The One Where I Was the Musical Comedy Act, of Sorts.

I was in a restaurant and it was time for me to head downstairs to the first floor to the bar section where I was an act of sorts.  I went downstairs and sat at the piano, but I had a guitar.  There was one older gentleman with gray hair, he was balding, and had glasses.  I don't remember seeing a computer or laptop, but I got the impression that he was working somehow.

My thing was I was going to play somewhat funny music.  In the dream, I was about as good at the guitar as I am in real life, which means I only know a few chords and struggle with timely transitions.  I said that I was very good at guitar (obviously being sarcastic) and that I could "learn him" how to play guitar if he wanted.

I started playing the Sound of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel but the lyrics were made up on the fly about how I hit an old woman with my car.  She had her hair up in one of those tiny buns on the top of her head and it left that shape in the side of my car when I hit her. 

The old gentleman found that somewhat amusing, so I kept the subject on her and would sometimes stop of make comments, like how some old lady's hair looks nice but when you go to touch it, it's wiry and rough.  At that, he laughed and nodded like I knew exactly what I was talking about.

I finished that song and asked him what I thought, and he joked that I was going to have to "learn him" how to play the guitar like that some time.  I mentioned that I was making up lyrics on the fly, and a nearby waitress chimed in with some lyric suggestions that I don't recall.  I started talking with her and I woke up.

The One with the Jogging, Mushrooms and Paparazzi Photo

I was jogging in a residential neighborhood with a client of mine who is a runner.  In real life, it has been raining a lot, so there have been a lot of mushrooms lately, which I love looking for and taking photos of.  

So as we were jogging, we were seeing them on people's lawns, including some really nice chanterelles, and I had to stop to take some photos, even though I felt bad for pausing the jogging.

I don't remember how the two parts were connected, but then it came up that a friend of mine (Garrett) had been involved in something of a scandal, because a photo had been taken of him -- I don't remember for sure, but I think he was buying drugs, and I seem to recall it was at a place like the Boatslip in Provincetown.  

The photo was black and white and old looking, and reminded me of the photo of Jack in the Shining at the end. 

The One at the Mall

I dreamed that I was at a pretty large mall.  I went to a pet store that had tiny giraffes in the bird area and little frogs outside of tanks that would lose their legs if you picked them up.  I picked one up and a leg came off, and then another before I put it back.  Then after that I saw a sign that said not to pick up the frogs.

There was another area where they kept bringing out animals to interact with.  First there was a baby goat, so I got down on all fours and it climbed on my back.  At this point, my friend Mark met me at the store.  Then a woman dressed and made up like Marilyn Monroe brought out a lizard that looked like a baby alligator as it raced over to me, but then changed into more of a small gila monster.  At first it looked aggressive, but when I pet it, it became very affectionate like a cat.

Later I was in a restaurant or pub that had this weird bicycle looking thing and if you pulled a ring on a chain, it would open a gate into a secret section that was sort of like a cross between a game and escape room.  It was like a car with a video screen.  I "drove" the car into an area that had fire on the video screen and had to find stuff to put into funnel-like receptacles to put it out.  

A couple of kids came in while I was doing it, and they were trying to play it with me. 

Then I woke up.

The One with Hide and Seek and the Vote

 The first thing I remember was me hooking up with a friend of mine (that I used to work with) in a big, old house.  The friend was also the project manager of a big effort and there was a vote about to take place.  I was a key vote, but the project manager was trying to stall the vote for some reason.

I was hiding all over the house trying to avoid Jen (who is a woman that I used to work with) who was trying to find me so the vote could take place.

I hid behind furniture and in closets.  Two other women found me in a closet and commented, "Oh, you're back in there" and laughed.  Once, I pulled down the stairs to the attic (the kind that fold up into the ceiling) to trick Jen into going up into the attic.

At one point, I ran out of the house and started running away but had to go back because if they knew I left the house, it would count as an absence and the vote could move forward without me.

The One With The Fruit Hulling Job

 I had gotten a new job at a fruit processing place or was possibly just touring it, and I was learning from a woman who ran a machine that processed strawberries and raspberries.

You'd take a fruit from the left, put it in the machine, and an arm would come down and scoop off the top (for both the strawberries and the raspberries).  All the strawberries seemed to be the same size (very large - like almost green pepper size), and you'd send them along on one conveyor.

