3 strange dreams and 1 excellent chicken pie
Apparently, my sleeping brain has decided it would rather just watch tv; all three of these dreams are tv-themed in some respect. And it's getting harder and harder for me to say upon waking where *I* was in my dreams. In these dreams, for example, I was pretty much an observer, not a participant. But when I try to go back through them, I have distinct memories of emotions and attitudes that only make sense for someone who was present as a participant in a given scene. Only I wasn't in the scene. I kind of miss the days when I used to go actively adventuring in all my dreams. Simpler times, when my asleep-brain wasn't as lazy as my awake one...
Dream the First:
A couple of nights ago, I had a dream about Peter and Horn-Rimmed Glasses from Heroes, only the setting of the dream did not resemble the NYC of Heroes so much as the landscape of a fantasy novel. It was an imaginary kingdom: pre-industrial but not sword-and-sorcery (there weren't any tunics or scabbards to speak of), with a smack of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I think Peter was the scion of a degenerate noble family. He still had powers, but the dream was very vague on what, exactly, these powers were.
HRG came to Peter with a gold pocket watch and said he needed Peter's help to find another like it. HRG showed him that the lid of the watch had a scene engraved on it: an old-fashioned army encampment, sparsely sketched and embarrassingly Narnia-esque. (My dreams are *so* into plagiarism!) A standard flying over a tent in the foreground showed a simple 'P' device. Peter wondered whether it meant something about his own family. He grudgingly agreed to use his whatever-powers of sneakery to find the other watch.
The two traveled out of town on a twisty road cut into a mountainside. I forget some of this chunk, but they got to their destination, and Peter went in alone. He was looking for a large, strangely squarish heap of loose sand under a faded canopy. The heap of sand was about the size of a king-sized bed. Peter had some idea that he might be pursued by others in search of the watch, so he wanted to leave as little evidence that he'd been there as possible. Strangely, as he approached the unmarked heap, he found that he could sense where the watch was buried, and his heightened senses were also telling him there was a *second* watch buried in this same heap of sand. He plunged his hand straight down into the sand exactly twice and came up with a pocket watch each time. He looked at each one. One watch was engraved with the exact same image as the previous one, but it was silver. The other was gold, like the first watch, and the image on the cover was again the same, except for the device on the standard, which was missing the 'P.' Peter had no idea what it meant, but he had a growing sense of conviction (and foreboding! woooo!) that it all had something to do with his family history.
Hearing noises outside the tent, Peter shoved the two watches into his pocket and tried to hide in a narrow groove in the floor that was partially obscured by the draping of the canopy. (Here my recollections become very confused as to p.o.v., since I have clear memories of the feeling of trying to wedge myself into the space in the floor, even though I had at no previous point in the dream been involved). Peter sort of knew that it was a futile effort, and indeed, the new party spotted him right away. He knew, somehow, that they were his antagonists, and he tried to be all casual, like he had just wandered into the room with the sand-mattress by mistake. As one does. The antagonists at least pretended to believe him. They smirked at him and showed him what they had come for, 'another watch like this.' Their watch was another 'P' watch, in gold, exactly like HRG's. (Peter never entertained the possibility that they had overpowered HRG and taken his watch; he assumed the watch-count was up to four: three gold, one silver, three P watches, one non-P watch).
Peter had to think of a way to get past his antagonists and escape with his two watches - preferably without any of them realizing he had ever found them - then come back later and steal the fourth watch. But even though he knew it was crucial for him to draw no attention to the watches hidden on his person, he couldn't stop putting his hands in his pockets. All his intuition told him that they were onto him and would never let him past them. But at just the moment Peter became completely convinced - by means of an evil gleam in their leader's eye! - that the antagonists not only knew he had the watches but knew exactly where he was keeping them... I woke up.
Dream the Second:
This dream was about an outlandish, grandiose, devil-may-care female airline pilot. She looked like Sue from Glee (my favorite character from that show, I'm afraid. I *never* like the villain best, but Sue is actually *funny,* and the other characters will insist on upsetting me week after week. Still, I tune in out of a protracted hope that the show will come to its senses, and because watching the curly-haired guy sing and dance just does things to me. Guh! The curly hair and the gangling gangliness!) and she flew a commercial airliner as if she were more like a taxi driver and/or captain of a booze cruise. By which I mean: a) she saw herself as an entertainer as well as a pilot, and b) she had passengers and a schedule and stuff, but she just landed at any airport she wanted, only to take off again and go wherever she wanted. She would stand on a chair in the airport and shout for everyone's attention, then try to convince the passengers waiting for their flights that they should go with her to Antarctica, instead.
