Dream Weaver...

Thursday Night
A work dream. Sort of. I'm currently carless, so a friend/coworker picks me up on the way into the office in the morning since I'm lucky enough to live just down the street.
In my dream, I wake up for work only to find I've overslept, and Kate's supposed to be at my house to snag me any minute. It's still dark outside (which doesn't ever happen since I don't have to be at work until 9am). My house is not My House; AKA it looks nothing like Childs Street where I actually live. I have this big kitchen, and I use the back door instead of the front, apparently, because I never see any other room of my house. I have a GIANT backyard with a fence running around it and some floodlights lighting it up. It's pretty reminiscent of the field at Terrapin. When I look out the back, there are a bunch of people out there hang gliding. In my backyard. In the dark. (WTF?) I'm frantically running around trying to be ready before Kate gets there and I make us late for work. I try to call her to warn her that I just woke up but she doesn't answer. Then she is knocking on my door, I'm still in my PJs, since this whole time I guess I've been doing nothing but trying to figure out what is going on behind my house. I let her in and apologize for running late, and then say that maybe she should text Tammy (our other coworker/department head) and let her know we're running behind and that we'll be in shortly. Kate says that Tammy already knows we're going to be late because Kate had planned on us doing some hang gliding before we went in and Tammy had said that that was fine. But then Kate says that she doesn't know if we'll have time for hang gliding because she forgot to do her experiment the night before and the results are due today. She asks to use my kitchen, which I let her do, and she proceeds to dig through all these clear beakers and tubes and stuff on this wire rack in my kitchen, asking if I have a really long graduated cylinder. (Most of the stuff there actually looks like the clear plastic pieces you can use to make a hamster/gerbil habitat...) She finds something that will work, and puts together this big thing connecting all the pieces, and pours this thick yellow solution into one end and starts heating it up with a Bunsen burner. I ask her which experiment this is, and she says "It's my Lemon Yeast experiment". The stuff starts boiling and running through the contraption. What I guess is the yeast itself sticks to a bend in the tubing, and the liquid runs out the other end, clear now. Then Kate says she doesn't know what this means since she doesn't know too much about yeast and says we're going to have to wait for Spike to get there and help her figure it out. And that now we really won't have time for hang gliding. Which is still going on in my backyard. Then Spike shows up, says some crap I don't remember about the yeast and Kate writes it down, and says she might have to do the experiment again because she might have missed a step. Spike goes out to join the hang gliding, and while cleaning up the experiment pieces Kate calls Tammy and tells her we are going to come in to work now. Tammy says she's decided to come over and go hang gliding too, so it's cool if we just stay at my house for now. It's still dark. I go to get dressed so we can hang glide, and then I wake up.

Saturday Night
I've made plans to go visit my dad in Cincinnati. Of course, being a dream, time and space are irrelevant, so I go to sleep after announcing my intentions to visit the Queen City, and wake up in my dad's house. Only it's not the house he lives in now. It's the house I grew up in. 11128 Mulligan Street, Sharonville, OH 45241. (513) 554-0378. It's a lovely warm spring morning. The place looks pretty much the same; the Grippo truck is still there, the two maple trees in the front yard, the floor plan is dead-on.  Differences are the lack of cats or dogs (my dad always claimed to be 'done' with pets, but until he left that house he always had at least one and I know he cried when he had to have our samoyed Kodi euthanized). The crabapple tree that was in the backyard when I was little is still there, but it's much larger than it ever got before my dad cut it down. Also, there is some huge building being built directly behind the property. When I ask Dad what it is, he doesn't know. When I ask what they did with the houses that used to be there, he says they are still there, including the residents, inside the new cinderblock walls, that he guesses they will eventually be torn down. Hanging from the eave on the back of the house are a bunch of baskets with almost full-size pumpkins growing in them. I ask if those are Mom's hanging baskets, he says yes. I ask if he knew she planted pumpkins in them, he says he hasn't looked at them since she left. (In this dream, I'm an adult. My mom moved out in 1987). So we go out to look at the pumpkins. Then he decides to show me his current garden. There is half of it on the side of the house (the neighbor's house- Ray and Joan Peltzel, or maybe it was Pelzel; Ray died years ago, I can't imagine Joan is still alive- is now 10 feet further from our house and on a higher plot of land so there is a little embankment) with flowers and something weird I have forgotten growing already. He had planted stuff all the way up the little hill, so there wasn't anywhere to walk. He just walked over the garden to show me stuff. Then he showed me the garden in the backyard. It was in the same spot his garden always was. He thought it was doing pretty well, but didn't want to get closer than 5 feet away or so because he thought his peppers were a little weak and didn't want to scare them away. (?) His garden was packed with plants; hardly any spacing. All different colors of peppers, and big plants that I guess were his tomatoes. Big heads of lettuce. He said he was concerned that when they finished building the giant building (seriously; this thing went for blocks) it would block his sunlight and he'd have to find another place for the garden. How odd that this dream focused on his garden? Then, like every morning, I am awakened by a cat that thinks he's absolutely wasting away because there were fewer than 14 pieces of food on his plate, the equivalent of a Feline Famine.