I See Dead People

Kjerste kindly reminded me today that it's been a while since I've posted. Just before she did, I was thinking the same thing, and wondering what I would blog about next. Lately, life hasn't felt too exciting, and almost anything I could post on this blog would be old hat. To wit:

Yes, I'm still trying to get in shape to hike to Machu Picchu.
Yes, Todd and I are still counting the days until we can move to Cambridge or somewhere else not in the 'burbs.
No, I still don't have a Real Job, not that I've been trying that hard.

So there you have it. Really the only new thing is that I've begun studying for the licensing exam. And is this exciting? No, it is not. It involves flashcards. And practice tests. And a big time commitment, which is another reason I've not been hitting the blog: My bloggin' time is being encroached upon by studying time.

Perhaps the only really exciting things are the dreams that I've been having lately. And I'm not really sure that "exciting" is the correct word, as the dreams involve dead people. I would like to note that my dreams seem to be the exact opposite of Suziemusi's recurrent dreams of growth and birth and all that good stuff.

In the dream I had last week, I was in a house (not my residence) and became aware that there were a couple of people -- both women, I think -- who had committed suicide and were hanging in the bathroom. They were hanging over the toilet from a metal towel rack of the kind you might see in a hotel. A (female) police officer/detective was on the scene, and she needed me to identify the bodies. So I guess this means I must have known them or something. Anyway, she's prepping me to ID them by letting me know what a gruesome scene it is -- I have yet to enter the room, and yet, I can basically picture it anyway. She's also telling me that it smells pretty bad. She takes me in the bathroom, and she's right: It's gruesome and it smells like dead bodies. Not that I know what that smells like, but I've read Stiff, so there you go. And the detective is giving me this look like "I told you so!" Anyway, I this point I wake up frantically, and with the smell of those dead bodies in my nose. Again, not that I actually know what that smells like.

After waking up, I realized that I had to pee, so I tiptoed to the bathroom (you know, the room with the dead bodies in it!) in the dark . At which point, in my sleepy fog, I began to think of scenes from scary movies I've seen, notably The Sixth Sense. And yeah, I started to get scared, much as a small child might after a nightmare. All I could think, however, is "Damn you, M. Night Shyamalan! You screwed me up!" Then I went back to bed.

Last night, I dreamed of dead folk again. In my dream, I was in Alaska, or some other cold spot, with a bunch of people that I seemed to know. We were on some kind of expedition, and we were stuck in the snow. We started to dig into the snow for some reason, and came upon some body parts. I remember, in particular, finding the face of a person, frozen solid and rather like a mask. Finding all these body parts indicated to us that another party had been there before us and had resorted to cannibalism. And in fact, we were needing to do that ourselves. Somebody produced a dead body (a rather large man, I think), with his hands, feet, and face removed (which I've heard from PBS can indicate cannibalism in archaeological evidence). Just as we were contemplating dinner, we all realized that there was a very small town about a block away from us. We hadn't noticed it before. There was some confusion about if it had sprung up during the course of our stay (how long had we been there?!) or we had just been oblivious. There was a general store and what looked like a Chinese restaurant. So we didn't eat the guy after all, but felt pretty stupid, since we had apparently missed some pretty obvious but important information.

So there you go. And stop looking at me like that. I'm not disturbed. And I'm qualified to make that assessment, especially with all this studying.