Accra

I had joined a study abroad trip to Accra, Ghana, and it was our first day in the city. The study abroad group was to be there for 3 months. The other people in the group were off at a day of talks and introductions, but I had sneaked out to explore the town. It was a cloudy day, and pleasantly warm - both temperature and color-scheme-wise.

The town was a mix of architecture, with narrow brick and stone buildings squished together to line the streets. I was walking down a tan cobblestone road, and turned a corner to come to a river-front street where a number of buildings were coated with a thick layer of sand, stuck on adding a foot to 3 feet of thickness to the front features of the houses and shops it coated. I took out my camera to photograph this beautiful sight, but while I fumbled with my camera settings, a shop owner came out and opened and shut a large security panel until it knocked all the sand away from his building and the neighboring ones. The sand disappeared into the ether as it was knocked away.

I walked a few meters down the street, and up a few stairs to the next street to get another view of the buildings, still intending to take a photo. A large woman walked around the corner, and walked down the street towards me. She seemed like she didn't want to be photographed, so I tried to adjust my camera more. I may or may not have gotten a good shot of the storefronts and little cars parked along this block.

I turned around, and continued walking in my original direction towards the river. The river was actually an inlet filled with sea-water, and a floating wooden-slat bridge spanned across to the part of the city where my group was staying. Approaching the bridge, I passed by a large group of identical-looking, short, pudgy men with somewhat Italian features doing a variety of exercises. They were blocking the road in parts, hanging from bars, and doing a strange head-focused push-up on their backs. But they made way for me as I passed.

I started across the floating bridge, and about half-way across I noticed some dark tan mammal with a few small darker brown and black spots swimming to my right, near the bridge. I paused to look at it, thinking it might be a kangaroo, but I couldn't tell as it's face was in the water. It raised it's head and it looked more like a long-nosed anteater. I walked along some more and the bridge sunk into the water about a foot, so I was up to my knees in the water. It was warm, and easy to move, though I had to stop for a minute while a baby orca swam across my path, momentarily pushing the bridge a bit deeper.

When I got to the other side of the bridge, I noticed that a large clear garbage bag I had been carrying was now full of water and two eel-like creatures. I didn't intend to keep/catch/eat them, and I poured them back out towards the water, though they dumped out onto the sidewalk and got stuck at a little 6 inch breakwater keeping the sidewalk dry from low waves. They didn't flop around, so I was a little concerned that they were dead.

Then I was in a narrow hallway with some of the people from my study abroad group. Some of the students in the group were complaining about how boring the day was, and how they were reconsidering coming here, and I thought they were ridiculous.

Saturday Night Horrorshow

My friend and I were breaking into a weird little strip-mall coffee shop and some pan-dimensional bad guys/police were trying to track me and my friend down but they couldn't really quite see us unless we were casting a shadow between them and a light source (though, to us, the world and them were all normal-visible).

At some point during this, we were in a very bright hallway, with bright-colored wallpaper, and I had an exterior view of myself as a darkened-shadow being that they could see. Later, at the coffee-shop and in its parking lot, it was the middle of the night, and everything was in dark blues and greys. The police guys had a large, dark blue van, and at one point I hid behind it from them, and my feet were almost seen, till I moved behind one of the wheels. It was nerve-wracking.

We eluded them, and they left. It was about daybreak and we went off to a third person's car which was sort of parked-in, in this strange little city parking lot that was very mossy around the pavement. The car was a small white hatchback, and we had to back it out down this very high, steep curb, to an alley/driveway area. I was concerned that the car would bottom out, but I was able to do this very quickly without issue. But then heading out of the driveway to the street, in front of us, there were 4 or 5 identical Japanese girls in white dresses, dark sunglasses, and pink hair bows.

These girls had their stuff in the road, so we stopped just before them and gestured at them through the windshield for them to move their stuff. They responded "Oh, thank you, most people would have just driven over us." Then they gestured that I should open my window and I shook my head no, and told them to move their stuff again. But they insisted again and again, so I cracked my window, and of course, the lead girl started reaching in and trying to strangle me with her ghost-vampire hands. I pushed her back, trying to cram her back out the window and trying to put the window back up but I didn't have enough hands to do all of this. I looked back through the car, and saw out the rear window that the car was now a sedan-style, taxi-yellow car, and some of the other monster girls had opened the trunk, and were cramming something into it. I couldn't quite get the idea across to my passenger in the front seat that she should help me get the window closed, and I worried about what was being put into the trunk -- if we could get away, what would we be bringing with us?

