Dreams for the Future

During our time of privation (since Soul Sister’s arrival we’ve been calling it the ‘pilgrim diet’), we’ve been having dreams of a prosperous future. Much like the first white people that landed on these shores, we are often hungry and have no fucking idea what we’re doing. We do have a better sense of fashion and more respect for diversity which is unrelated to our ability to survive, but hey, the name evokes pretty accurate visions of both the amount of food that we’re eating, and the monotony therein.

The thing is, we’re not just cutting way back on eating out. We’re shopping at Costco like the frugalistas we are, buying twenty five pound bags of rice and only shelling out $0.75 each for what is probably half a pound of gelato because “we have to be able to tell Soul Sister whether it’s good or not if she wants ice cream”. We’re doing laundry by hand in the sink (or bathtub, depending on how long we’ve let it go) because our utilities are included in our rent. We’re washing our hair every other day to save shampoo and conditioner (an unprecedented change for Anya, who is a clean hair nazi). But yes, it’s really the snacks that we’re missing.

And while we love food (boy, do we love food), and basic hygiene, they’re not the only luxuries that we’ve been pining for as we work hard to save our pennies and not run through our savings quite as rapidly, searching in vain for the real job with benefits and livable wages thing. We’ve each steadily built up a list of items in our heads that we will get “one day”, when we’re established adults with disposable income.

Oh, how we long for this day.

Below are just a few of the things we’ve wished for, best read aloud in the most wistful tone you possess.

Beer

Belts (see: Work pants)

Biscotti

Blazers of all colors and materials!

Boots (for fashion, for winter, flats, heels, all kinds of fun)

Brazilian wax

Bubble bath

Burritos on the regular (we just found a great new restaurant that only costs like $7 and has a salsa bar and we STILL CAN’T AFFORD IT)

Coffee table

Dry cleaning (not clothes that need to be dry cleaned, a trip to the dry cleaner for the clothes we already have but can’t afford to clean).

"If the clothes from that dry cleaning bag are on the floor of my closet, you’re going to be a very sorry young lady."

Food of all kinds:
    -Ice cream/Gelato/Fro-yo
    -Mall pretzels
    -Pizza
    -Popsicles
    -Sunday brunch
    -Cheese
    -Chips and Garden Fresh salsa
    -Smoked salmon
    -Any salmon/fish/seafood
    -Basil
    -A wide variety of seasoning
    -Fresh produce
    -FOOD TRUCKS

Herb garden (or just herbs!)

Makeup (This one is getting dire, and Anya will likely have to rely on the annual Christmas stocking replenishment of the basics to get by with some semblance of mascara and blush. Good bye, concealer, old friend. Hello, dark circles, how I’ve missed you!) and Name-brand toiletries

Nights out on the town (dinner, movies, drinks, ANYTHING)

Plane tickets home for the holidays

Purse that an adult would conceivably carry her belongings in

Razorblades

Salon haircuts

Starbucks (A luxury Anya has been enjoying in spades thanks to her loving ex-coworkers and the gift cards they bestowed upon her, soon to run out and be missed all the more)

Wallet (filled with cash)

Work pants (in our new smaller waist sizes)

Dealing with Dream People

Admittedly, we can occasionally be a smidge unreasonable. We generally feel that because we’re aware of our flaws, we’re a little bit ahead in the game (and we are so very aware of our flaws, both real and imagined). This blog serves many purposes, one of which being a medium for us to discharge some of our shit into the ether. We do not expect this to incite any change within ourselves, nor for anyone to identify with our bizarre “problems.” We are literally just throwing it out there, hoping that someone can at least be entertained by the weird crap we have to (choose to?) live and deal with.

Today, we are delving into the depths of our subconscious minds. Yes, dear reader, we are once again entering the realm of dreams (this time sans prophecy). We have never really mastered the art of lucid dreaming, and the dreams that we remember, more often than not, seem to take us down a rather unpleasant path. We’ve lost track of how many times we’ve come into work in the morning, shared the fucked up fragments of our upsetting dreams and mused over why nobody has invented some kind of magic pill to stop you from remembering your dreams (something more sustainable than getting super drunk every night).

Forget-Me-Nows are also not a great long-term option.

Even when we have good dreams, we’re left feeling cheated that we’re not actually on a beachy vacation with Matthew Crawley. No matter which way you spin it, at the end of the day, dreaming is a bitch. If not always, too often to be worth it.

These guys know what we’re talking about.

Now, we’re not going to rant about our nightmarish visions of swimming with sharks or chewing on tinfoil. These are things we can deal with, feeling safe in the knowledge that neither of them will ever actually happen with us. The dreams that actually cause us the most strife are the ones inhabited by terrible (sometimes terribly realistic) versions of people we know IRL, our family members, exes, friends, significant others, and random acquaintances. You know the kind, where you wake up crying because you’ve upset your mother or your girlfriend cheated on you...right? Just us? Great.

The thing is, we have this bad habit of carrying those feelings with us for the rest of the day. If Anya dreams that The Libertarian left her alone in a scary room full of alligators because he had to save his dog, she’s a little grumpy with his real life counterpart until he apologizes for his dream self’s actions. Totally rational. If Paul dreams that he was on an island full of people from high school and they cannibalized Anya for the sake of survival, she’s grumpy about that too. At least in these cases we can debrief in the morning, pour out our dream angst (often revealing deep seated fears) and go about our day.

Whatever gets you through the day.

We’re going to feel really, really alone if this has never happened to anyone else, but we’ve both had those dreams where we see someone we once knew, someone who fucked up big time and is now blacklisted, comes back to either haunt us or apologize. Somehow, it’s equally terrible either way. You wake up either half in love with some asshole who ripped your life apart and left you stress puking for months, or freshly wounded and pissed as hell. GOOD MORNING! TIME TO GO TO WORK!

