Real World Interlude: Gluten Cramps, Chris

Today:

Today pretty much sucked. I woke up at 3:30 this morning sick to my stomach, then again at 4:30, with the really sharp stabbing cramps that usually mean “You’ve failed to read the ingredients labels carefully enough.” It really hurt. When we finally woke up at about 9:00, I was still having pretty bad cramps, and didn’t feel like going to the Easter parade in Lee Park. I tried to convince Chris to go and hang out with our friends there, but he said he didn’t want to go without me, and he told me to lie down and rest some more. I slept a couple more hours, then felt better – apparently, though, Chris decided that I had ruined his day, and so I was going to be sick all day whether I wanted to or not. The rest of today has been filled with delightful tete-a-tete like “Must not be very sick if you can down two Diet Cokes in a row” and “I thought you were going to lie down and have a nap.” It’s frustrating. It seems like we’ve gotten back to a more nearly even keel by this evening, and we worked together on dinner and sat and watched a TV movie.

Dream: Visit from the Alien Spacecraft

dream 20020305: Visit from the Alien Spacecraft

I’m sitting on the back lawn, but it’s not this house – the back lawn overlooks a slope leading down to a beautiful valley. The lawn itself is a smooth expanse of grass, no trees or flowerbeds. A sleek looking space craft appears, apparently from nowhere, and does some maneuvers in the air before settling to the ground. A door opens up, and I can see people inside, but then the door closes, and it lifts off and goes away.

Then another ship lands, but in a different place – I recognize this one as being a US craft. I go toward it as it opens – this one opens by the top lifting up from the bottom, and there are people inside. One of them comes out, and grabs me by the arm – he wants information on the other craft. I try to explain to him that it just landed briefly and I didn’t even hear any of them speak, but the man keeps wanting information. A crew comes out of the craft and starts measuring and marking where the alien craft had landed; it left a patterned brand mark on the grass that looks like a plan of the ship. Now it seems like it’s inside and not outside any more; there is a big crowd gathering around us, watching the men measuring and photographing the landing marks. I think it’s just a phase shift, though; I don’t think they covered the yard. There is a man here, and he asks me about how the Turtle Creek Chorale is doing; I tell him that they’re doing fine, just had a good concert season… he points a remote control at an area of empty space, and a screen pops down – there is a picture there of a young man carrying what looks like three paintings hinged together, but larger than a usual trypich. On the back of one of them, it says BMP3 – he’s apparently British Majesty Paul the Third. It’s like a news interview – he’s explaining that he’s giving this piece of artwork to America to help out; he says, “And because your plane got saudered and mine didn’t.”

Then the screen rolls up and disappears. The people are about to leave – I tell them that they had better do something to protect the land site if they want to keep people from walking on it – there is quite a crowd here, but they seem totally disinterested in the land site, they are just having a party. The guys from the US space craft place some little signs around the land area – they have “KEEP CLEAR” printed on them in block letters, and then above that is written “DANGER” – but it’s broken up, so that some signs have DA and some hav NG and some have ER, and some have just one letter. This part is written in black marker. They remind me of the signs that they use in the bin at McDonald’s to mark when food was prepared.