Snippet Just Remembered

In addition to the party dream from last night (see last post), I also had another dream that I just recalled little bits of:

My bedroom was fairly long and narrow, and arranged like a hotel room, with two double beds. I thought about how it would be ok, if not ideal, for having house guests. I went out into the livingroom, and after a bit, I noticed that R had decorated for christmas. There were a number of small trees and some bows of greenery and some lights around the room. It was a bit haphazard, and not ideal, but ok.

Cocktail Party

I was at a friend's house - a lovely 3 or 4 story, dark wood sided, mountain house, built in the side of a hill. The back of the house had balconies, and floor to ceiling windows, looking out on a view across a large mountain lake, pitch black, but shiny in the moonlight. On the other side of the lake, there were mountains. The inside of the house was dimly lit in spots, in a fairly dark, but not cold way. I could see well enough. The carpets were a taupe color, and the walls white. Some flat banisters were made of a warm wood panel.

One mountain, directly across from the house, was a ski resort. At the base of the mountain, you could see tiny people walking around near the docks of the lake, partying, boating, going to restaurants and bars in the ski village. There was one large ski run that led down the mountain to the village, a wide, swath of brightly lit white snow, with skiers gliding down it. As I watched the scene, I noticed that the size of the people on the ski slope was much bigger than those, closer to me in the village and on the docks. The inverse perspective made me think of religious paintings from medieval Europe, and I thought there might be a trick of physics that made the world work that way. As I was watching some of the skiers grew bigger, and the village was hidden under the snow and skis as the skiers started to ski towards the house I was in, across a disappearing lake.

I wandered away from the window, and found a second beer. I mingled, wandered around the house a bit, recycled my beer, and then decided to look for something else to drink. I didn't want to get too drunk, so I decided to have tonic water on the rocks, so as to appear to be drinking a gin and tonic. I searched around for a fresh bottle of tonic water, and found a good one, poured a glass, and drank some. It tasted good. The glass was a bit too small though. I looked for a clean glass at the sink and in the cupboards, and could find only glasses that were especially small, like the one I had, or clunky white mugs. I finally found a small, but nicer and slightly bigger glass with slightly sloping sides, and tiny orange elephants in a little pattern all around it. I looked in the fridge and found a hand-sized, pyramid-shaped bottle of Bombay Sapphire, and decided I would add some to my tonic water after all. [The kitchen was mostly whites and greys - the walls and fridges being white, the counter a light grey, the floor a darker, but still light grey, and the sink being a typical metal sink.]

I came back to the counter, and my glass was missing. A woman, now standing between me and the fridge (to my right, just on the other side of the sink) had it and was washing it to use for a drink of her own. I told her that I had worked hard to find that glass, and that I had still been using it. She let me have it back and I refilled it with tonic. I sipped off a bit of my tonic water, and poured in some gin. Then I looked into another freezer, to my left, for an ice cube or two.

I wandered back out into the dining/living room area where most of the party-goers were. I knew that this was P's house, and I saw my friend D, but didn't recognize anyone else at the party [though I didn't really think about that]. I wandered up a flight of stairs, and found an open level, with a den setup, with black couches, but otherwise fitting into the overall taupe, white, and warm wood colors of the rest of the house. Two large men were in there, chatting and laughing. The other side of this floor was mostly taken up by a bathroom, that I only just barely noticed the door to. I wandered up another floor, and found the bedroom level. I wandered across the room, and felt a soft rug under my apparently bare feet. I looked down and saw that it was a sibling of the rug in my own livingroom [in real life]. I wondered about this for a moment, turned around to see a friend had followed me into the room, and woke up promptly.

Bits remembered

I had Kodachrome film that needed developing.


I was pan-frying flat bread on a stove. I was putting flour into a large, flat, black bowl, divided down the center into almost a yinyang shape. one half had a light brown mix of a non-wheat flour and spices. the other half was empty. I took a spice-shaker full of white flour, and started filling the left, empty side. As I did this I noticed that there were maggots in the flour container. At first, they looked motionless, but then one started wriggling. It stretched out and found one of the holes in the top of the spice shaker, and started stretching through that. It was horrifying.

Guest Blogger: R's Honeymoon

A--- and I were on our honeymoon in Malaysia. We were at an Australian-themed but decidedly British/Irish fish&chips pub, made over with thatching and wooden beams, surrounded by a yawning turquoise lagoon rimmed by bold tropical foliage. We weaved in and out of the open-air pub, trodding elevated slats over swarming tropical fish. We were hungry and thirsty but entirely put-off by the incongruencies offered by this establishment and its entirely European clientele. We walked and walked and finally discovered a bathroom. A--- went in.

