lastnite: a dream journal

Spiders, caymans, cookbooks, and the high price of parking

I dreamt that I was at the old playground in my old neighborhood, and one of the preschool kids almost got eaten by a crocodile. His mom came up to me and explained that there were caymans in the kiddie swimming pools and it just wasn't safe at all. I agreed, but didn't know exactly what to do, so we all stayed inside a lot from then on.

I had to go to back to the university for some reason and Mom drove me. We miraculously found parking spaces right in front of the building we needed to go to. Mom drove past the handicapped parking (which was full) and the "Professor of the Month" type parking stalls. We pulled into a free space on the other side of those reward stalls and we noticed that, instead of parking meters, they had actual policeman standing in front of each stall. We continued into the parking space and the policeman got out of his little tollbooth-type box. He told us we owed $7.00 to park there for one hour. Mom said that was a little high and she decided she'd just drop me off and pick me up later. The policeman got very upset and said it was $9.00 to refuse to park there. We quickly pulled out and Mom sped away. I remember thinking that I was glad that she had a handicapped tag so that her license tag was simply a line of five numbers instead of a more memorable combination of letter and numbers. She dropped me off and I realized how ill I felt. I went on a roller coaster and, while it didn't help my headache, it still was neat.

I was making movies in a program similar to Flash. Persons could download the real music video to any song from a mysterious website, then fiddle with it, and upload it to share their modified video. I had a Christina Aquilera video to work with, and I immediately added subtitles and so on. Her video thankfully wasn't of her, but images of Marlo Thomas from That Girl and other dated things. Then, towards the end of the video, a bunch of current-day teenage girls ran out of their high school and towards the woods. White italicized Helvetica text told me it was "a few years later," and I changed that to something smartass. I was doing all this editing work in the old upstairs bathroom of the old house. I went to preview my video, but it had somehow gotten intercut with commercials starring Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez. I was a bit upset that it was continuing past nine o'clock, but I don't know why. Then I was going to take a shower, but I was bit by a spider on my right index finger. I ripped the spider from my hand--it was a tiny tan spider--and smashed him on the white porcelain sink. I saw the blood smear and thought about how it was really mine.

I went to a garage sale and bought several cookbooks for $2 each after debating whether I really wanted them that badly. I bought Beyond Parsley and the full, hardback, brand new version of The Joy of Cooking. Later, Mom called and told me that she had bought me James Beard and other cookbooks at the same sale.