A church service on a Friday morning

I dreamed that we went over to the church for a cleaning day, and lots of people were coming in and sitting in the pews. We had as many people show up as the day of Mark and Pam's concert. We kept asking around if anyone knew what was going on. Did we have a special service scheduled today on a Friday morning that we forgot about? Nobody seemed to know. Erick wasn't sure if he was supposed to preach, or if a guest was coming, or if it was a community sing. Some of the people started getting up and singing songs. Some of the people I work with at Walmart were there and started to sing, but it was terrible. I was mortified. Mark and Pam said that they'd try to come up with something to sing, but didn't have anything prepared. Erick decided to pray for a long time so that they'd have time to prepare. While he was praying, I remembered that some of my songs were in the piano bench, so I quietly tiptoed up to the stage to look for them. Not only did I not have a single song that I had ever heard of in there, I ended up dropping the lid to the piano bench on my cell phone and breaking it into two pieces.

Realizing it was getting late and that I was scheduled to work 2-11, I tiptoed out of the church, tossing my phone into the trash can on the way out. Halfway to work I stumbled across a truck full of worms that had overturned on the highway. I got out to help the man sort out the worms. He said that all I needed to do was scan them with my telezon. While I was helping him, I noticed that his fence was made of these unique, hollow wood, and he said that he got that from Freda Clendenning's house in Sedalia. I agreed that even though Freda was dead, her trees were legendary.

I tried to scan the worms, but I couldn't figure out how to work the telezon. It was touch screen and didn't look like the ones at work. Finally I looked at the clock and realized it was 3:40 already and I was late to work, so I apologized and left. I looked at the road and realized it was snowing. The roads were terrible. I didn't know if it was safe to go to work, especially without a phone. I thought about borrowing the kids' phone but realized Joy took it with her when she went to Momentum.

I stopped by the Hummels house and delivered some whipped cream to their poor, starving children. That was when I woke up.

A fast car and a flying picnic table

So this is actually one that I had a week or so ago and just never wrote down. Hopefully I can still remember it.

I dreamed that I went to a car dealership and bought a really awesome car. It was a silver convertible (although not old like Jay's). It was so fast and had tons of power. I put in reverse to back out of the parking lot, and went so fast in reverse that by the time I got it back into drive I was completely lost way out in the country. Since I don't really know my way around Illinois yet, I drove around for awhile looking for a familiar sign or landmark. I drove past a park and saw some people in lawn chairs sitting around in a circle playing musical instruments and I thought to myself, "Ah ha! Those must be the Spellbrinks! I know they like to play music in parks!" So I knew I was getting close to home, because the Spellbrinks live somewhere in the area.

I came to a town and drove down a little cobblestone road, and there was husband and kids, sitting in a restaurant eating pizza. I parked the car in the alley and went to join them. After we finished eating, I realized that we still weren't sure how we were going to get home. Finally, I had a great idea--we could fly home! Each of us took hold of the picnic table that we were sitting at, and tried flapping our arms. We tried saying every magic phrase we knew from every Disney movie that we'd ever watched to get that picnic table to fly, such as "second star to the right and straight on 'til morning." We finally got the picnic bench to fly, but not very high. We almost hit Terri Autry in the head.

That was the end of the dream. I don't know if we made it home or not.

Having my parents over for Christmas

I dreamed that we invited my parents to come to our house for Christmas, and they showed up really, really early. Like this month. We were not even prepared and didn't expect them to be here yet. In fact, when I answered the door I wasn't even dressed--I just had a sheet wrapped around me. I scrambled around trying to find clothes and ended up wearing an odd assortment of bras, aprons, and sundresses, and then let in my family. There were a ton of people. All of my siblings and in-laws and nieces and nephews and people I didn't even recognize were there, including several babies, and I wasn't sure where I was going to put them all or how I was going to afford to feed them.

We decided we should set up some extra card tables. I remembered that there were some card tables in the garage, so I went out to get them. I went down the hallway to the girls' room and went out the door, and there was another bedroom that I didn't know about it! It had a crib and a nice bed with a quilt, and I thought I could put some of the extra people in there. Then I went through the next door and I was in another room. This one was huge with lots of giant TVs on the wall, and they were all turned on. I thought to myself, "Well, now I know why the electric bill is always so high!" The room was decorated for Christmas, with several Christmas trees, and tables decorated with tree-shaped glass candy dishes, and red tablecloths and doilies, and large pillar candles. I grabbed as much stuff as I could to take back with me.

When I was back in the hall, an old man met me and told me not to go out to the garage. I don't know who he was or why I couldn't go there, but I shrugged my shoulders and headed back to the livingroom.

After we got everything set up, I asked my parents if they wanted a tour of the house. Mom said no, but Dad said sure. So I showed him around and discovered that our house was even bigger than I had realized. We had a big library with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and thirty leather armchairs, and a planetarium, and a great marble hallway that led to the front door. Outside, I showed him the stables and the servant's quarters and the big stone front gate.

But once we were in town, I realized that everyone else in town lived in these horrible slums. There was this awful apartment complex with drippy, black walls, and naked and dirty children lived in it with sad eyes. I felt terrible that I lived in such a mansion while they lived in poverty. Then someone told me that I owned the apartments, too, and that I was a slum lord. I felt awful about it. Then I woke up.