Which is where we were supposed to be going, Sue permitting. I got on a plane - I think - with a bunch of other passengers. We were supposed to be taking a flight to Antarctica with one stop in the middle. After one leg of the trip with Sue, most of the passengers had decided to transfer to flights on other airlines. So the passenger roster diminished significantly, and Sue decided to stop for a couple of days so she could shill for new passengers. Because of the delay, only two passengers total from the original flight decided to stay on and wait, and much of the middle part of the dream was taken up with these two characters flirting with each other ceaselessly. I seem to recall that the man, in particular, was extremely obnoxious, smothering the woman with attention, but to my disappointment, the woman eventually gave in to this guy's advances and decided she liked him back. I sort of wasn't there for any of this, because I was one of the passengers who got disgusted and left with another airline. But then I sort of was one of the new passengers Sue picked up, too, and when we got on the plane and took off, I had serious doubts that Antarctica was where we were actually headed.
Dream the Third
Ando and Hiro from Heroes were in a car with somebody else I can't remember. (The appearance of more Heroes characters probably has to do with the fact that I thought about getting up and writing down the previous two dreams, before falling asleep again). Hiro sneezed and accidentally stopped himself, the car and the driver in time. Ando tried to get Hiro to snap out of it, then gave up, opened the car door and went around back to try to push the car out of the middle of the street. (Hiro was glitching in the season premiere, which - I admit! - I watched; I am hopeless. My brain's version of a Hiro-glitch still doesn't make much sense, however). Somehow, Ando ended up climbing on top of the car, jumping up and down to try to get Hiro's attention. Which meant that when time started up again, the car started going, and Ando was thrown in front of the car.
He got hit - a little. Hiro felt bad, so they both decided to get some cake. Luckily, they were right outside of a local cake restaurant. Supposedly, this restaurant was located in my town, because I remember thinking, 'Oh good, I've been meaning to go to that cake restaurant; now I will know what it's like.' And there is a cake restaurant of sorts that I have been meaning to try out here in town, but it is not built by the side of a railway trestle three or four stories in the air, and this one was.
Hiro and Ando had to figure out how to get up to the cake restaurant. They found an elevator and, quite naturally, assumed it was the way up. But although that seems a reasonable assumption to me (you'd think the proprietor of a cake restaurant four stories up would be glad for whatever makes his business easier to get to - but no!), the elevator was not safe for human use. The doors would not stay open more than a second, and there was no sensor to stop them from shutting on a person halfway in or out the door. Hiro and Ando both made it on, but they had to leap out the door when it got to the top or risk being smushed. Hiro made it through the door the first time, but Ando had to ride it all the way down to the bottom and up again, so he could have his chance to jump out at the top. Then the proprietor of the cake shop told them they weren't allowed to ride the elevator, and as punishment they would have to take it all the way down again and come back up by the stairs. So it was back in the elevator, risking their lives to jump out one at a time on the ground floor.
Hiro and Ando didn't remember any stairs, but that was because the bottom stair was a block away. Instead of flights of stairs twisting back and forth at each floor, this wooden staircase was designed in a giant arc that gradually ascended to the railway trestle and shook and swayed when you stepped on it. Very harrowing. I didn't like this part, because I'm afraid of heights (of slipping and falling from them, anyway), and I worried that my weight would break the old rotten wood steps. Of course, I shouldn't have worried because *I wasn't even there.* Hiro and Ando, however, made it just fine.
At the top of the staircase, Hiro and Ando finally found the cake restaurant. Inside, it was like a dingy little diner with an old-fashioned refrigerator and no kitchen behind the counter. Hiro and Ando (and I) were disappointed to learn that the cake guy didn't make his own special cakes, he just bought frozen cakes from the grocery store and defrosted slices of them in his grimy fridge.
The End.
In other news, I am trying to get excited about cooking again, after a summer spent wilting in the heat, too hot and bored to eat, much less cook. Last night I made this recipe for a chicken pie (it is made in a casserole dish) with cinnamon, rice, raisins and yogurt in the filling along with the vegetables, and it was a very good start:
http://www.realsimple.com/food-recipes/browse-all-recipes/indian-spiced-chicken-10000001586998/
I used phyllo for the first time ever to make the top crust. My phyllo turned out a lot uglier than the picture, but the pie is delicious. Very tender chicken and rice, with a nice blend of sweet and spicy! Hobbitastic dining, indeed!
