Invasion of the Skating Shrimp (Night of Mon/Tues May 27/28)

I was somewhere before this part of the dream, but that's gotten fuzzy now.

Walking in a large crowd across a large bridge, perhaps the Steel Bridge in Portland, heading towards a very large city across the water. I turned to my left and saw two women, African exchange students, one carrying a baby who was her nephew. I knew them, and they caught up to ask me a question about where we were going.

I talked with them for a minute, facing their way as we walked. As I returned my gaze frontwards, my eyes passed over creatures just below the surface of the water not far below the bridge.
There were many, giant bright red and bright blue shrimp creatures. They were all much larger than people, perhaps the smallest of them were the size of a rhinocerous.

 I paused, thinking about taking a photo, but not having a camera on me, and other people looked at them.

We walked on, continuing to cross the bridge, but then the giant shrimp creatures started pulling themselves up onto the bridge, and walking across the bridge, and the dropping back over the other side into the water.

Out of the water, they were a shimmery metallic brown color, and glistening wet, almost slimy. They didn't seem to acknowledge the existence of the people walking on the bridge, and so we continued, warily, to walk. One somehow caught the arm of a man near me, biting into it. The man kept quiet as we helped free his arm, but his nearly panicking almost brought the attention of the rest of the shrimp monsters on us.

We got into the city and time passed. The shrimp had taken over the city and perhaps even the world. To get food, we had to go on daring missions to raid bodegas for old canned goods. We would go when the streets were deserted of shrimp giants, and once we had our haul, we'd throw old, rotten milk containers and other smelly foods down dark alleys and then run. The scent of our decoys luring in all the nearby shrimp, as we got away, climbing up the beams of modern architecture high rises.

It became winter and the shrimp couldn't survive underwater in the freezing temperatures, and instead skated on the frozen lakes and rivers. At first they skated like hundred-legged cockroaches might, on the tips of their sharp little legs, worming back and forth across the ice quickly and in great masses to stay warm. We caught glimpses from the tops of high rises we squatted.

One day, we received an invitation from The Shrimp inviting us to one day of amnesty, for an ice skating party. The shrimp looked more cartoony at this skating party, which we of course attended. Great masses of shrimp now stood on hind legs and wore ice skates. They towered over even the tallest people, twice their height. We skated around, having a lovely time, but wary of the shrimp. They stuck to the thicker ice, while the people could skate out over thinner ice. We came to a plan. We would create a conga-line of skaters, humans at the front, skating in circles again and again on the thicker ice. The shrimp would join our line, at the end of it, and as we got faster and faster, our circle would get bigger and bigger, and then we would skate out over the thinnest ice when the shrimp were caught up in the fun, and lose them to the depths of the icy water.


Note: This marks over 1 full month of nightly dreams.

Two nights of poorly written up dreams

Night of Sat/Sun, May 26/27

1. We were vacationing in a nature preserve. It started in the woods, but went out over a shallow, calm ocean. We hiked out on a boardwalk/wooden platform walk for a long time, and finally reached a small visitor-info and hotel island, but it's just a rest stop with visitor info and a bathroom. The hotel had disappeared. We paused there and looked at a map and saw that we could continue out over the water, but that it would never reach land again, it dead ends out over the ocean. So we're going to have to head back. The sun is setting and it gets dark, and I worry about seeing our way back on the narrow walkway.

2. Driving in van, but behind drivers seat, can't reach pedals. Get stuck in giant ruts on dirt road, get out to group-lift it out of ruts, kajigger the back end and it bounces and becomes a better-suspension-having subaru outback. Get back into van, still can't reach pedals.

Night of Sun/Mon, May 27/28 (Memorial Day)


We check into a hotel, where I had long ago booked a room for a conference. We have our cats with us, and the room doesn't seem cat friendly, even though they checked us in. There's a balcony that looks out on a river, and the bannister doesn't seem safe for the cats. The river is rushing, and the cats are curious. I want to change hotels, to one that is more cat friendly.

I'm in a dark mall, near the hotel, where my conference is taking place. Brother A is there. I use the bathrooms, which are a bit weird. I run into A outside of them and we walk, perhaps in the direction of the hotel again.


