In which, apparently, I'm insecure and stressed

Gotta blog this quick, before I forget it.

Then I've got muffins to bake (peanut butter chocolate chip, today) and - according to my dream - I'd better get cracking on the house cleaning.

I had this dream this morning ... the kind that convinces you that you should turn off your alarm clock because it's part of the dream and it just makes sense to do so, and you only realize when you wake that your dream tricked you ... I'm not the only one who does that in dream, am I? So somewhere along the line I turned off my alarm and overslept, and was rewarded with this dream:

So in this dream we were... somewhere. I guess it was our house, parts of it were similar, but all rearranged. And the house was a MESS. And people were over to get donuts before church. And everyone was being polite, but I was looking around - I believe I was even still in my bathrobe - and realizing how messy the house was, and particularly the kitchen where the donuts were.

Then, after the people were gone, it was raining really really hard outside, and the rain was coming from a different direction than it normally does. It was pouring and I realized it was dripping quite steadily into the living room. I ran to get some pots and pans to catch the drips, but all the pans were full of things like forgotten cookies and unwashed brownie crumbs. All I had was dirty dishes. Finally I just grabbed a few, turned around to turn them into the living room, in time to see the few individual drips turn into a downpour.

The pans I had chosen were woefully inadequate for the downpour, so I started running around the house looking for other places it was leaking, and trying to figure out where the roof might be leaking to cause it. It poured down one wall of the hallway and was dripping in several places in the bedroom. I used some dirty laundry to wipe up the floor as I heard the rains slow outside.

We had to go outside for some reason, and while we were out I realized I was wearing only a shirt and underwear, and was desperately trying to make sure my shirt was long enough to cover at least my behind. The Grand Lunar laughed and said not to worry, because the Shirt And Underwear Band -- apparently the high school band in his hometown, where we apparently were, and sure enough, down the street came a marching band whose uniforms were barely bottom covering tunics. But somehow I did not feel comforted by being attired like the band.

I realized I needed to get home and clean up the horrible mess, but somehow -- I guess as the marching band was coming by -- we needed to sit on some stone-and-grass steps, sort of like a roadside amphitheater in town, to watch the parade. We were sitting right near The Grand Lunar's old High School Youth Group Leader, who wasn't old at all. Somehow we had grown up, but all the people he knew in High School were still late teens, early 20's. And they were whispering and pointing. At me.

It turns out, according to the dream, that The Grand Lunar hadn't been back in town since way back before we were married, in the time where we had broken up after dating quite some time. And in that time he had tried to get together with his high school romance, who's name was something like Nadine or Noreen. And who looked quite a bit like Elizabeth Bennett in the "Colin Firth P&P" which we just watched in real life. So, as the story went, Nadine or Noreen would not take him back, when he had returned long ago, but he didn't really want to get back with her anyway, he was just sad that he and I had broken up, so when we got back together he was happy. But in my dream, all the old high school people did not know or believe that, and so they were whispering and pointing at me because The Grand Lunar had had to settle for me, his second choice.

Then I realized that Buzz, my newly potty trained (WOOOO!) 2 year old, was over peeing in a canoe. So I had to run over and get him and tell him not to pee in canoes, and the people who had been sitting on the edge of the canoe were appropriately shocked and grossed out, because of course in addition to it being shocking and gross, they were all still late teens, young twenties, and had no idea that sometimes kids did crazy things like that. So they couldn't relate. I tried to laugh it off and tell the youth leader that everything looks like a toilet to a potty training toddler, but he wasn't so sure.

So I scooped up the toddler and began making my way back to the early morning parade outdoor street amphitheater seats, and saw my mom, who apparently was also visiting my husband's childhood town (which, I must also say, bore no resemblance to his real childhood town), and my mom was wearing a big fluffy white swank-hotel bathrobe, and her hair was down and drying naturally after her shower, so it was all in beautiful auburn ringlets, and I remember thinking, "At least mom was able to shower and dress before coming out in public, unlike me!" (because I was, of course, still in my t-shirt and underwear) ...

so I wobbled my way along the amphitheater rock ledges to get back to where we were sitting, stepping over and around people, and as I got closer to our seats I found I was also stepping over dirty dishes and the like. Because, apparently, it was also our home. And it was the end of the day, and I realized the parade had diverted our whole day, and it was bedtime and I hadn't gotten any of the cleaning done. The dream ended with me sighing that i'd have to spend all tomorrow cleaning.

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*the ironic thing is that we did work pretty hard to get the house back in shape yesterday, and it's not actually so bad at all. Not perfect, of course, because we do live here and I am behind on folding the laundry (although totally on top of the washing and drying!) (and the folding will be rectified today)

**after re-living all this, I think I'll pass on the muffin baking and get down to cleaning, just in case all of The Grand Lunar's high school youth group drops by.