An old house on a grassy plain.
Not my old house, but fitting for the dream. Photo by Markus Spiske.

This Old House

You know how dreams have a way of vanishing? Well, Wednesday morning, I woke up and furiously began typing on my iPhone. It was a desperate attempt to record every bit of nocturnal weirdness before it faded away. Without further ado, here’s the dream.

A big remodel or construction project is underway at my parents’ new house. For that reason, my mom and dad are still living in the old one. My sister Sarah is on the premises along with Oksana, a co-workers from Costco. She’s in the kitchen and seemingly upset. She forgot to put something in the oven and asks me if I remembered to do it. I say no, and she pretends it’s my fault.

Sarah walks down the hallway, enters the kitchen, and gets one of those weird expressions on her face. She tells Oksana that I’m already married (which I’m not), just to make me mad. Oksana has no response. Against my better judgement, I have a crush on Oksana.

Outside, I supervise the deck-building project. The weather is simply awful. One of the captains from Deadliest Catch (a Discovery channel show about Alaskan crab fishers) is working on the deck with his crew. I do my best to help but end up getting in the way. I’m not sure why, but they have Geiger meters testing for radioactivity. It’s also snowing.

At another point, I crawl through a narrow passageway inside the new house where my mom and grandpa are sheet-rocking the hallway and bedrooms. It’s really claustrophobic. The sheet-rock is about a foot thick—one of the bedrooms is really tiny due to the loss of space. I hope it’s not mine.

Later, Mike from work asks to borrow a can of paint for his parents. Apparently, they want to paint their cabinets the same color as ours in the old house. When he and I go to my old house, the cabinets are painted a poop green and brown with neon caulking at the seams. My parents seem to think it looks great. I apologize for the horrible colors and we leave with the paint.

We try leaving through the basement but encounter a rattlesnake barring the exit. I grab two wooden dowels, each about a foot long, and whack the snake when it springs at me. Mike escapes, but I keep fighting.

After I hit the snake enough times, it turns out to be a little iguana/lizard/newt thing that hisses at me. I step on it and its guts pop out. Weirdly, its guts are made from salsa.