dreams

A Dream Come True

~ Kelly Wolf ~ 8 Comments

When I was about 5, I had a terrible dream. Our kitchen phone – a prototypical ’80s cream-colored landline with a loooong, dangling cord – began to ring. I picked it up, said, “Hello?” and a torrent of insects poured out of the ear piece. The stream was so thick and fast-moving, it pushed me out of the kitchen, through the front door, and down the driveway, growing ever larger as it surged ahead. The whole world became black – just an all-encompassing flood of thickly-packed bugs. I woke up shaking all over.

Today, in Western North Carolina, we’re preparing for the emergence of a “double brood” of cicadas. Apparently, sometime over the next month or so, trillions of cicadas will burst from the ground to blanket the entire outside world and fill the air with a constant, deafening roar.

Of all the dreams I’ve ever had that I did not want to come true, “bug flood” is most definitely in the top 5. And yet, here it is, preparing to will itself into existence.

I’ve heard harrowing tales of the last cicada swarm in Western NC. Folks had to use snow shovels to dig paths to their front doors. Home window screens and car windshields were so covered in bugs, people’s views were completely obscured. My friend was riding her motorcycle and thought she’d been shot in the chest, then again in the head, but she’d actually splattered two unsuspecting cicadas. The noise was so loud and incessant, people felt like they were losing their minds. And that was a single brood, mind you – half the size of what’s about to befall us. The possibilities are truly terrifying. How are my dogs gonna deal with this? Will they come in from the backyard covered in cicadas? Or with mouthfuls of cicadas?

Maybe, if it gets too bad, I’ll just act like my neighbors down in South Carolina and call the police. “Hello, 911? I’d like to report a childhood nightmare come to life. Anything y’all can do about that?”

I saw one cicada while camping last summer, and that was one too many. I did snap a photo of it, however, to send to my sister. Over the years, I’ve learned that when I see something and say, “Ew,” my sister would see the same thing and say, “Cool!” So I take pictures of gross things and send them to her.

She was pretty stoked on this one.

Now that I think of it, I may have a solution here. I just need to move my sister back from Spain so she can go through this ordeal with me.

“Look: that car’s completely covered in cicadas! Cool!”

“There are three inches of cicada carcasses on the ground! Cool!”

“The restaurants are serving fried cicadas! Cool!”

“The dogs are pooping cicada parts! Cool!”

Maybe, with her continual reframes, I could survive the bug flood. And maybe, after breathing life into a dream that was so horrifying, I vividly remember it over 40 years later, the universe will see fit to do a little balancing act and make one of my good dreams come true.

I do love a flying dream, universe. Just sayin’.

Rise Up Screaming

~ Kelly Wolf ~ Leave a comment

Ever since I took a job with a heavy lean towards bureaucracy, my dreams have been utter crap. Because a big component of the dream world is “cerebral housekeeping” – essentially, our minds kicking out anything from the previous day that is deemed unworthy of brain space – my dreams consist of subject matter like populating spreadsheets, navigating government databases, crafting cumbersome contracts, and trying to coerce people in leadership positions to respond to repeated, urgent inquiries. In short, it sucks. None of that shit is acceptable fodder for dreams. Or real life.

The other night was different, though. For starters, I wasn’t even in my own dream. Instead, the protagonist was a retired professor in a virtual meeting with a group of former students. Their interactions seemed sinister somehow, then became innocuous and conversational before the scene shifted entirely, now featuring two people closed in a room, watching two other people through a window in the door. When it became clear to the folks in the room that they were imprisoned and their captors were getting ready to abandon them, one of the prisoners put his mouth up to the window to scream for help. The scream wouldn’t come out, though. It was just a muted, slow moan. He tried again. It was a little louder, but no scream. He took a deep breath and tried with all his might. Finally, the scream came forth, low at first, then rising in pitch and intensity: “ooooooOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!”

And that’s how I woke myself up. As I lay in the darkness, I came to the embarrassing conclusion that I had most definitely been vocalizing the crazed cries of the guy in my dream. This was confirmed as my dog Daisy ran into the room to nuzzle me with clear concern, and my husband tapped my shoulder, then shook it gently.

“I’m awake,” I muttered. “I’m sorry.”

“That sounded scary,” JR replied.

“I’m okay.”

I lay there in silence, imagining JR and the dogs’ sudden shock into consciousness by my strangled moans-turned-screams. As the scene rolled over in my head, including Daisy’s valiant rush to my aid, a burst of laughter exploded out my nose, and that was that. I could not stop laughing. Of course, that woke everybody again.

“What’s up?” JR mumbled.

“It’s just so funny. The sounds I must have been making…”

“Oh, yeah. It was like ooooooowwwwww aaaaahhhhgggg…..”

And then we were both laughing. Titus, the 100+ pound dog who sleeps in our bed, decided these nighttime shenanigans were pretty awesome and started to wriggle all over and lick our faces. Daisy stayed put wherever she was, probably shaking her head and wishing everyone would shut up and go back to sleep already.

To me, there is something so incredibly hilarious about losing physical control of oneself. I’ve written about this before, recounting another time I rocketed myself and the rest of the household out of sleep by wrenching dream behaviors into the waking world. At least this time, I didn’t kick JR full-force in the shin. 🤣

Welcome to My Unconscious

~ Kelly Wolf ~ 3 Comments

Alarm goes off this morning. I press snooze.

The next thing I know, I’m standing in the large, industrial kitchen of a luxurious domicile where I’m housesitting. For some reason, the kitchen is full of visitors. The people are unfamiliar, but I know they’re connected to the homeowners somehow. On the counter is an answering machine (apparently I’ve traveled back in time), and I press the play button, then listen to a message from a young man who’s looking after my place while I’m away. His tone is morose as he explains that Jasper, my dog, has died. The folks in the kitchen give me sad, compassionate looks while the message plays. I assume they heard him leave it, so they already know the news.

I don’t have time to linger over Jasper’s passing, however, because I have to get to a show. An acquaintance of mine has embarked on a comedy career and asked me to attend her opening performance. I walk through a door (conveniently located right off the kitchen) to enter an auditorium full of people. The lights have been dimmed, and I work my way through the dark to find a seat. It turns out we’re not there for stand-up comedy. Instead, we watch a sitcom’s pilot episode, and the budding comic I’m there to see plays one of the characters. Sadly, as the show runs, the laugh track provides the only laughter in the room. I wonder what I’m going to tell the woman afterwards, though I imagine the crowd’s silence is feedback enough.

Then I’m in another house that I know is mine, though it’s nothing like anywhere I’ve ever lived. There are no signs of Jasper – no food bowl, leash, etc. I walk around the house, trying to piece together what might have happened to him, when my alarm goes off again.

In the real world, ten minutes have passed. I wake with a deep feeling of melancholy, but it dissolves as I hear Jasper’s claws tick across the floor in the other room. My sweet dog is alive, I have no housesitting responsibilities, and I don’t have to tell whoever that woman was that her show was awful.

Whew.