dreams

Vivid Nightmares, Puppet Master Edition

/ Shane / Leave a comment

I have always had very vivid dreams until lately when I think I have been so sleep deprived that my body doesn’t have time for that crap.

But the other night I had a real doozy, and I can’t seem to shake it. If you are not into creepy murder puppets, I suggest punching out now…this gets pretty gross.

So somehow I had befriended these puppets, right? I think I was hired to dust some dead lady’s house or something. And the puppets were all like “hey man, it is so not fair that they keep us locked in this room, you know?” And eventually I was like, “Yeah, that’s really not right to treat these guys that way!”

So I let them out of their room and the first thing they wanted to do was to kill these two people who had imprisoned them. I was a little uncomfortable with that, but I kind of thought, “Yeah, well okay. I mean I guess they’re pretty mad they had been wrongfully imprisoned, and who am I to say I wouldn’t feel the same way if I were them?”

So the puppets killed these people and then we all went back to their ancestral, underground homeland. They had these magical tunnels that connected to the ventilation systems of every building in the world. And they were so happy to be home! And there were suddenly, like, hundreds of them. Way more than I remembered releasing.

Now, it turns out these were some bad puppets. I mean these things made Puppet Master look like Sesame Street (except for Leech Lady because UUUUGH *nothing* could be worse than Leech Lady). Specifically I remember this one came down the aisle pushing this old fashioned pram that was like spraying blood out the sides like a sprinkler and all the puppets were just going nuts like this was the best, awesomest thing ever.

Right about then I realized that maybe I done goofed by letting these things out.

So there was this one puppet that looked like a sailor or something and I was asking her where all these other puppets came from and she was like “Oh yeah, we can like turn into regular people so we can pass and like get closer to our victims.” It turned out that each puppet had like a really specific type of person that they liked to kill (for her it was sailors). Then I realized this puppet on the other side of me that was all black with like a quilted, plain-white face (facial features, like a nose, but no like eyes or anything) was actually my co-worker Amy. And I was like, “Oh man, I never even knew you were a murder puppet! You’re so good at pretending! So who do you like to kill?” and she was like, “Feminists” and I was like, “Yeah, I guess that makes sense.”

So then I was like, “You know what? These puppets really were my friends so, in for a penny, in for a pound: I’m just going to turn myself into a murder puppet too.” I had a vague notion that if I just ate what they were eating I could turn into a puppet, so I thought maybe I could get some of that blood that was spraying out of the pram. But then someone handed me a little paper plate with like some meat on it and they said it was a child. And I was like, “Man, I really don’t want to eat any children, but it looks like chicken and it’s in a nice vindaloo sauce, so really this is probably my best bet.” But I couldn’t quite bring myself to eat it, so I was just like carrying around the plate because I kept thinking I would get to it in a minute.

So this party was getting wilder and wilder and all the puppets were like disbursing into the ventilation systems to go out and spread murder into the world, and the puppets didn’t seem to mind that I was there, exactly, but some of them were getting a little TOO friendly, and that’s when it finally occurred to me that:

  1. All of the puppets that I knew were no longer in sight,
  2. It’s possible that they were never really my friends in the first place, but it was all a ploy to get me to let them out, and
  3. There very well could be a puppet who had a really specific type of person they wanted to kill, namely, me

Right about then the lights went out and I was sitting in the dark thinking about how this whole thing had really gotten away from me, and I hadn’t eaten any kids yet, so I wasn’t a puppet myself, and I probably doomed the world, and also there might very well be puppets crawling towards me in the dark right that very second…

And then I woke up.

And then the next day Amy knocked me out of the fantasy football playoffs in my work league SO SHE’S OBVIOUSLY A MONSTER AFTER ALL.

The end.

Quote Monday Dreams a Little Dream

/ Shane / 2 Comments

Sara: “I’m going to make a smoothie.”
Evie: “A chocolate smoothie!”
Sara: “No, I’m making banana.”
Evie: “But I’m dying for chocolate!”

Evie: “You can put on lotion AFTER I’m in bed. This is my commandment!” – Where did she even learn that word from? (And it wasn’t from school, that was my first thought too, but I asked her)

Evie’s been having a lot of “bad dreams” lately (the quotes represent the fact that I think a lot of them are an excuse to get me down there because she’s lonely). Her dreams can be kind of strange. Certainly I have had dreams that were scary at the time, and then silly when I woke up, but here are a few that stood out:

Evie: “A cow jumped over a fence and turned you and Oliver into cows! And then you ran away!”

Evie, practically in tears: “We were walking and the floor was covered with caterpillar puke!”

