I just had one HELL of a screwed up dream. Which will probably be of no interest to anyone, but I wanna get it down for me.

It was Thanksgivingish. My husband and I and a old buddy of mine from online (whom I’ve never met, but will always think of as an elderly cigar-smoking gangster halfling named Max–he’ll probably always remember me as a twitchy werewolf Mafioso type masquerading around as a paladin, by the same token) were hanging out and discussing something–writing, or painting. Max was telling me that it was important to follow my creative impulses, even if other people thought they were stupid. (It was all very cryptically phrased, of course, being a dream–my favorite was “You should have finished that one painting, “Feng Shui.” I thought it was good. *name* didn’t, that’s why he told you not to do it, and you stopped because you could hear the sword rattling.” (I have no damned idea what that means and have never done a painting called “Feng Shui.”) We left the apartment, but James ran back inside to hide the newspaper from me, for some reason. Weird. Went out, time sort’ve fugued as it does in dreams, we came back to the apartment, and I discovered that the newspaper James had hidden from me said, in huge headlines, “ALIEN SHOT!” and was about an alien being…you guessed it–shot. Hmm. This disturbed me, but did, in fact, confirm why I’m so skeptical of those “Aliens Revealed!” documentaries on the sci-fi channel, since if anyone actually found incontrivertable proof of aliens (or Bigfoot, or Nessie, or Atlantis or whatever), we’d hear about it in the papers, not six months of production later on cable.

Another time fugue, and I’m at Thanksgiving, with my mother, who for some reason is now a single divorced waitress. She’s freaking out about Thanksgiving and all the hundreds of redneck relatives coming over, and the inevitable chaos (although we actually tend to have small and harmonious Thanksgivings in real life.) James has vanished, evidentally several years ago, believed abducted by aliens. Damn. Good thing I fugued past that whole greiving thing. Max is still around for some reason, being supportive about the relatives. My mother breaks into tears. A woman comes up, middle aged, very large, wearing a green vest with one breast bare. We all stare at her in embarassment for a few minutes, and finally my mother says “Ah, your blouse is open..” and the woman says “Oh, goodness!” and covers it up. This cheers up my mother immensely–the relatives may be crazy, but at least she has all her clothes on. Mom goes off to waitress. We’re standing on the lawn, and some redneck relative (I should add that none of these relatives actually exist in real life–we never see anybody on my mother’s side except my two cousins, who are cool as hell, and I don’t remember most of my extended family on my father’s side well at all) is trying to tell me some filthy joke about a prostitute with scurvy.

Then it turns into a scene from War of the Worlds. We all look up, there are huge explosions in the sky, the clouds turn smoky orange, and this gigantic piece of wreckage goes screaming past, over the neighborhood, (someone yells “My god, it’s the International Space Station!”) and finally crashes. Unfortunately, on the restaraunt where my mother is working. Damn. She’s gone, but two of my cousins, believing that only I can hold the family together, cobble together a faked recording, ostenibly from her, telling me that I have to stay with the family, even though I want to light out and never be seen again. (As is typical of dreams, I can both be present at the recording, and hear it and believe it. Go figure.) Max is still being terribly supportive. It turns out that this is because he’s an alien, too, one of a particular breed that, I am told, is fundamentally a brain and a cloaca and does nothing but think and excrete. (I should add out of deference to my friend that I’m fairly sure that in real life he is NOT an alien, and if he were an alien, would hopefully be something cooler than a brain with a cloaca.) This last revelation is entirely too much for me to handle, and I am debating whether to reveal this information and risk having Max killed by an angry anti-alien mob, or not.

And then James shook my shoulder and said “Wake time for wibblies!” or something like that. Oy. With a subconscious like this, who needs aliens?