Twice now I have dreamed that I am possessed by a demon, and I'm read to admit that my subconscious has successfully drawn my attention.

The other night was nice and metaphorical.  I dreamed of a room full of people, mostly those I knew, opening their chests (bloodlessly, thankfully) and delighting at the wonders they saw inside themselves.  They showed one another, then laughed and opened themselves again and again and again.  I stood in the corner, huddling and scared.  An angel came to me and asked me why I wasn't joining in with the others.  I hunched further over myself, shook my head, then spelled, in the air, "demin."  The misspelling was deliberate.  If I spelled it correctly, I feared I would call it out.

That dream I was willing to write off as a side affect of talk therapy. It made sense to me, so I considered it and what my possible demons could be, metaphorically of course.  I figured, too, that since I'd just finished editing and posting a big story full of demons and possession that this was an easy grab for the subconscious, and I left it at that. 

I dreamed of demons again last night, and now I'm just plain confused.  This time I was going to the chiropractor, the one I see in real life.  The office was dream-mangled, and the rooms were labyrinthine and dark.  I didn't notice, however, and arrived describing my neck pain to the doctor--this would be the neck pain that had been keeping me up all night and making my right hand fall asleep.  It's been, lately, worse than it's ever been, and it's irritating me.  I explained it to him, and he nodded, and led me back to some room in the back of the building.  Some assistant (who is not there in real life) came and made up a mattress on the floor, and he had me lie down.  I just lay there for a long time, and he spoke softly, of things I don't remember.  I was very tired, and I'd drifted back to that room, and now I lay there dazed and floating.  After several minutes, he spoke.

"Good.  I think you're safe now.  You went too close to a meteor there for a minute, and it tried to grab you."

I remember being puzzled.  Meteors?  Really?  This is a hazard?  How do you tell?  I wanted to ask the questions, but I was still tired and dizzy, so I just sort of frowned.  He did a few procedures, the particulars of which are lost to me in the fuzziness of the dream, but what I remember is looking at this dish-like thing where two little globby monsters appeared, one pink and one brown.  "These were inside you," he said.  I remember staring at them, disgusted and horrified.  I felt violated.  Those had been inside of me?  Where?  How?  Why?  And I still felt dizzy, so I worried there were more.

The dream deteriorated into complete rather than just partial nonsense at this point: they served me lunch on a dish I'd forgotten to rinse, I milled around the halls of my own home only to land back at the front desk, and there was just general stuff, nothing that strikes me or floats to the top.  But I keep thinking of those demons on the plate, the casualty of getting "too close to a meteor."  

You can't have my kind of imagination and take your dreams literally. You just can't.  But this is twice in the span of a week that my subconscious has identified that I am harboring alien particles.  I'm not sure what to do with this, frankly.  Get an MRI of the nerve cluster that affects that arm at C7/C8?  How?  Tell my doctor that I keep dreaming of demons living inside me?  There's no clue as to the chiropractor's procedure, either.  I just laid there on the mattress on the floor and was dazed.  And more importantly, I hadn't felt like that was all.  The dream ended with me in a confused panic.

I have no answers.  I'll probably play with runes and cards later this morning, because I'm That Way, but I don't expect to actually learn anything I can use.  I suppose the only thing to do is to keep listening to my subconscious, and maybe to drop an autowriting/journal note to my celestial steering company and let them know BY THE WAY, THAT DOESN'T INFORM ME AT ALL, ONLY SCARES THE SHIT OUT OF ME.  Well, and it also makes me want to go write.  But anything does that, to be honest, and that one they already know.

So far I've only really had two in real life, though I suppose I have to count the third one I really wasn't going to count because I didn't think they'd been gone enough to really be ghost-like, but then I dreamed last night, and in that theater, this person did indeed count as a ghost.  The two I counted in real life were on facebook, and benign, and even welcome, so that's okay.  The third ghost-not-ghost wasn't bothering me until the dream, and basically this morning I'm wincing and groaning a little.  Damn subconscious.  Always so slow to get memos.