As I waited, I watched a trio of Teutonic muscle-men ogling a quarter machine outside the toilet. The machine was at eye level and contained two screened cells that slid open when you added a quarter. The most muscly of the trio had inserted his payment and eagerly slid the screens aside to reveal two bronzed sculptures within: a pair of bikini-clad butt-cheeks on the left, and a pair bikini-clad boobs on the right. Both were over-sized. The man was growing excited as he and his cohorts joked in Dutch or Danish or German. A--- emerged from the bathroom just in time for this spectacle to culminate in the muscle-bound leader's making a spectacle of his giant and malformed arm-meat. As he flexed he asked her "Hey, baby, want some of this ice?"

We quickly absconded, laughing, probably as much at his misuse of the slang term for diamonds as at his absurdly bulbous physique. As we walked back through the winding paths of wooden beams we noticed a gathering crowd, knee-deep in the surrounding lagoon. The crowd grew until there were hundreds of tourists standing in formation in the water. Suddenly a baladi (the cliched belly-dancing rhythm) broke out and the hordes of pasty white people in swimsuits began an ecstatic group dance. They would slap the surface of the water in unison to the beat, then gyrate around, wildly shaking their asses. This went on for some time. A--- and I waded around the edge of the reedy blue-green beach watching in awe, unable to peel our eyes from the spectacle.

Sat/Sunday

I was having a birthday party. It started at a restaurant, or a bar, and a good group showed up. We moved on to an ice cream parlor, which was also a nice bar. While standing in line to order ice cream sundaes and drinks, two people -- a couple I used to babysit for about four years ago -- bumped into us in line. The woman was looking good, but the man had lost a lot of weight and most of his hair. They had been invited to my birthday celebration and were in town for the weekend, but had declined. It was by chance that we'd run into each other here, and they were apologetic for not attending my party, but chose to join our group then.

After ordering, we found a large table in the back of the place. It was in a large dark alcove, with dim, warm lighting from some modern, minimalist hanging lamps. Our table was a large, hollow square, allowing the twenty or so of us to all sit around and see each other, and talk easily. It was a high table and we sat on tall bar stools, or stood. We made a pile of our coats along the wall and in the corner, behind where I was sitting. I had some great friends there, though I couldn't place all of them quite correctly. There was a good looking man with shoulder length dark brown hair and dense, short stubble all over his face, who I thought I knew from U Chicago, but another good friend, D, a professor at UO congratulated him on having just gotten tenure at a university in Texas. I realized that I had seen the announcement about that, and knew his name from that, Eric [not a waking-life person], but was still pretty sure I had known him in Chicago, but that the timing seemed too quick for him to have gotten tenure. We were all happy for him nonetheless. The other good professor friend, D, then walked over and told me about how he'd written a pivotal recommendation letter for the guy, which had helped him gain tenure. This made it seem more like Eric had been hired, than gotten tenure, but I went with what people were congratulating him for.

We all had large ice cream sundaes and a number of fancy cocktails. A number of people said good night and went home, while others lay down on the floor to sleep it off. I wandered around, noticing that many people had left their coats in the pile. I recognized a few including C's and my own. I paced about thinking about what to do with the coats - to take them home with me so they didn't get lost, or to leave them there.

[I woke up briefly]

A number of things happened in my next dream that I don't recall, but I ended up in the household of a single Chinese woman and her seven year old son. Except for a few written things in the apartment, none of this dream was in English, though I wouldn't claim it was really in Mandarin either.

They were being haunted by their deceased three year old son/brother. It was time for the seven year old to be asleep, and he was sleeping on a mat in the little room I was sitting in with his mother, but then he got up, gathered his mat and blankets in his arms, almost sleepwalking, and trudged past us to a ladder that went up into a sleeping loft. Carrying his things, and not saying a world, despite his mother asking him what he was doing, he climbed the ladder-stairs to the loft and went off to his end on the right to lay down again. Neither he nor his mother went up there much, as the left side was the old room of the three year old boy, was mostly untouched, becoming a shrine, and had a haunted air about it. His mother called after him again, and he didn't reply, but we could see him moving about, trying to get to sleep.

His mother was in a bit of a state of despair, and picked up a strange dark red carved head, which was similar to a fat-Buddha statue, except that it was just the head. She asked it, wailing, what to do about both of her sons, and what was going on with the haunting. She laid it down on the clothed table, where its shrine was, and it started moving on its own. The mouth open, and a long red tongue licked out. It started speaking, and its speech blended into the movie on the small tv next to it on the table. We watched the movie, which was, of course, not in English, but I could follow along pretty well. [Though I don't remember the plot now.] After a bit, the mother asked another question of the Buddha head, about how her son had died.