In other other news, I finally looked up how to make boldface in html. Yay me!
.
Dream the First:
A couple of nights ago, I had a dream about Peter and Horn-Rimmed Glasses from Heroes, only the setting of the dream did not resemble the NYC of Heroes so much as the landscape of a fantasy novel. It was an imaginary kingdom: pre-industrial but not sword-and-sorcery (there weren't any tunics or scabbards to speak of), with a smack of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I think Peter was the scion of a degenerate noble family. He still had powers, but the dream was very vague on what, exactly, these powers were.
HRG came to Peter with a gold pocket watch and said he needed Peter's help to find another like it. HRG showed him that the lid of the watch had a scene engraved on it: an old-fashioned army encampment, sparsely sketched and embarrassingly Narnia-esque. (My dreams are *so* into plagiarism!) A standard flying over a tent in the foreground showed a simple 'P' device. Peter wondered whether it meant something about his own family. He grudgingly agreed to use his whatever-powers of sneakery to find the other watch.
The two traveled out of town on a twisty road cut into a mountainside. I forget some of this chunk, but they got to their destination, and Peter went in alone. He was looking for a large, strangely squarish heap of loose sand under a faded canopy. The heap of sand was about the size of a king-sized bed. Peter had some idea that he might be pursued by others in search of the watch, so he wanted to leave as little evidence that he'd been there as possible. Strangely, as he approached the unmarked heap, he found that he could sense where the watch was buried, and his heightened senses were also telling him there was a *second* watch buried in this same heap of sand. He plunged his hand straight down into the sand exactly twice and came up with a pocket watch each time. He looked at each one. One watch was engraved with the exact same image as the previous one, but it was silver. The other was gold, like the first watch, and the image on the cover was again the same, except for the device on the standard, which was missing the 'P.' Peter had no idea what it meant, but he had a growing sense of conviction (and foreboding! woooo!) that it all had something to do with his family history.
Hearing noises outside the tent, Peter shoved the two watches into his pocket and tried to hide in a narrow groove in the floor that was partially obscured by the draping of the canopy. (Here my recollections become very confused as to p.o.v., since I have clear memories of the feeling of trying to wedge myself into the space in the floor, even though I had at no previous point in the dream been involved). Peter sort of knew that it was a futile effort, and indeed, the new party spotted him right away. He knew, somehow, that they were his antagonists, and he tried to be all casual, like he had just wandered into the room with the sand-mattress by mistake. As one does. The antagonists at least pretended to believe him. They smirked at him and showed him what they had come for, 'another watch like this.' Their watch was another 'P' watch, in gold, exactly like HRG's. (Peter never entertained the possibility that they had overpowered HRG and taken his watch; he assumed the watch-count was up to four: three gold, one silver, three P watches, one non-P watch).
Peter had to think of a way to get past his antagonists and escape with his two watches - preferably without any of them realizing he had ever found them - then come back later and steal the fourth watch. But even though he knew it was crucial for him to draw no attention to the watches hidden on his person, he couldn't stop putting his hands in his pockets. All his intuition told him that they were onto him and would never let him past them. But at just the moment Peter became completely convinced - by means of an evil gleam in their leader's eye! - that the antagonists not only knew he had the watches but knew exactly where he was keeping them... I woke up.
Dream the Second:
This dream was about an outlandish, grandiose, devil-may-care female airline pilot. She looked like Sue from Glee (my favorite character from that show, I'm afraid. I *never* like the villain best, but Sue is actually *funny,* and the other characters will insist on upsetting me week after week. Still, I tune in out of a protracted hope that the show will come to its senses, and because watching the curly-haired guy sing and dance just does things to me. Guh! The curly hair and the gangling gangliness!) and she flew a commercial airliner as if she were more like a taxi driver and/or captain of a booze cruise. By which I mean: a) she saw herself as an entertainer as well as a pilot, and b) she had passengers and a schedule and stuff, but she just landed at any airport she wanted, only to take off again and go wherever she wanted. She would stand on a chair in the airport and shout for everyone's attention, then try to convince the passengers waiting for their flights that they should go with her to Antarctica, instead.