Though I'd like to write off all my dreams from last night, thank you.  They were even more annoying than the fact that my right hand is falling asleep again, though the improvement is that it's JUST the hand now, not the whole arm.  I am anticipating the chiropractor's excitement when I tell him this.  He's already in love with my shoulder in only a way a chiropractor can be.  But I digress.  The dream.

The ghost bit was just annoying, the same old same old, dreams from years ago come back like they'd never left, except, as I write this, I realize I've improved just slightly because while I knew I was the same, I worked very hard to not let anyone know, and the best part was I had this Team that went around with me, aiding and abetting, and there was never confrontation, and I never got hurt.  Except this was all happening on a beach, and when it was done, I told Dan I'd take Anna to the car and come pick him up.  Don't ask me why, but it worked in the dream.  

So I get the car, strap Anna in her seat (she's four in the dream), and I think, "I should lock the doors," and as soon as I think that, someone tries to get in the car. I get the back doors locked in time, but the front passenger seat fails to lock, and the guy gets in.

I am angry, angry, angry with my subconscious, because the man is black, and he is a thug.  I have a racist, stereotyped subconscious.  I am so disappointed.  I think he had to be black, though, because he had to be Other, because he was very smooth-talking, trying to convince me to let him kidnap me and my car and my kid, and I think I was unable to act because, retardedly, I didn't want to be racist.  Actually, this is all very good for therapy, where I am talking about being too nice, of providing false fronts where people then think they are my new best friend or can ask me do to, say, or be anything, and I am standing there hating them but can't speak about it because I am so heavily programmed that I can't be mean unless someone is being a horrible ass.  I still think it was dumb that he was black, though.  I can think of at least seven archetypes which wouldn't have been so gauche. But the key was that he was an invader, he was a threat, but he wasn't MEAN, just sleazy, so I couldn't fight him.

Anyway, the good news is that I got him out, dumping him in front of a bunch of other people who were doing the same thing, but they were in this mob, trying to get other people to buy their shit or take them somewhere or do other things they didn't want to do.  I'm not sure how it worked, but somehow he couldn't force me to do anything once I rolled down the window and they started in, and I got him out.  But then I wasn't in the place where Dan was going to meet me, and I couldn't stay because of the mob.  I started driving around in a busy city that reminded me of Chicago, needing to call him, but I couldn't get to my phone, and I wasn't sure he had his on.  (Very real life.) 

The weirdest part is that somehow I ended up going up a hill that was so steep it was practically sheer, and of all things, I was going up it now on a bike.  Anna was behind me on her trail-a-bike, no longer four but her actual age now, and she's nervous, but I tell her to just keep pedaling, just keep going, because we're almost there.  There's a guy beside us biking, as if to prove it can be done.  But it's SO steep, and soon the bike wheels start spinning against the pavement, unable to go.  The guy's tires do, too.  We're stuck.

I turn to look back down the hill, and I about throw up.  I can't go back down it on the bike.  I'll die.  But I can't go up, and for some reason walking is out.  I turn to the guy, looking at him in panic as I try to keep my voice light as I reassure Anna.  The guy points to the right, and we go onto this side street that looks like Iowa City, still a hill, and it's the wrong way, but it's not as impossible, and there are other people there.  I start up it.

Then I wake up.  And deliberately do not let myself go back to sleep so I don't dream again.

So, I don't know what this means.  Maybe it means nothing.  I guess at least the ghost didn't get me, and I didn't fall down the hill. 

Dan, start taking your goddamn phone with you.  Everywhere.  And make sure it's on.  And for the next month or so, you are WALKING ME to the car if we're ever in a busy area.

ETA: I was thinking about this as I drove Anna to school, and I realized that it wasn't the guy on the bike who suggested the turn-off, but me.  Somehow that seems important.

The other night I had another Neil Gaiman dream.  This time he was reviewing my writing, showing it to someone else, and he was very pleased with what I'd done, and was trying to explain it to the other person.  "Look," he said, holding out some pages.  "She's turned the sacred into the sacrisant." 

I've been meaning to look that up for days, and I finally did last night.  I found some references to some Catholic Church position, and then I found this.

 This is what I'm talking about.