For example, the other week Anya had a dream that literally combined every lifelong fear she has with her worst recurring dreams into a nightmare smorgasbord that couldn’t have been worse if it was concocted by her own self-hating alter ego. It was truly creative mixture of banal anxieties and deep seated fear rooted in life choices, involving the Cheating Bastard, an unwanted pregnancy (there’s no other kind ‘round these parts), and trouble navigating the subway. How are you supposed to recover from that shit when you can’t even roll over and say “Babe, I dreamed you were an asshole, fix it please?”

Reason number 153829 we need this shit.

Spending hours or even days in a funk born of an unfortunate nocturnal encounter with a ghost from the past is just not even fair. We’re trying to move on with our lives, deal with our shit, etc. and our goddamn subconscious just can’t let it go. Feeling a little guilty over x, y or z? Here, have a dream about how all of those things are ruining the lives of people you love. Maybe all of these shitty dreams are actually good for us, allowing our minds to work through some of our emotional baggage or current life challenges, but last time we checked, dream science wasn’t exactly a concrete field, so, for the time being, keep it.

Tell us we are or are not crazy?

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream THE FUTURE

I have had incredibly vivid dreams for my entire life. When I was a kid, my family used to talk about our dreams over breakfast and we had to stop doing it because mine were so long and detailed that everyone got bored and I was late getting ready. Now that I’m thinking about it, it’s entirely possible that this was more of a “I, a self centered nine year old, hold court every morning over cereal and tell my family about my nightly adventures in Imagination Land even though they clearly give not one fuck” rather than actually talking about dreams over breakfast as a group. I distinctly remembering my sister saying “When is this going to be done? It’s BORING”, but it wasn’t! To me.

I’ve had a lot of dreams that involve me breathing underwater, which sounds awesome until you realize that it looks less like this:

Silly little underwater friends!

And more like this:

Yes, a very boring pool

Usually I’m swimming someplace pretty barren like a huge version the gross pool above, but there is some kind of terrifying orca or hell seal that is going to kill me/my dream soulmate/a little orange puppy named Macaroni. I even recounted that dream about Macaroni for a creative writing assignment in fifth grade, that doesn’t count as cheating, right?

I don’t think I’ve ever had a dream about falling, but I dream about swimming all the time. Dream interpreters, do your thang.

I also used to dream about flying sometimes as a kid, but I sure as shit wasn’t soaring above the clouds effortlessly. No magic carpet involved either. I just started running until I ran into the air like it was a staircase, and I totally thought I was a special little snowflake because my subconscious recognized that it would be actual physical work for a human to fly, just like it is for birds, or Pegasus.

Nope, that shit doesn’t fly here 
(oops, forgot to warn you about my love of puns!)

As it turns out, that is actually not what makes me a special snowflake. That particular distinction stems from the fact that I have had at least TWO prophetic dreams. Maybe I should have caps locked AT LEAST, because I remember having a few days where something happened and I was like “hey, that’s crazy, I dreamed that last night” not to mention countless instances of déjà vu. I’m sticking with only those that can be corroborated by witnesses, meaning I bored someone to tears in the morning with my detailed account of the night before, and then later that EXACT THING HAPPENED and I was like “holy shit, I’m so glad I told you that, aren’t you glad you sat through it so you could bear witness to my PSYCHIC POWERS?!”

It’s like when I know what’s going to happen at the end of a movie that I’ve never seen, and I face a dire struggle. The angel on my shoulder is like “Don’t be a dick and ruin the ending for them!” and the devil on the other side is like “You have to tell them, otherwise they’ll never believe in your impressive powers of observation when it comes to foreshadowing! They’ll think you’re just saying that you guessed that plot twist in the first twenty minutes! Don’t you want to prove that you were right all along?” I try really hard to just settle for the satisfaction that I know I knew...really hard. But I’m not great at settling, so you probably don’t want to watch movies with me.

Have you seen the twins episode of Law and Order SVU?

Totally called it.

So! My first future telling dream was a few years ago. I woke up, showered, went down for breakfast, hooray all is well. I sit down at the table with my granola (every morning, every day, Meijer brand with raisins, don’t judge me), and the conversation goes thusly:

Anya: So, last night I had a dream that there was an outbreak of the whooping cough and it started with like four people and then everyone in [my college town] got it. (By this time I had learned to seriously pare down my dream reporting).

Mom: No way!

Anya: Jesus, you don’t have to be sarcastic, I got it down to one sentence!

Mom: No I just read in the paper that there are a couple kids in [college town] that just came down with the whooping cough.

Anya: Holy shit, I guess I’m a prophet(ess?). In my dream it was like kind of a plague and a bunch of people died, hope that part’s not real.

Mom: Oh, great.

Pretty impressive? I thought so, that’s for sure. I can’t tell you how many times Paul has brushed off a nightmare I had about someone we know, and inevitable he hears “But remember when I predicted the whooping cough outbreak? IT COULD BE REAL!”.

The other one is less fun (I mean I guess the whooping cough wasn’t fun for the people that actually came down with it). I was dating this guy a few years ago, and things ended badly. Like cheated on me, lied to me, pulled some things that are a blog article unto themselves badly. And honest to God, one night I had a dream that he confessed that he had lied to me, was sleeping with someone else, blah blah blah. Lo and behold, the very next day we have that exact same conversation. As hurt as I was at the time, I was still totally like “Aw fuck, prophecy dream number two, moving on up in the psychic world!”

Next stop, TLC

I mean what are the odds? Nate Silver could probably tell me that, meh. The problem is, it’s not really helpful when only like one dream every three years comes true the next day. Or when I wake up from it about two hours before it actually happens. I’ll work on it?

-Anya