Dream: The Purple Haircut

Dream 20020731, 7:00 AM:

The Purple Haircut

I’m with Dad. I think he’s taking me to some sort of medical appointment. We get there, but are very early, and the door is locked; we drive around for a while to kill some time. A bum comes up to us, and asks for money. He knocks us over somehow – doesn’t seem threatening, more like an accident. Dad reaches into his wallet and takes out a handful of bills, ones as well as larger bills, and hands them to the man. He drops some, and I help him pick them up. I am feeling annoyed with Dad for giving him money, because I disagree with it.

The place where I was supposed to be going is open now. It turns out that it’s not a medical place after all, but a hair salon. I go in and sit down, and a fun looking young woman starts playing with my hair. My hair is a lot longer; it’s nearly shoulder-length. I tell her that I have a pretty cool job, and I can do my hair a little wilder; she starts trimming and cutting, and I end up with a really cool looking chin-length wedge type cut. It looks really good. At one point, she has to crank the chair down to reach the top of my head, and I realize that there are mirrors attached to the side of her counter so that I can see myself when the chair is low. Her name is Jennifer; there are some other women here, I think a mix of stylists and friends of theirs, and they are talking about “why haven’t you come to a Jennifer before?” They sing part of it, it sounds like a piece from a musical.

Then, she asks me if I’ve ever used that “ice” stuff that is like colored gel; I explain that I’ve seen it in the stores, but haven’t ever gotten any. We talk about the various stages my hair has gone through, and she picks on me for not doing anything wilder with it, but I explain how I was having fun with long, then short. She gets some of the color gel, and runs it through my hair, making it a soft shade of purple. It is still mostly brown, but purple where it catches the light. She runs her hands through it for a while. She wants to make it *really* purple, with a permanent dye – she starts mixing it up. There are two different containers, one is the liquid base, and the other is the dye, which is dark and purple like grape juice concentrate. She mixes the dye into the liquid base inside a container like a large thick syringe, and sets it on the counter.

We talk a little while about how she wants to do this. I explain that I can get away with a lot, but purple might be too much… I ask her how long it would be before I could color it something else, and she says eight weeks. I tell her I don’t mean how long until I have to re-color, thinking that I could over-dye it sooner; she says, no, she meant eight weeks before it could be any different color. I explain that I sometimes have to entertain the social set – I explain with hand gestures, that some of them are the long-gloves, white hat set… Jennifer and the others agree that purple hair is probably a little too far.

Then, I’m in Dad’s car, sitting in the back seat; Virginia from OCP is here, in the front seat, but I don’t know if she knows I’m in back. I’m not dressed, and my robe is in the front seat, I ask her to pass it to me, and put it on. Richard K from the Dance Council is having a big garage sale, I can see it across the street – it’s mostly books. I go over and look at the books, but they’re all large old volumes. I really don’t have any use for any of them. A couple of them are big red books, but almost seem more like boxes shaped like books. Then, I sit down in a dining chair; it’s made like a basket, with flat strips of willow. It’s not very comfortable, so I get out of it.

I wake up, but inside the dream… I am sitting on a chair or couch, and looking at people going by on the street. It is not any place that I recognize. I think to myself that I could lie very still and get back to sleep and have a lucid dream, but I can’t seem to fall back to sleep. I don’t realize that this is a false awakening, or I would have done something more interesting. Then, I really wake up, thinking how ironic it is that I thought I was awake, but wanted to have a lucid dream.