The raspberries, however, had to be sorted by size.  There were 5 raspberries of different sizes as examples and you'd match yours up and send it down one of the 5 conveyors. She'd take the fruit, have it hulled and hand it to me to sort.

At one point, I noticed that she was wearing a face mask but I had forgotten mine, so I went to grab it and came back.

One of the strawberries was too big, and the arm would miss (doesn't make sense, I know).  The woman said, "Don't move the strawberry toward the arm.  Let it miss and you'll get an error code.  'B', no wait, 'G'.  Yeah, 'G', and that means 'Beetsey'".  I asked, "Beetsey?".  She responded, "Yup!  Look it up!".

She moved to the side and let me do both parts, and I noticed that while she was wearing a face mask, she was coughing and sucking on a cough drop.  I asked her if she was OK and she said, "I feel good, but I have this cough."  I told her she should tell her boss and she said, "Yeah..." 

And then I woke up.

The One on the Tropical Vacation

Jose and I went on vacation to some tropical location.  We were walking along the beach and I wore my new Earthrunners sandals.  There was a hole in the sand, and when I looked inside, there were these interesting clams that had multicolored stripes on their shells and large clam beards.  When I picked one up, there was a label on them that said "Shrimp Clams".  

A guy walked by with his wife and young boy and was asking me what I was looking at, but he only spoke Spanish.  I didn't know the word for clam so I said "camarones clams" and asked Jose what the word for clam was and he said, but I don't remember what it was.  

Then the guy asked us for our opinion on which of two sunglasses he had we liked better.  There was one pair that had white mirrored lenses but the eye frames were too far apart for his face.  The other had amber lenses and looked better but the frames were too narrow and kind of made him look cross eyed.  I told him I liked the white ones better.

I took my sandals off and waded in the water for a bit, which was super warm, and then realized my sandals were supposed to be good in the water so I tried wading while having them on.

We wanted to take a photo near a sign near the beach, but there were a ton of people hanging around it, so we ended up going onto a stairwell to take a photo there, and then man with the glasses and two other guys came to take the photo with us.  We never took the photo because his wife and kid went downstairs into a lower level where shops were to go to the bathroom and we were waiting for them.  An older couple who were waiting for us to move (although I thought they were just hanging out on the stairs like a lot of people were) to go downstairs got a little frustrated and the wife said "let's just go down this way instead" and I apologized because I didn't know they wanted to get by, and they should've just said something.

I vaguely remember walking around a store, looking for the bathroom (I had to pee in real life) but the only "bathrooms" where these big tables you sat at that had holes in the side that you peed into.  What women did I have no idea.

Next thing I remember we were at a restaurant and Alexa was sitting to my right - she came along on the vacation with us.  At one point we were looking at her iPad and a photo came up of her lying her back with her lifting up her waistband, like a teasing photo like she was going to take a sexy picture.  She took the iPad back quickly because she didn't realize it would come up and she was a little embarrassed but only because the guys that wanted to take the photo with us were at the table with us too.

On my iPad there was a photo that she must've photoshopped and added to my iPad as a joke - it was her with an erect penis and she was holding onto it like she was masturbating but was crying - it was supposed to be "how'd I get this?"  I was asking her how she got it onto my iPad - did she guess my passcode or had I left it unlocked (the latter was true in this case).  I asked her to take it off and she did so by tearing off a paper card at the back of my iPad with the photo on it.  While we were on the trip, I had this like paper cardboard cover put on my iPad (maybe from the resort) and I noticed there were two more that were put over the original one.  

That's when I woke up and immediately texted Alexa about the photoshopped pic.

The One With The Frog Dissections

I have a class today on instrument-assisted soft tissue mobilization (IASTM) and last night I had a nightmare where I was in class but we had to do frog dissections. 

We were given tadpoles that were frozen and we had to reconstitute them by pouring "440" over them, which was an alcoholic beverage like 151 rum but a different number.  We'd leave them in a container for a few minutes and very quickly they went from tadpoles to frogs, of all different types and sizes.

Then we had to kill them before dissecting, so people were spread out all over trying to kill the frogs - I was walking around trying to find a spot to do it, even though I didn't want to do the dissection at all.  People were around the room, in stairwells, everywhere, trying all kinds of methods to kill the frogs with varying success.

Some were using ligatures to try to strangle the frogs, I think I was going to try drowning the frog.

That's pretty much all I remember.