I'm at a dinner, and there are tables of food, and I'm in front of one with many platters of skewers. I'm looking at them trying to decide what looks good to eat, and I touch one, to get a better look at its contents. Right when I notice a small pink shrimp on one end and decide to not take it, a woman comes up and is pleased that I've chosen the thing she's responsible for. So I have to take it. Next/later there's a fancy dessert table. I'm thirsty and interested in fresh fruit, but there is none. Just dry biscuits spread with chocolate ganache and bowls of mixed nuts. I'm looking at this, and scooping some onto a plate, when a fancy lady says, "A-mond fruits" (like almonds, but pronounced eh-monds)

Night of Sat/Sun, May 18-19

Travel and waiting, travel and waiting. I was at an event, but it was preparatory for more travel and another event. We were transporting a large vehicle of some sort... perhaps towing a boat, or driving a boat, maybe on the water or on the road. We had stopped at a large mall slash hotel place and parked part of our transport in an open-air parking complex nearby, and I had spent time in a hotel room. We were coming back here to spend more time, but first we had to deliver the vehicle, or maybe its cargo.

I dressed for a party in the dimly lit hotel room. My things were in the leftside drawers of a long, low dresser. I left and got in an elevator with a number of people. It was crowded. It stopped at the incorrect floor for me, but most people were exiting, and I decided I'd just walk the extra distance, so I exited and walked across an open-air mostly-cement structure, up some cement stairs approaching where my vehicle was in the parking structure.

A tall, menacing gangster in a long cape with a bit of a hip flare to him and two henchmen approached me in a fairly open space before the main parking area. They demanded the money I was carrying, and I dug into my two front pockets of my dress to give them all of the coins in them, hoping that they'd ignore the lump of my wallet in my back right pocket. I gave them the coins, and then lay down on the pavement face down, worrying about my wallet. After I laid down though, the bad guys were replaced or pushed out by a tall, similarly-flowing-20s-gangster-suit-dressed super slender woman who held no ill-will towards me. The henchmen were replaced by a large group of average looking adults arranged in a diagonal grid, as if they were about to engage in a fancy choreographed group dance.

One of the people in the group, near me, was D (RIP), with his hair cut short in the style of his weekly haircut [of last night's dream]. He was stuck in this group, in a form of purgatory - not unpleasant, just unfinished/unending, but temporary in that it can be passed through when one is ready.

There was a sense of enlightenment/nirvana/white patterns on the edge of the whole... but it was just beyond most people's grasp/awareness. There was the whole, but this was additional. I could see and touch the manifestation of enlightenment, but it was somehow exterior or additional to what most were aware of. It seemed obvious, and weird to be exterior.

Weeks and weeks of dreams

Since April 27 or 28 I have had vivid dreams nightly. They started as hard to remember, frantic, strange things that would disappear upon waking, but were clearly there when they were there. Over the past few weeks, they have continued, a couple per night, but finally calming a bit since Monday or Tuesday May 14/15ish.

I still haven't remembered the majority of them, but I recall the tone of them more, and some I have been able to remember bits of, to write up here, as I related them in other venues, briefly, right after they occurred:


Night of Fri/Sat, May 17/18
D's (RIP) Hair - haircuts weekly causing anxiety despite the knowledge that it would grow back perfectly by the end of each week. His widow still widowed despite his continued existence, a blue sky, and a little trail of tiny white cloud poofs out the window.

Event Day, with tropical sidewalk morning wedding banquet, to which I was not invited, but for a woman with whom I was not acquainted, and so it did not matter... plus I was to see all the same friends at a party that afternoon, except I had not packed appropriate clothing. Plus, J was missing his right arm below the elbow, but had a double-arm down to that point. J and AR were the most prominent people in this dream, though EH merged with J momentarily.


Night of Thurs/Fri, May 16/17
I woke up one minute before my alarm clock went off, with a major pain in my back, having had this dream that I pinched my back/spine somehow and asked R to massage it and then he pushed on it worse, which woke me up. Other dreams were had, but this erased them.


First calm dreams - Night of Tues/Wed May 14/15
I was reading my diary from when I was a kid - but there were way more entries than I ever really wrote in a diary and it started out like my old pink diary, and then progressed to become like my Ramona Quimby fill-in-diary and as I got older - to like 11 or 12, the pages started to have fill in the blank stuff and very 90s photo/drawing pics of him and it kind of jumped between "reading" the diary and looking up from it to see myself at 11 or so but I was a way more outgoing and cool version of me. Before that I dreamed that I was in a large bathroom, but it wasn't really a scary/gross-bathroom anxiety dream


Vaguely Remembered - Night of Sun/Mon May 12/13
There was an ant on the bottom of my foot, so naturally I dislodged it, and naturally then there were bees all over my legs and arms. I accidentally squished one of them and then was concerned the rest would start stinging me. I stumbled out onto a porch while someone went to find some incense to smoke them away. I did something that made them all fly off, but I can't recall what it was.