I was transported into a viewer state, watching a room, in which the boy and his father were watching tv. The boy had something wrong with his hips, and had to wear braces on his legs, and wasn't allowed to move around much. The father was enforcing this, having the boy sit with him while he watched tv and drank too much beer. The boy had to go to the bathroom, so the father paused the program, and told him to go. The boy walked over to the tiny bathroom, and closed the door. He looked into the toilet, and realized that instead of a toilet, there was a large (bigger than the toilet) hole, like you might see in a submarine, with a ladder to climb down. He didn't want to pee down into this submarine below, and he was curious, so he climbed down to explore. Of course, this hole led into a parallel world, so he had disappeared after this moment.

Friday/Sat. Night

I was at a party and had to go to the bathroom. I went into a smallish, somewhat dark home bathroom, closing and locking the door behind me. For a moment, I almost panicked, realizing, not exactly that I was dreaming, but at least that I was having a bathroom dream, which often turn for the worse when the bathrooms are haunted or filthy or there's no decent toilet to use. But then I realized that I had been able to lock the door. This would keep out any unpleasantness!

The toilet in this little bathroom looked a bit dirty, but there was another, large, brightly lit room just off of it, so I flushed that toilet, and moved into the next room. It was a big, white-tiled room, with a strange, but fine toilet in the middle of it. I looked around the room briefly, seeing at the far end of it, my husband standing, looking back at me. He disappeared then, and the bathroom was all mine. I jump-flew around a bit, used the toilet, and woke up. It was invigorating.

[This was just the very end of a much longer dream, but this is all I could really recall upon waking.]

Guest Blogger: B. goes skiing

I've been having plenty of dreams, but I haven't gotten around to typing any up lately. So, here is another guest blogger and her dream:

There was a man named Ben, racing around a frozen lake on cross country skis. On his back he carried a baby in a papoose. There were a lot of people and we were all trying to circumnavigate the lake before the ice melted. The man with the papoose offered me a pull line and said he would pull me around the lake, but the ice gave way and we went into the water. When we made it to the shore, I realized that the baby in the papoose was also named Ben and it was Ben from Lost!

Apocalypse [about 2 hours from] now

I'm on a public bus, but it's a bit rickety, like one you might find in the movies from the 80's set in South America, full of chickens and racing down narrow dirt roads with cliffs dropping off to either side, bouncing and jolting, making you think that it would crash or plunge to its destruction at any moment. Except, there aren't any chickens and the cliffs aren't well defined. The land is various shades of dark brown and green. There are few trees, no bushes, possibly some buildings off in the distance in any given direction. But for the most part, it's all hills in my view, which is aimed close to the ground. The sky is a not-too-dark gray.

It's racing along a narrow dirt road nonetheless, up and down hills, like a rollercoaster. Sideways death is less of a problem in my mind, than the fact that it's bouncing up and down, and might crash into the ground in front of us due to the hills being so steep. We have somewhere to be.

We get there. I'm in a large, modern in a mid-century, expensive, California hills style house. The rooms are big, and things are in light tones of beige, tan, sand, gray, and so on. Windows line the outer walls of the large rooms, looking out onto a regular seeming world of gray and green hills.

People are bustling around the house. All of the air in the world is going to be gone in two hours and we have to pack up our belongings, horde our food stores, and get to a building that is designed to be airtight. The building, seen only in our minds, and miles away, behind me when I think of it (not west, east, south, or north) looks like a dark black dome structure -- your typical Mars settlement from uninventive science fiction movies. It's made of hundreds of bolted together metal sheets, and has sparing, dark-tinted windows to compensate for the lack of a filtering atmosphere.

I'm packing up my stuff... a few mementos I don't want to lose, clothes, bedding, and other basics. I keep thinking that I need to pack more food, but I get distracted by Playmobil toys. I grab a bunch, thinking that people will probably be bringing kids to the dome, but forgetting toys in the rush to grab essentials. I realize that I haven't packed any toiletries, and grab some of those. I'm near the kitchen and thinking of canned goods. I worry about how much more time there is, but there are still two hours.

Someone sees something out the window, and I go to look. Down a level, in a courtyard between this part of the house and another (looking in the direction of the dome from the house) a scraggily haired, skinny man, dressed in filthy clothes - a t-shirt and ripped jeans is propositioning families running by. In exchange for marrying their youthful daughter, he'll protect them through the Apocalypse. But in truth, he's a cannibal.

I go back to packing my stuff, thinking about how to get to the dome quickly.