Tuesday, September 06, 2005

Dream Analysis, anyone?

I had this pathetic dream yesterday, and since we all LOVE to hear about other people's dreams, I knew I had to share.

In the dream (start wavy dream sequence screen) I was, for some reason, shopping at a nice health food store. I was going through the store with my cart (empty) and saw Spunky and her kids shopping. So, I went over and introduced myself. Spunky looked at me with a fairly terrible look, as if to say, "Dolly Mama is even worse in person than I imagined she might be!" She said a polite but short hello, and then gave all her kids The Eye (as if to say, "Hurry, but don't let on that we want to get away from this person very, very fast"), and they all scurried to pay for their stuff and get out of the store.

After feeling like I had totally alienated Spunky and co., I was walking through the produce section. I picked up some grapes, and realizing I was hungry, started eating them. I meandered through the store, picking up a little bit of this and a little bit of that. The store I was at is one I only get to a couple times a year, so I tend to stock up on the things that I can only get there. As I got toward the middle of the store, I had eaten the entire bunch of grapes, and then realized to my horror that they had not been priced before I ate them! They were supposed to be weighed in order to know the price. (I guess I had been thinking it was like a box of cookies that you can just open and eat some from and then pay for at checkout just the same) So I started panicking, wondering how I could fix this problem. I hurried back over to the grapes, counted the empty stems from the bunch I had eaten, and was trying to remember if the grapes I ate were bigger, smaller, or comparable to the ones I was looking at, so that I could come up with a comparable bunch to have them weigh so I would know how much to pay.

Then I got distracted by some need out at my car. I guess my kids were with me or something. So I walked out to the car, taking my cart full of unpaid for groceries with me! Once I got the situation at the car under control, I realized that I had taken the groceries out without paying, so I was horrified that I had somehow screwed up AGAIN, and hurried back into the store. Once inside, I had the additional horrible realization that I did not have enough money to pay for all these groceries! I guess I had forgotten that I had only stopped by the store to get one specific thing, not to stock up for months of natural foodery.

So then I started the slow, embarrassing process of going back through the aisles, putting the groceries back on the shelves. At some point I noticed that the store staff had noticed I was behaving strangely (what with all that grape-stem counting, scaring off Spunky and co., and coming back into the store with a cartload of food...). A man from the store came up to me to say, "Can I help you ma'am?" but not in a how-can-I-be-of-help-to-you? sort of way, but in a are-you-mentally-unstable? sort of way. So, I just smiled a crazy, insecure smile and said, "Oh, no. I'm fine! I just changed my mind about a few things!" and proceeded to return every single thing from my cart back to it's rightful spot on the shelves, except for the grapes that I selected to stand in for the ones I ate. I paid for those and left.
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You know, I love to discuss ideas, and I love to challenge thinking that I find to be inconsistent, not well thought-out, or just interesting and I want to know more about it, but I'm also a real softie and I don't actually enjoy tension and always worry in a debate situation that I have somehow come across as a shrew and offended the other person. I now keep copies of almost everything I write that is even mildly controversial, because I worry so much afterwards about what I said. So, I guess that explains the Spunky part of the dream.

The other, well, it's a combination of money stress and feeling like it's hard to get a handle on doing all my stuff well......


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