Last night I dreamt that Dan, Anna, and I lived in a house that I think was supposed to be this one but looked nothing like it.  We had just moved in, but I was edgy about it.  I kept telling Dan there was something wrong with the house, or that something wasn't right, that I didn't feel right when I was in it.  I became obsessive about locking the doors.  At some point Anna just ceased to be there, as if she were a character that wasn't working, but I remembered her, and that began to bother me, too.  And in the dream, I was having dreams and visions.  I changed, too, from being myself into being an African-American woman, very tall and lithe with a sort of 70s 'fro going on.  And then I went to the bathroom, became myself again, and knew the something wrong was in the bathtub.  Dan came in, and I said, "There's something wrong," and he told me to calm down, and either left, or I left in the sense that I stopped focusing on his presence and just looked at the tub.  And that was when I heard the child, felt its presence.  I asked it to tell me what was wrong, and in answer, it made the dirty ring around the tub bleed.  "He did this to you?" I remember saying.  And the child didn't speak, but I knew that "he" had, whoever he was, and that he was coming back to make sure no one ever found out.

Then I woke up.

What is impressing me, or perhaps more appropriately, striking me, is that neither in the dream or upon waking am I upset.  I dreamt of a bleeding bathtub and my greatest thought is, "Yeah, I really need to clean mine.  It's getting gross."  In the dream itself, I was more focused on who the hell is going to be coming to my house rather than the fact that I could sense the presence of the dead and that a child had been murdered in my bathtub.  I also keep remembering the way that blood ran down the sides of the tub, starting at the ring.  I recall it on purpose, because it was such a striking image, and because it doesn't seem threatening, if you can believe it.

I don't usually remember these dreams, but I have them all the time.  I'm actually feeling a lot better for remembering this one.  None of them are ever recurrent, but I can tell you I'm usually battling something grisly in a dream.  Usually I am calmly kicking its ass.  Except for that one with Neil Gaiman shooting the dragon with the Easter egg.  God, I want that dream again.

Hotels and schools.  I'm always running through the hallways of hotels and schools, organizing the troops and preparing to to deadly battle with an invisible enemy, but I never have so much as a weapon.  It never seems to bother me, either.

I will say I had an overwhelming urge to listen to E.S. Posthumus this morning, though, to let their lovely symphonic sound even out all the dark, dripping blood.  And, as a point of interest, I have twice made sure all the doors were locked in the house.

The running joke around here is that I do not sleep before big events.  The most famous is that on the night before my wedding I slept exactly one hour, and spent most of the night obsessively playing mahjong.  (I got a high score I never did beat again on that computer, that nobody ever did.)  It's always been like this, to the point that sometimes I court it: before I went to England, a friend of mine got me drunk on Jameson's, I slept about two hours, spent the day straightening my brain again, then came around just in time to be completely unconscious during the entire flight from exhaustion.

Last night I was determined to be differnent.  I cleared my head naturally.  Then I had wine anyway.  I had a nice massage from Dan, and he relaxed me and made me giggle and happy, and I went to bed blissful and content.

3AM, I'm awake. 

It's not the trip this time!!!  I'm taking that as an improvement.  It was a dream this time, a very "hot" one--not erotic, but vivid and . . . timely, I guess.  I woke from it with that urgent must-act feeling, angry that my pad and paper were downstairs, so I just tried to remember it go back to sleep.  Big mistake.  My mind shifted gears and started writing the first two scenes of Etsey Book II.  THEN they had my attention.  That was the next opening?  What?  The dream with Kevin Costner?  Really?  What?  Then I listened, and then I lay there in bed, jaw dropping . . . .

Then beside me Anna began to sing "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer" in her sleep, and I giggled.

Tried to find pen and paper anyway.  Found paper.  No pen.  So I got up, wrote it down in my journal, typed up the bit my conscious brain had already puttied onto it, and then, because I was here, wandered to my google homepage, where once again the horoscope bombarded me.

There are good times to be had, yet you won't be allowed to join in the fun until you are done with your chores. If there's too much to do, prioritize your work so you finish as much as possible. Your ruling planet Mercury changes signs tomorrow, pushing you into a whole new set of projects. Even if you feel somewhat scattered, rely on your greatest strength and concentrate on the details.

One of those stream-of-conscious entries which I suspect are either loved or hated.  You have been warned.