Better Than Cream Cheese? Made out of tofu? No, it is not better than cream cheese. Unless you might consider that it might be healthier for you because it doesn’t have animal fat and is made out of tofu. Does it taste good? About as good as light cream cheese, which also doesn’t taste that good.

I know better, everyone knows better. Yet I tried it anyway.

And then on the drive home, it started to sprinkle a bit. Enough to occasionally flip my windshield wipers. It rained heavily enough during the night that I could hear the tap of water hitting the metal patio cover. What a lovely sound.

Waking up ths morning, it’s grey and cloudy and cool and there’s a definite feel of moistness and promised precipitation in the air.

The rain is finally back. I’m so glad to see it again. Thus begins the gentle glide into fall and winter, hardly distinguishable from each other in Fresno.

I have possibly restarted my old addiction to Oblivion. Oblivion was supplanted by time constraints, a computer that was barely up to the job and most of all, that usurper World of Warcraft.

Well, I kicked the WoW habit some months ago, and aside from a few twinges of happy memories or comparisons, I don’t really regret leaving WoW. My interest had waned, and I’d reached a plateau of frustration.

Technically, instead of playing Oblivion, I should be writing yet another cover letter. Never fear, I can work on that on weekday, so that the unpleasantness doesn’t interfere with my stress-free weekend.

I won’t admit to how much time I’ve played Oblivion in the last couple of days, but let’s just say it’s a long time. A really long time. An embarrassingly long time.

So much so that as I sit here typing this blog entry, I can swear I can hear the background music to OB. Even though the game isn’t running. My brain is imagining, because my ass is planted in this same chair that it has occupied for many hours this weekend, that it is still in Oblivion.

Well, it is not. I’m getting out of the house for a bit. I recruited real, live human company to get me out of the house, so I can’t decide that instead of doing anything else, I’d like to be sitting here again, playing Oblivion.

Even addictions need breaks.

In fact, a search of my I must be dreaming category shows that the last time I wrote an entry was almost a year ago.

I haven’t stopped dreaming. My dreams are getting increasingly bizarre. I love most of them.

Maybe why I don’t write about them is that I’m getting better about identifying the themes. Anger. Frustration. Being late. Toilet dreams. Fear. Not being able to protect my cats in case of emergency. And then there’s my good old friend, the tornado dream.

I’ve had a handful over the last year, and just haven’t written about them. I kind of wish I would, so I would have a better idea of how many I actually have. Again, I must plead laziness.

So this morning’s entry was a real doozy and comes closer than I ever have to what I might consider lucid dreaming or at least recognizing that I’m in a dream.

I’m visiting home, a conglomeration of the place I grew up, where my dad lives now and where I live today.

People down at the end of the street are looking down at me. They know I have bought a condo nearby and don’t approve of me as the current owner, about to take possession. There are all these rules I must follow, and in addition, the people at one property didn’t like the old owner and are preparing to extend their vendetta against me.

I try to explain and they won’t listen. They treat me horribly and people I know in the dream taunt me. A young man and his girlfriend go into the house looking back at me and laughing. Even though I don’t like them for how they treat me, I wish I could be friendly with them. They are young and vibrant, stylish and thin. The girl has a star tattoo on her back that she can turn on and off with a laugh. I want that tattoo, or at least the secret of the appearing ink, but I don’t want to copy and also don’t want to stoop to be nice to people who are only treating me badly.

I eventually do a good deed for the people who live there, so they begin treating me better. I am invited in the house, and an enormous woman is stuck in there, all the time. The people who live there quietly told me that she used to be skinny, and why she is so large now, but in waking, I don’t remember. All I remember thinking is, I hope I never get to that point myself, something that frightens me in waking life as I continue to gain weight.

Then I got to my family’s house. My dad and stepmom have been shopping for Christmas presents, early. It is only October, I tell them, but they say they want to be prepared. When I come back a little bit later, there are three trees fully decorated and another that is half decorated, though there is little room in the tiny house. Under one of the trees are the handful of presents they had bought, already wrapped.