Which is where we were supposed to be going, Sue permitting. I got on a plane - I think - with a bunch of other passengers. We were supposed to be taking a flight to Antarctica with one stop in the middle. After one leg of the trip with Sue, most of the passengers had decided to transfer to flights on other airlines. So the passenger roster diminished significantly, and Sue decided to stop for a couple of days so she could shill for new passengers. Because of the delay, only two passengers total from the original flight decided to stay on and wait, and much of the middle part of the dream was taken up with these two characters flirting with each other ceaselessly. I seem to recall that the man, in particular, was extremely obnoxious, smothering the woman with attention, but to my disappointment, the woman eventually gave in to this guy's advances and decided she liked him back. I sort of wasn't there for any of this, because I was one of the passengers who got disgusted and left with another airline. But then I sort of was one of the new passengers Sue picked up, too, and when we got on the plane and took off, I had serious doubts that Antarctica was where we were actually headed.
Dream the Third
Ando and Hiro from Heroes were in a car with somebody else I can't remember. (The appearance of more Heroes characters probably has to do with the fact that I thought about getting up and writing down the previous two dreams, before falling asleep again). Hiro sneezed and accidentally stopped himself, the car and the driver in time. Ando tried to get Hiro to snap out of it, then gave up, opened the car door and went around back to try to push the car out of the middle of the street. (Hiro was glitching in the season premiere, which - I admit! - I watched; I am hopeless. My brain's version of a Hiro-glitch still doesn't make much sense, however). Somehow, Ando ended up climbing on top of the car, jumping up and down to try to get Hiro's attention. Which meant that when time started up again, the car started going, and Ando was thrown in front of the car.
He got hit - a little. Hiro felt bad, so they both decided to get some cake. Luckily, they were right outside of a local cake restaurant. Supposedly, this restaurant was located in my town, because I remember thinking, 'Oh good, I've been meaning to go to that cake restaurant; now I will know what it's like.' And there is a cake restaurant of sorts that I have been meaning to try out here in town, but it is not built by the side of a railway trestle three or four stories in the air, and this one was.
Hiro and Ando had to figure out how to get up to the cake restaurant. They found an elevator and, quite naturally, assumed it was the way up. But although that seems a reasonable assumption to me (you'd think the proprietor of a cake restaurant four stories up would be glad for whatever makes his business easier to get to - but no!), the elevator was not safe for human use. The doors would not stay open more than a second, and there was no sensor to stop them from shutting on a person halfway in or out the door. Hiro and Ando both made it on, but they had to leap out the door when it got to the top or risk being smushed. Hiro made it through the door the first time, but Ando had to ride it all the way down to the bottom and up again, so he could have his chance to jump out at the top. Then the proprietor of the cake shop told them they weren't allowed to ride the elevator, and as punishment they would have to take it all the way down again and come back up by the stairs. So it was back in the elevator, risking their lives to jump out one at a time on the ground floor.
Hiro and Ando didn't remember any stairs, but that was because the bottom stair was a block away. Instead of flights of stairs twisting back and forth at each floor, this wooden staircase was designed in a giant arc that gradually ascended to the railway trestle and shook and swayed when you stepped on it. Very harrowing. I didn't like this part, because I'm afraid of heights (of slipping and falling from them, anyway), and I worried that my weight would break the old rotten wood steps. Of course, I shouldn't have worried because *I wasn't even there.* Hiro and Ando, however, made it just fine.
At the top of the staircase, Hiro and Ando finally found the cake restaurant. Inside, it was like a dingy little diner with an old-fashioned refrigerator and no kitchen behind the counter. Hiro and Ando (and I) were disappointed to learn that the cake guy didn't make his own special cakes, he just bought frozen cakes from the grocery store and defrosted slices of them in his grimy fridge.
The End.
In other news, I am trying to get excited about cooking again, after a summer spent wilting in the heat, too hot and bored to eat, much less cook. Last night I made this recipe for a chicken pie (it is made in a casserole dish) with cinnamon, rice, raisins and yogurt in the filling along with the vegetables, and it was a very good start:
http://www.realsimple.com/food-recipes/browse-all-recipes/indian-spiced-chicken-10000001586998/
I used phyllo for the first time ever to make the top crust. My phyllo turned out a lot uglier than the picture, but the pie is delicious. Very tender chicken and rice, with a nice blend of sweet and spicy! Hobbitastic dining, indeed!
In other other news, I finally looked up how to make boldface in html. Yay me!
.