sanity is relative

I don't remember the name of the guy who the dream cast with Leonardo DiCaprio, so we'll call him Leo. He's a rising star business mogul who lands a pretty, blonde trophy wife and is making money hand over fist. They have two kids (one boy, one girl). One day when Leo is off at work, the wife is teaching the kids to cook while someone is visiting (it felt like an interview almost but I'm not sure on that detail now). The kids are using sharp knives but the wife insists she's taught them well.

The little girl goes, "Ouch mommy, I cut myself!" and has a bleeding finger but it's not super-bad. The mom starts looking at it but suddenly her own nose is bleeding and she's getting kind of out of it. I have no idea where the visitor went but the mother ends up sitting on the floor leaning against the fridge with her two kids sitting with her and she's half out of it saying weird stuff (I don't remember what she said anymore). The kids just seemed to be sitting there listening to her quietly.

Later on, Leo is writing a love letter of some sort about how he feels like he hasn't spent enough time with his wife lately and he wants to make that right. She comes in while he's writing and finds a half-finished, rejected version of the letter on the desk where he was initially writing (he's moved to another part of the room and hasn't noticed her come in). She goes over to him and seduces him, not like that wasn't kinda the whole idea anyways. But it really felt more like she was seducing him than responding to his written overtures.

The next scene is the family on a four-person swing (each person sitting side-by-side) that is set up to have a really nice view at a place like a botanical gardens. I think Leo and his wife were talking about something but I don't remember what anymore. The only thing I really remember thinking was wondering if that chain would snap. But it didn't, so I think the scene was mostly there to imply things were supposed to be going somewhat properly with the family again, but it still had a sense of foreboding.

The next part is years later, the little girl is now a teenager going to the beach with her mother. Everyone is in bathing suits and the daughter is smokin' hot. The dream perspective switches to her, so I'm the daughter now. We spot someone we know who sells makeup, and rush up to her excitedly. The lady sets out things on the sandy/rocky ground where she is. I see a couple of just-released sample boxes and pick one up, asking if I can have it and the lady says yes. I say I'll definitely be placing an order but I'll be right back.

I hurry off along the beach on my own. I think the idea was I was going to talk to some friends further along, but I end up finding a few guys my age who I sort of know. They're hanging out in a rockier area with my uncle Nick (who is Nicolas Cage). While I'm talking to the other boys, Nick asks me if I'm still dating that one guy and I say something like, "No, we broke up." He goes, "Awww, maaan!" with a tone that doesn't mean he's sad about the breakup but that he's wishing we weren't related because now I'm available. Way to be obvious about it, Uncle. xP

Anyways I'm still talking to the other guys and they're telling me about an incident I vaguely remember hearing about, where a boat got wrecked in a storm a while back. I remember mentioning during the conversation that I had a boat myself, and couldn't understand why someone would leave theirs unmoored to get trashed like that. Turns out the boys had been in that storm and something had attacked the boat. And my mother had subpoena'd the boys for the chunk of the creature they'd managed to keep. This made me double-take, that my mother had anything to do with it, and what the heck do they mean by creature? I was trying to ask them more about this creature, and got the impression of a goopy purple thing with a few tentacles. It didn't sound like an octopus, but the sort of thing that suddenly made me think there was something supernatural going on.

Here dream logic really messes with things because I'm trying to hear what the guys are saying but they're all suddenly very tiny and wet sand is almost covering them up. I call to them and say I can't hear them, and then I say something like, "My mother must be blocking you!" I look down the beach and I think she was down that way somewhere, probably coming my way, but that's kinda fuzzy. I decide to head out into the water to swim away and find somewhere further around some rocky outcroppings where I can stop and try to think about what the heck is going on.

The makeup sample thing I had has vanished to forgotten-plot-element-land, but hey, it's cool, I have a huge crab pet now magically, who seems to understand when I talk to him and squeaks back all cute-like. I tell him we're gonna go for a swim, and while the actual swimming part makes very little sense, the crab also decides to have a piggy-back ride on my shoulders while I'm swimming. He's heavy, but I keep going anyways.

Then I woke up.

A lot of the major details of this dream are fuzzy, but I do remember the animals. At first I found a black rat in a dark room that had a big unmade bed in it (mine? not sure), it was moving really fast and seemed scared of me. I know that as pets, rats are very sociable, and I kept thinking I could convince it to be friends with me somehow. I just talked to it as if it were already a pet, hoping it would think everything was fine and warm up to me.

Then the rat changed to a ferret (as if it always had been one) that was pretty much all very dark fur... I would say black, but my brain kept telling me that all-black wasn't possible, or endangered and thus not really available as a pet. And he was very loving and friendly and I was holding him, and for some reason I was now in a basement room where the ferret's cage was. Then he had a pure white buddy, not even sure where the second one came from, but I knew they were both mine. I was having trouble remembering the dark one's name, but finally remembered it was Riddick. The light one I think had a really short name like "Cho" and possibly later it got changed to "Aster" (as that's my albino original character).