I play the game and look for one of mine, so that I may shake it and guess what it is. But it’s also only October and I’m a little annoyed that I have to wait this long, and also that the decorations are already up. I’m pretty limited with my Christmas spirit; I can’t take three months of marketing and fake holiday cheer. I am only in the mood for about two or three days.

I ask if my family is going to decorate the unfinished tree, the largest one. It is sparsely lit and decorated only halfway up. It has the potential to be the most beautiful, but instead, I’m told that they’re taking that one down, that it was from last year.

And then comes the tornado part.

I dream that I’m at a party. It somehow seems like Southern California, though in waking, I can’t tell you why. Is it the haze of the air, the warmth so late in the year? I know in the distance, I occasionally can see enormous jets taking off, almost close enough to tough, they’re so big.

As I’m watching the sky, it seems to become gray. A puff of gray smoke shows in the near distance and in the next moment, it swirls into a tornado.

The sky becomes more like a line drawing or grayscale. It looks unreal.

My dad urges us to get in his vehicle, to escape. There’s no time to gather anything. I want to grab my cats, but my dad forbids it. We have to go now.

I am starting to panic over the cats, but then I tell myself it will be OK, that nothing will be damaged. We can come back and my cats will still be there. Something in me says that I know it is a dream. I might even say it. So I don’t fight as much as I could.

As we drive, I see two funnel clouds, again, like animated drawings, so close I can almost touch them, yet still far away. I don’t feel any wind or hear anything, and as we drive closer, past them, reality distorts. It’s a wall of watery gray, distorting the scene beyond like a vertical pool of a rippling pond. A section of it bows out toward us, but we’re not in danger.

Now I am no longer worried. Though the tornadoes could rip out of the barrier at any point, I know it’s an illusion, that everything will be OK, and that unlike all my other tornado dreams, I know for once that this is a dream, and that I can’t be hurt.

I should study lucid dreaming. From the very little I know, the key is identifying or setting a recurring theme or trigger to signal that you are dreaming and use it to be able to control your dreams. I know this time, I seemed to know I was dreaming, which allowed me to relax and not be as disturbed by the thought of leaving my cats. And maybe that’s all I needed to do, is change the fear.

I love most of my dreams. Even the bad ones. The ones I don’t like usually involve large spiders, fighting with my mother and getting in confrontations at work. I also recently had one about going to law school at the last minute. I categorized that as unpleasant because I was starting school a month late and also realized that I liked sleeping. I was relieved to wake up.

I welcome the tornado dreams. I used to think they meant something. Maybe they do, but just not quite in the way I always thought. I know they don’t signal precursors to tornadoes. I know I’ve been close to a number of them in real life, but never seen a funnel cloud, which has always weirdly frustrated me. Do they signal turmoil in my life? Curiosity? Danger? Frustration? Being silenced as a joke in my family because I always have those dreams? I don’t know. I’m not sure I want an answer.

Sometimes, I can touch funnel clouds in my dreams. Sometimes they are small. Sometimes they are huge, taking up much of the sky in big, roiling angry clouds. But more frequently, there are multiple tornadoes in the sky, making them further unrealistic. Sometimes I imagine the sound that everyone talks about: like a herd of lions roaring or a freight train. I am rarely afraid of the tornadoes, and it’s always notable when I am. I am usually more concerned for the safety of others or my cats than for my own. Maybe because I know somewhere deep inside me that they’re not real. The usual common thread is that I usually tell someone, often a member of my family, “See, I knew those tornado dreams meant something. This is real.” Even when they often have an implausible element, like the one from my youth when the air around me was filled with hundreds of frozen, white funnels the width and height of a stubby pencil.

Many of the best dreams haunt me for some time, and I can remember some from childhood. I think writing them down helps reinforce them. I certainly don’t want to forget this one.

Carry on.