They’re not all bad though:

Evie: “Daddy, I had an exciting dream! Santa Claus had a baby! A baby boy! He wore a Santa hat!”

Mommies get short shrift

/ Shane / 5 Comments

Evie: “I can be on the edge, and baby brother can be in the middle, and daddy can be on the other side. And we can make a smooch sandwich.”
Sara: “And where will I be?”
Evie: “You’ll be in the baby’s room, picking up.”
Sara: “But where would I sleep?”
Evie: “On the blankets.”
Sara: “What blankets?”
Evie: “By our foots.”

“One day, when you’re bigger, you’ll probably need a new car seat.”
“I want a pink seat.”
“We’ll talk about it and decide.”
“I already decided.”

“Last night I had a dream. Nala was on a leash, and I took her outside and was flying her.”
“You were flying?”
“Nala was flying, I was walking.”
I don’t know why I am endlessly fascinated by her dreams, but every time she tells me one I am enthralled. I think they’re great. Like, I know that she has dreams, just like anyone else does, but somehow I’m always surprised when she tells me one.

“You ate a lot of good things for lunch, I bet you grew two feet!”
“I already have two feet.”

“More Pinocchio please!” <– Evie’s way of asking for more gnocchi.

Basketball, Dreams and Cactuses

/ Shane / 2 Comments

Over the weekend we took Evie to a women’s college basketball game. It was actually a lot of fun. Evie was excited to learn about a new sport and see people playing actually playing it. More exciting though were the peripheral things, like the jazz band and the decorations for the Hawaiian theme promotion. Most exciting of all, of course, was the mascot.

Evie gave him several high-fives over the course of the evening, and she demanded to know where he was at all time. We spent much of the game looking around for him so she could check out what he was up to. We’re pretty sure he was a Phoenix, but Evie insisted he was a Cardinal, due to the fact that he was red. Every dance move, every attempt to pep up the crowd, was amazing to her. And for my own part, I really enjoyed the game. It was exciting.

Unfortunately we left before the end, so I didn’t see who won. Evie has asked many times since then if we could go back to “see the bird” and has made plans for our next trip. So who knows, we might be back to watch another game.

Evie, laughing: “Those aren’t pants!”
Me: “Yes they are.”
Evie: “No they’re not!”
Sara: “What are they, if they aren’t pants?”
Evie: “Cactuses!”
They were khaki’s, although maybe she wasn’t misunderstanding the word…she finds khaki’s to be stiff and poky.

Over break she was taking a nap in the car, when suddenly she sat bolt upright and announced, “I have to go potty!” We started looking around and finally found a place to pull over and go. As we were looking, she says, “I was having a dream I was going potty.” So we had to explain to her, “It’s okay, that happens to adults too!” I don’t know how many times I have had dreams like that.

The next day she was eating and she started crying. She said, “I ate my finger! Does that happen to adults too?”

It’s so funny, seeing her have these dreams that adults have. This morning she told me a dream that she was in a place where there were lots of people eating, and she was looking and looking for her chair, but she couldn’t find it. Again, haven’t we all had dreams like that? She hasn’t gone to school yet, so she can’t have ones where she hasn’t studied for a test, or can’t find a class or her locker. I still have a dream like that now and again.

Of course, she has strictly Evie dreams too, like the one she had over the weekend where her feet got dirty because she had cheese in her Elmo slippers…

To sleep, perchance to dream

/ Shane / 6 Comments

One night Evie was crying in her sleep. I went to see what was the matter and she explained to me that, while she was lying in her crib, a frog was trying to eat her legs. I explained to her about dreams and she went back to bed, but this dream stuck with her for several days, until we had to have a lengthy discussion about good dreams and bad dreams, and why bad dreams couldn’t hurt you.

Now, I don’t know about you, but this sounds like a horrifying dream to me, even as an adult. There’s something particularly creepy about it being a giant frog, I can totally picture it. I’ve seen Pan’s Labyrinth.

The fact is, I have very vivid dreams that I almost always remember on a nightly basis. When I was a kid, I was deathly afraid of the dark. I would lie awake nearly every single night with the sheet pulled up to my eyes, getting carried away by my very vivid imagination. Naturally, I would rather Evie was spared from that.

The other day she told me about a dream she had. She was flying down a long hallway, like a bat, while “something with no mouth and no feet” walks behind her. Creepy to the max. On one hand I am proud that she has such a vivid imagination. I think that will serve her well in life.

I’m sure every kid has nightmares. It’s probably not a big deal. Anybody else have any experience with this? How old were your kids when they started having nightmares, and when did they grow out of it?