Today's word is mature.
The older I get, the less mature I want to be. And I don't mean that in a naive, punk rock sort of way. Maturity is for the birds (tweet tweet) and apparently my sub-conscious thinks so too.

What follows is a little tongue-in-cheek but also something that has been on my mind a lot in the past year: MARRIAGE AND BABIES. Yowsa. If that doesn't scare you, I don't know what will. Here's a list of dreams I've had in the past year involving both. Just try and pick these apart, you armchair shrinks!!!


Red is the Color of Love and Babies

• I had just rented my own studio apartment. It was really big and everything was connected in one big room, loft style. I wasn’t completely moved in yet, as there were still piles of someone else’s old junk and a whole “library” room of their old books stacked around. While B and I were in bed, I commented on how great it was that the kitchen and the bedroom were in the same room because now we could have breakfast in bed all the time and I could serve him hot coffee whenever he wanted it. He responded, “You are the cutest and most generous girl I’ve ever met.” Then we had sex. We got up afterward to go to the bathroom, fix our clothes and whatnot and came back to the bed to find it already made (and I never make my bed). I check in the messy “library” room and find a tiny little girl who looks like a baby but has graying hair. She's really frail and brittle, almost like she’s made of dust or going to break. She has a scabby gray dog by her side. I realize they are ghosts haunting my new place.

• My brother and I were at a public event in a hall, like a craft show of sorts. I had S (my sister) with me, or it was more like a little boy who was supposed to represent S. He was dressed in white, which denoted special treatment from others or an extra ability or something. With all the shuffling about, I lost the S-boy in the crowd and became frantic. The bulk of the dream was spent with me spastically running about and screaming the little boy's name over and over again. We went outside and into a neighborhood, which coincidentally was Ma's (my grandmother) old neighborhood in Roslindale, mixed with some sort of hilly, rural farm type of area. Whenever I asked someone if they had seen the little boy, I told them to report him back to Ma's old house. I had a vision that this little boy was standing in the middle of a hilly field getting harassed and pushed around by a group of older bullies. The dream ended with me calling 9-1-1 and screaming hopelessly into the phone. I never found the little boy.

• I was taking care of a premature baby. It was tiny-tiny-tiny, like the size of my hand. I took it swimming in a pool. Its head went under and it couldn't breathe for a couple minutes. The baby turned blue and green and stopped breathing altogether. I took it out of the water and tried to do CPR. Every time I blew into the baby's mouth, its head would turn pink and inflate a little, but it never started breathing again.

• I was at work and had to take care of a baby mouse that was really really small and fragile. Y gave me a little wooden box to put the mouse in so it wouldn't run all over the office. I went out to lunch or something and left the mouse. I came back and it was dead

• I was with the girls in my band and we were all dressed in beautiful evening gowns. We stumbled upon this new neighborhood in Chicago that was really affluent and beautiful. We went into this banquet hall type place with gorgeous hardwood and lush carpets. The architecture was beautiful and very old and ornate. The building was one long, long hallway that we kept walking through, moving into different rooms, each more beautiful than the next. A member of the staff came by and commented on the popularity of weddings at this place and I inquired about the cost of such a wedding.
  
  We eventually reached the end of the long hallway and stepped outside. There was a huge green hill and in the distance I spotted some people and what looked like a funeral procession on the hill. I pointed and said, "Look, it's a funeral" and L said, "No actually, it's a wedding procession." What was peculiar about the procession was that all of the members of the party had to walk up a steep, long, green hill as part of the procession. Everyone was really worn from the climb.

• It was my wedding day and I lost my dress and was hiding naked behind bush, looking for anything I could cover myself up with.
  

• It was my wedding day and our cake was the biggest one I had ever seen and was made out of chocolate and peanut butter. Big B and I both grabbed huge chunks of it and started throwing it at each other and smearing it on our faces and laughing.