42 Dreams of Arizona Bay

I dream I hear a bunch of noise outside. I am living in a weird conglomeration of the place I grew up, where my dad lives, and where I live now.

Outside the window, I notice that the pool — larger in my dream — and hot tub have been covered. I am glad because some leaves are falling right now and I disliked seeing a carpet of leaves in the pool.

Then I see a creature float past my window, looking very much like an enormous spider. Gray with a body the size of a basketball. I’m freaking out and try to tell Heather about it. As I do so, a much larger creature comes closer to the window and begins pushing in.

It looks like a whale but strangely plastic-y. It pushes in closer and closer to me, until I realize that only a thin sheet of plastic and the screen of the window is keeping it out. As it moves a little away from the house, I quickly shut the window and latch it, and then the other.

I no longer feel threatened by either the plastic-y whale or the dimly seen spider creature. I see a bunch of people working in a nearby grassy field. It seems all the creatures are fake and that some sort of water structure had gotten out of hand.

The dream shifts and I am arguing about work. I am telling a co-worker that he screwed up, but he isn’t listening to me, as he never does. Then he tries to tell me how to do my job and I lash out. I tell him I’ve been doing this job, in one capacity or another, for more than six years, and I don’t need him to tell me what to do.

I get a call on my cell phone, but miss it because I am angry and busy. I check my voice mail, and it’s for a job interview I apparently had. At first, I think it’s for me getting the job.  And now I’m not sure I want it because we haven’t talked money and I’m not sure I will like the job. But instead, the message is telling me that for the second part of the interview, I need to shoot pictures on a film camera. I mean to call right back, but then get distracted. It keeps looming in my mind and I think that I have not shot with my film camera in 2.5 years, so that it’s unfair to expect me to. Further, taking pictures would only be a small part of whatever this job is. I’m tempted to tell the woman that interviewed me that I’d rather use my own equipment than use their crappy manual camera.

Now I realize I need to get the cats to safety. The envelope of water has only surrounded half of the house, but I know it will get bigger soon. So I manage to lock Ziggy and Data safely into an interior room, but Merlin keeps escaping to the porch, which is not very safe. It has older windows and rickety screens that can easily be pushed out.

Every time I grab Merlin, I notice a different cat I need to save.

Scampy, a calico cat born just a year earlier than Stinky, died several years ago of a pretty nasty tumorous cancer. Yet she is there, fat as ever and quietly sleeping in a big ball.

Stinky is hiding in a corner, and won’t let me approach her. So I tackle other cats first, some outside cats that must have snuck into the house. I know I can’t have this many cats in the house, but I tell myself it’s only until we’re all safe again.

Then I try to get Stinky again. She eludes me, and then disappears. Until I find her quietly sleeping in a corner of the safe part of the house. There’s only a tiny little corner of me that is surprised to see her, that remembers she has been dead since July.