Dream: The Wet Spindle

Dream 20031031, 6:00 AM:

It seems like there was more to this dream before the part that I can remember.

I am in a bathroom at a house, not sure if it’s my house or not. The bathroom has dark gray or black tile; it seems matte, like slate. The bathroom is really huge. I walk across it, and see a bunch of short red hair on the floor, as if somebody had trimmed their bangs. It is dyed a dark red, and I recognize it as Hattie’s. I say to myself, as if declaring a solution in CLUE, “It was Hattie, with the hair scissors, in the bathroom.”

Some other stuff happens that I can’t recall. I walk down the street to visit a woman who seems kind of a hippie-witch; she hands me a tiny little spindle with some yarn on it, and takes me out in the back yard to show me her alpacas. I tuck the spindle into my shirt, up by the shoulder. The spindle is about three inches from top to bottom, with the whorl less than an inch across. It doesn’t seem like it’s an impractical size in the dream, but in real life, it’s too small to be of much use.

The back yard has wires criss-crossing it like fencing, but they are thick single wires, like knitting needles. I pet one of the alpacas through a piece of wire grid fence, and one of them (the mother?) keeps trying to bite me. The little one wants to have its cheeks scratched just like a cat.

I don’t remember how, but somehow I get soaked. I reach into my shirt, and find that the spindle is also wet. When she realizes this, the woman is upset; apparently the spindle is not a kind of wood that will stand being wet. She explains that it’s Lemon Dew; this is apparently the name of the kind of wood. I slip the spun thread off and look at the spindle, and can see that it is already visibly swelling. I tell her that a friend of mine who is a musem curator (Hal) told me that many of the restoration centers will have a vat of lemon oil to dip dry wood in; I wonder if submerging it in oil would help. We look through several bottles of different kinds of oil on a pantry shelf; it seems like some of them are vegetable oils, but not the right kind, and some are mineral oils. I finally find something that sounds likely, and pull it out.

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