Six Degrees of Cheese Whiz- Welcome to My Nightmare

Ok, I need to take a break from the travel ranting series. Partly because I am starting to get tired of my own whining and partly because of what happened to me last night and this morning.

I had a nightmare this morning. The alarm clock of course woke me at the exact time when I would have started to panic or at least when I would have probably made myself wake up anyway. Anyone know anything about dream interpretation? I have books on it and if I had more time, I would probably include links to some sites here for you. Maybe I’ll come back and edit this later.

Now I don’t know about you, but I am generally pretty good about remembering the details of my dreams. So when I woke up this morning, I immediately shut off the alarm and then grabbed the note pad by my bed and started scribbling all the details I could recall. If I couldn’t remember the words, I went with feelings or impressions. I tried to capture as much as possible before it all slipped away.

From time to time I have dreams that seem to center around a theme. For me, it seems to be tornados and teeth. Weird, huh? Not at the same time, but those 2 things seem to pop up regularly. This morning’s nightmare was about tornados.

So to the best of my knowledge, I can remember being in a house with my family and we were packing up and moving. I remember that Dad was carrying boxes out the door. I was upstairs feeling a little annoyed with one of my sisters. She apparently had borrowed my tube of red gift-wrap for a gift she gave me. I was annoyed because now this tube of gift-wrap wasn’t going to be with all my other gift-wrap, which was already packed away. Anyway, my brother was outside on a swing set and I went out to talk to him. I was annoyed with him because he was annoyed with my Dad. I have no idea what we talked about, I just remember being annoyed.

So then we were in front of this building. I don’t know where we were. There was a huge church next door. This thing was enormous. Makes me think of the Kremlin. And it was bronze. Weird. Anyway, Dad made some comment about being careful today because there were supposed to be storms in the area and possibly tornados. I piped up and pointed and said, “There’s one right there.” Sure enough, there appeared a tornado. It started off as the traditional funnel and then it turned the same bronze color as the church and it had some sort of weave pattern to it. It then swiped past the church and seemed to latch onto one of the spires and twist it like it was a piece of taffy. The spire briefly became a statue of the Madonna (and no, not the Material Girl) and then disappeared. I could hear my baby sister scream (like I have never heard her scream before, even in pain) and say something about God, but I don’t remember what it was. Then it was just about getting inside before the tornado reached us.

Once inside this building, we looked for stairs down to the basement. Suddenly, there were stairs everywhere and it looked like some MC Escher drawing. We ended up splitting up and I went down one set of stairs alone, while the rest of my family went down a different set. (Very symbolic, I think) And I was suddenly about 9 months pregnant as I tried waddling down the steps. We all reached the basement at the same time and we weren’t alone. And I was no longer pregnant.

Bono was there. Yeah, you heard me. Bono. And he was chain-smoking. He didn’t seem particularly worried about what was going on. He was rambling on about something, but I don’t remember what. I do remember the wall-to-wall windows (in the basement?) that let us see what was going on outside perfectly. The tornados had changed shape. There were 4 of them now in a cluster. Instead of a traditional funnel shape, they looked like the glass covers you might see on a cake stand. Sort of squared-off at the top, but open and round at the bottom. And they were bronze. Sitting outside these windows in a lawn chair was George Michael. He was wearing his leather jacket from the Faith video and flip-flops, I believe. He didn’t seem too worried about what was going on either. (Maybe he had passed out) And my Dad was calmly describing what was going on as if he were narrating an episode of Storm Chasers.

One of the funnel clouds started to descend over the building. At that point, the building started to shake like an earthquake and the noise was like a freight train. There was also a lot of pressure building in my chest like the G-forces you feel when you are on a roller coaster. I think I had just screamed, or maybe just started to scream when the alarm went off.

So, now I have to try and figure out what it all means. I LOVE self-analysis, so I have been consumed with trying to figure this out. That means starting with what was going on before I went to bed. Last night I went downtown and finally had some cheese steak. I went to both Pat’s and Geno’s. (I liked Geno’s better.) You can get cheese whiz on your sandwiches. Brilliant. So, I tried those and then I was watching a CNN interview with Angelina Jolie before going to sleep. Oh, and my birthday is on Saturday. Now with all that information, here is my initial analysis.

When ordering a cheese steak, there are rules involved. To disregard them means not only no service, but I am sure some sort of public humiliation. So, at Geno’s I ordered the Wit-Out, Wiz, which means a cheese steak without onions and with cheese whiz. So, the fact that the spelling of Whiz was changed to wiz on the menu caused me to think about The Wiz or The Wizard of Oz, which of course deals with a tornado. Hmmm. (That’s where the 6 degrees of Cheese Whiz comes in.) And then the whole Bono/ CNN interview with Angelina (who just had a baby)/ me being pregnant (or bloated from the cheese steak) scenario isn’t so hard to figure out either I guess. And then there was the wrapping paper and the tornados shaped like cake stand domes that could all reference the upcoming birthday. How George Michael fits in is anyone’s guess, although his birthday is the day after mine. Isn’t this fun?