A dream about our old house

I dreamed that we went back to our old house for sale. At first we couldn't remember where it was. We went to one place and it was just an empty lot, and we thought someone had torn it down. Then the kids reminded us that it was by the railroad tracks, so we drove uptown and found it. When we went inside, we were shocked to find that it was a mess. There were spiderwebs and bugs and all sorts of things in the house that we had left. It was really gross and trashy. Most of the stuff was broken and there were open garbage bags of trash in the backyard. We said, "Well, now we know why nobody wants to buy our house!" We started to sort through all the stuff, but we really didn't even remember most of it. We threw away most of it. There were a few neat things that we wanted, such as an large square mirror (8 feet by 8 feet) that I thought would look really nice on our bedroom wall, but I wasn't sure how to bring it home. There was also a pretty glass china hutch, but since I already had a china hutch, I didn't know where I'd put it so I decided to just leave it.

There was another part of my dream that I can't remember. I told it to Erick this morning and now I can't remember. He said he thought it was about my mom and dad but that's not jogging my memory. If I remember it later maybe I'll come back and finish this post.

A dream about being chased by a rocket cart and other things.

Last night I dreamed that I was trying to work at Walmart, but Lisa Penner had a remote controlled rocket cart and she was making it chase me around the building. I was out in the parking lot, dodging cars and trying to hide from it. Finally, I rolled under a car and lay very still for several hours, hoping she'd give up looking for me and go away. When I peeked out to see if she was gone, I saw that she had put my Timothy on watch and he saw me. Immediately the rocket cart went after me again. I ran inside the store and logged onto a register, thinking that if she realized I was trying to work she'd leave me alone. My line got very long, and I looked around and realized I was the only register open.

Unfortunately, I messed up my first order and cashed it out instead of hitting "credit." So then I had to wait for a CSM to come and do a "1-action code" to void it out so I could re-ring the order. All of the other customers were very frustrated with me. Not only that, but I realized I had lost my library card (or it might have been my FOID card) and that I wasn't legally allowed to process credit card transactions unless I applied for a new copy. It was going to take 5-7 days for that to show up and also would require a $35 processing fee.

In the meantime, I went to church, and realized that all of the singers on stage were wearing dresses that were way too long for them. I felt bad for them, and wanted to do something to help. So, as inconspicuously as possible, I crawled up on stage and pinned up their dresses with safety pins.

Stormy dream

I dreamed last night that it was storming, and I was driving the church van in the rain. I was following Erick, or maybe Erick was following me. Visibility was poor and so I couldn't see where he was. Suddenly, I saw that the road ahead of me was flooded. Most of the cars were trying to drive through the water, but I was pretty certain Erick wouldn't want me to risk driving through standing water.

Luckily, there was an exit ramp to my right, so I took it. When I finished driving around the cloverleaf ramp, there was a small gas station on a hill, so I decided to park there until I could contact Erick and let him know my location. The hill was really steep, and I kept sliding backwards even though I had put on my parking break. Finally I turned the van around and parked at one of those concrete blocks so it would roll forward into the block to keep me from sliding down the hill.

I tried to call Erick, but it kept going to voice mail. I tried the kids' cell phone, too, with the same results. I even tried calling the phone number of some of the people that were with him, although I don't remember who they were. By the time I was finally able to reach Erick, he was seventy miles away and not very happy that I had pulled off, because apparently the water I had seen on the road was only a mirage.

Then there was a big wind that destroyed most of the buildings in town. I saw a tall building laying on its side, and a little girl named Sophie was trapped inside. I rescued her, and were trying to let her parents know that she was with us and she was safe. Since I didn't know her parents' names or have their contact information, we all stood outside in the rain holding our umbrellas side by side so they would see us. Some of had teeny little umbrellas that were only about five inches in diameter, and others had big giant ones that were a couple of yards wide. Together they made a nice canopy and we stayed dry in the rain until Sophie's parents showed up.

Then the looters came. Well, they weren't really looters. They were more like scavengers, picking up recyclable material for scrap. They took all of the extra lumber and bits and pieces of everything the storm had destroyed so they could get cash out of it. They even took wet, soggy cardboard. They cleaned up everything so well that there was nothing left but bare ground where the town used to stand. I was pretty impressed and wondered why it seemed to take so long to clean up after storms that I had seen on the news, like Oklahoma.

The last thing I dreamed is that AT&T was trying to sue us because we hadn't paid our last bill, even though we had.

A short dream about gambling

This was a couple of nights ago. I dreamed that there was this old man who was playing Poker at a casino and had gambled away everything he owned. He had just picked up his young grandson at the airport who was supposed to spend the summer with him and and his wife. But because he had lost so much money at Poker, the old man was desperate to keep playing and win the money back.

The grandson had two horses that he loved very much. The grandfather decided to gamble the horses in hopes of winning big and getting back everything he owned, but he lost those, too. He knew his wife would be very angry with him for losing his grandson's beloved horses and just couldn't face her, so he gambled his grandson and lost him, too.