stress_dreams nr last night i dreamt that it was christmas and my family and i were exchanging gifts. i had decided to give people the next best thing to restaurant gift cards — actual food that they already owned but hadn't eaten yet. i wrapped two leftover slices of pizza, as an example, as a gift for my brother. my mom stopped our gift exchange to scold me on this type of gift-giving, even though in the dream it seemed completely logical. she was getting more and more frustrated, and i was arguing with her and asking her not to ruin christmas. but she stopped the gift exchange, and then started accusing me of other things, one of which was that i kissed someone at the jazz club nearby. she wove that into some kind of crazy tale she was accusing me of being involved with. i think i may have actually shared a kiss with someone in the bar, and i was trying to tell her it was just one kiss and there wasn't anything else to it. but then i ended up thinking of a whole other explanation of what i'd been doing at that jazz bar. "i was just there, sitting at the bar with roya [name changed, this was a person i knew only peripherally from high school; she was the best friend of the sister of one of my friends]." "roya?" my mom said. "yes, she's iranian," i said, thinking that her unusual name would make the story more believable. i continued that there was a film shoot going on and someone who'd been scheduled to shoot a scene that day had backed out, so they asked me to replace her. "that's it, i was only there one day!" i stressed. my siblings looked like they believed me, and were also trying to convince my mom. i was getting more and more riled up that she didn't believe any of this, though i'm not exactly sure what she was or wasn't supposed to believe. 260720 ... e_o_i last night's dream_job 260721 ... raze a recurring theme over the last few years is being attacked or antagonized by someone (usually a stranger), hitting them in the head with a baseball bat, and discovering they're indestructible. they often stand and smile at me, unconcerned. sometimes i wake myself up before they can retaliate. i'm not sure what that's about. at least the dreams in which a plane or helicopter almost crashes into the house make sense, since that's become my daily reality in the_waking_world. last_night i had another one of those stone skull dream scenes. this time i was able to set the villain on fire when the bat did me no good. the man became a black_cat the moment he was bested in battle. he managed to avoid being burned too badly, but he walked pretty gingerly in the aftermath. and then i felt a great wave of sadness wash over me. because i love cats. you just can't win sometimes. 260721 what's it to you? who go blather from