the direction of the TV. It was like music at first, and then turned into chatter. This continued for much of the football game.

And then I realized we had the surround sound speakers on and the noise from the crowd at the game was coming through them. Aha.

So that got me to thinking about auditory hallucinations. Does a person who has such an episode hear things inside his/her head? Or are the sounds and/or voices external?

Space Jams

So besides having dreams about fish, the other recurring theme I have is of outer space. Usually in all my spacey dreams humanity ends up dead either by Earth getting sucked into a black hole or the sun exploding and frying us. No matter what these dreams consist of or how they end, I'm always horrified and scared. I only remember the last two space dreams I had, the most recent one being just last week.

Space Dream of Doom #1:
All was well with the world and our solar system, and then for some reason it turned out that Pluto was really a gigantic black hole (how ironic considering it's recent degredation from planet to asteroid) and it sucked us all up. D:

Space Dream of Doom #2:
There was a scientist somewhere who was experimenting with creating mini-universes in a laboratory. He had managed to create a mini-galaxy and kept it in a jar so it wouldn't disturb anything; however, he failed to take into consideration that even a mini-galaxy would have an extremely dense core by which it would attract and keep in its orbit the other stars and gases. This particular mini-galaxy became so dense that it turned into a black hole, broke out of the jar, and sucked us all up. o_O;

Geez, wtf? Seriously, where's Freud or Jung when you need them?

Fish X-ing

The fish are following me.

It's been quite a while since fish have made an appearance in my dreams. So what do they do now but start showing up in real life!

It was late one night a couple weeks back, and as I drove up our gravel road I spotted something in my headlights. It was a coyote. It took off into the shrubbery, leaving this writhing, flopping blob in the middle of the road. At first I thought it was a bird struggling about, its wings broken and its body probably ripped halfway open, bleeding a slow and painful death. But the way this thing flipped about was not very bird-like. It must've been a fish. The overgrown creek right off the road has always been known for its salmon-spawning; the coyote must've caught a salmon after it became tangled in the branches and thorns covering the creek and then drug it up to the road to make the kill.

So there I was, confronted with an actual fish who was dying and needed to be saved. This was my chance to save it and redeem myself for all the failed rescue attempts in my dreams. But for some reason I didn't stop. Something was telling me that this was how it was meant to be and that everything would be okay. So I continued up the road, leaving the fish to its fate. How shocking, though. It was one of the most disturbing things I've ever seen.