There was some nonsense about the house flooding and me trying to get out of it without the ferrets getting wet. I couldn't remember if they could swim or not. I stuck one ferret on each of my shoulders and managed to get out, since I was currently taller than the water was deep. I think there was something about a car ride... the ferrets disappeared into dream logic plot holes... and then I was in a parking lot by a large open parkland with a playground in one area near a bunch of picnic benches, and some forest and open grass with walking trails. There was a dog in the parking lot, some kids were petting it.

This dog is probably the weirdest combination of breeds I have ever seen. I believe what it was supposed to be was a rottweiler, pit bull, and corgi mix. It had the coloration and muscles of a rottweiler, it's face was also mostly that breed but I could see some pit bull there, and then it had the shape and general size of a corgi. Cute and hilarious all at once.

The kids said the dog was a stray or something, but as I was petting it I noticed that its fur was clean and looked like it had been taken care of; it didn't have a collar. The dog was super-friendly and really liked me (and I liked it, I was kinda hoping it needed a home) so I picked it up and said, "Let's go see if you belong to someone." I started carting this dog around the park, specifically the picnic area where a large group seemed to be having a gathering, and I kept asking random people if it was theirs.

I wasn't having any luck (yay! new doggy all mine?) but strangely enough the dog seemed to keep changing into a fluffier, curlier-haired dog, like cute-overkill, kinda like something Paris Hilton might have except it was still a chubby thing, not skinny.

I can't remember any more.

(I've forgotten a lot of this one... I should have gotten up and written it down... d'oh!)

( contains spoiler(s) for the movie Deja Vu )

I've forgotten a lot of this dream, as quite a bit of it didn't make sense. But there was a remote, tropical island and I was part of a group of stranded people trying to keep alive and not get killed by "the Others" (just like in the TV show Lost). I remember at one point getting hypnotized by some flowers on a tree nobody else could see (I'd breathed in some kind of gas they hadn't gotten a whiff of), and running off to a place where the Others had control of a big, fortified building. I was going to go in there because the madness in my mind made me think I had to. John Locke was trying to stop me but I went up a lot of steep, sandy slopes and the trees and plants I used to pull myself up would always pull out of the ground as soon as I was done using them, so Locke couldn't keep up.

Later on there was some weird goings on to do with guns, and I had one at one point but then ran out of ammunition, but didn't want the Others to realize this and was hoping I could find some more before they figured it out. There was also some Sims skill-building weirdness going on (like I said, half the dream made no sense but there was a definite air of suspense and fear throughout the dream). In the end, though, I remembered that another character in the dream plot had swum out west and found another island with nobody on it, a safe place the Others didn't know existed. (I think I was that other character somewhere back in the dream, that's how I knew). So I rounded up the one other person I could find who was still alive and said we had to swim west. The nice thing was, the sun was setting in about an hour so it was very obvious which way to go. Follow the sun!

As I was swimming off, though, my (real) kid sister runs up to the beach and starts crying because she can't swim (not true, but in reality I don't think she woulda been able to make it to the island anyways). She has some teenager friends around her too with similar problems; some of them can swim, but not very well. There's a moment where I wonder if it's too late, because it seems like I knew the Others would be showing up any moment, but then I decided I couldn't leave her behind and swam back to shore. I told my sister to hang onto me, and her friends to hang onto her, and I'd swim and we'd all make it together if some of the others could do some kicking too. This was working fairly well, but we had only gone a few yards before I saw one of the Others.

This person was more like an ape-human hybrid creature, and this one was female. At that moment that's what all the Others had been like the whole dream (but they hadn't really been, they were humans up to that point... silly dream physics). I was afraid because the Other had an inflated inner tube and was getting into it to follow us. But she called after us and said she wanted to join us, that she didn't want to be with the Others anymore. I told her she had to promise not to flip out and kill us later on, and I had to be convinced she was being truthful, and she did promise and I believed her. So we added the inner tube to our floating people raft and kept swimming. The inner tube helped a ton.

We saw the safe island coming up through some haze, but then there was the thought that swimming past that would bring us to New York City. And we hadn't even gotten to the island yet when suddenly out of the haze (to the left of the island) comes a very New-York looking skyline, with tons of skyscrapers crammed in and going straight down to the waterline. More and more of this city appears and we stear towards it, confused but not gonna let this chance go to get back to civilization. As we get closer we notice that the buildings are put together oddly, like they've been stacked up all funny on top of each other and not like you'd expect any sane builder to do.

A wave carried us into a hallway of the closest building, it turned out to be an indoor shopping mall. Then the place we'd come from, with all the water, melted away into more of the mall, disappearing like it'd never been there. The architecture seemed to normalize as well, and there we were sitting on the floor with the inner tube, people walking by us ignoring us.

We walked into the closest shop, seeking answers to this weirdness, and it was a Meet Santa shop sorta thing. Santa Claus was sitting behind a desk and for some reason I knew this guy was probably actually the real Santa Claus, not just some guy dressed up in a suit like anybody else would think. This section of the dream feels very Narnia-like, specifically the end of The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe where the kids ask the Professor if he thinks they've been on a real adventure. And that's more or less what I asked Santa, was if we'd been on a real adventure. He seemed to be indicating that he believed it was real, but now that I think about it, he never gave a straight answer.

Then I woke up.