Dream Sequences, Part II

I've been having terrible dreams lately, and by terrible, I mean fantastic. Heart-pounding, terrifying dreams that jostle me awake. Highly stressful dreams, with complicated puzzles and genocide and with manual cars and highways and with bleeding gums and running. Lots of running. Dreams like these are the best kind of dreams, because they're story-making and memorable, but also the worst, well, because they're usually bad dreams. I wake up tasting the fear, and then have to spend a few moments shaking it all off. Sometimes it takes a minute, sometimes it takes more. I suppose that it's a bit odd that in times of stress, I dream of things like genocide, dental mishaps, and stress. Lots of stress. I've decided to document them (hopefully the last of them) here, at least parts of them, although I'm sure you've realized that genocide is often not a topic meant for the food table. So I'll start with the most mild stress dream, build up to the worst, and try to maintain some brevity.

Several nights ago, I saw some hellish gates in my dream, and I'd like to document what they looked like because they looked awesome, even though I don't remember much of the rest of dream. I'm talking about literal gates, gates made in some humongous weird Asian-Style architecture. Think the arch that welcomes tourists into the Chinatown in DC, but solid and propped up between two canyon walls. Anyways, this odd Chinatown-esque store-front rose to stunning heights before my eyes, like a dam between two walls of rock, with endless porch-railings running horizontally across the face. It was a wall to another side, suspended with nothing but scraggly boulders and black water below. On the ground floor were entrances to the deepest, most extensive Asian shopping mall ever, like Pacific Mall in Toronto, filled with nothing but useless knick-knacks and vendors in cluttered glass cubes, another horror in itself. I remember standing before this face, looking up and feeling nothing but helplessness in front of these gates, parked on the shoulder of the highway across the ways with the blinkers on and the car door hanging open.

Now, this was the driving dream, and the helpless feeling was purely situational. Somehow, while being taken to a music lesson (I'm pretty sure it was for something like flute, an instrument which I have certainly never put to my lips), my father disappeared, we became victims and a pursuit, and I became the driver of the car. I say "we" because there was someone in the backseat, and I can nearly swear that it was actually some version of Lana from Archer, yelling at me to "drive! drive! drive!" or "turn left!" while we were being shot at by who knows who.  After escaping our pursuers, I desperately drove my manual car up and down tight streets and steep hills in a convoluted maze, up and down highway ramps into and out of some neon-ridden slick-wet roaded city, stuck in angry traffic and behind mistimed lights, desperately trying to find, no, to save my father from something terrible. 

At some point, I left the car and entered the store through the hellish gates, and found myself on a cruise-line ship with a beautiful ocean view. You'd think this would be a pleasant thing, but alas, dream-me was very aware that I was on a ship in a mall, seeing as I had just entered through the hellish gates into said giant mall, whose halls I had been traversing moments before. "Dream me" could not accept that an ocean cruise was happening in the middle of a giant mall. Skepticism was at an all time high. Not only was I all "this is clearly not real and instead some hellish demon mind-trick!", but I was also very much "Where's my dad?"

So that was that dream. Stressful, but kind of fun. The other two dreams are much more gory (caution! grossness ahead) and stressful, so I'll just spit them out right here in a tumble or two. One dream was a recurring dream in which I am flossing and suddenly all, I mean all, of my teeth begin to fall out and my mouth feels like it's filled with sand grains that I can't get out no matter how many times I rinse and spit, except in this dream there was a lot more flossing and blood and it was at a dinner table and my family was watching and I kept trying to speak through it all while continually amassing mounds of bloody floss and tissues before me. 

Here's the scary dream (I'd advise skipping the next two paragraphs if you would like to skip being horrified, just look at the pretty picture to the right). Two nights ago, I had a weird genocide dream in which families, children included, and I were being held captive at a rusty huge empty factory that had a dam mechanism in its lower compartments because a river flowed into the building's base. It was a beautiful, haunting old factory, with yellow, green, gray and blue sheet metal patched together, but still, was falling apart because it had been out of work for god knows how long. 

It was in and outside this building that our captors were murdering us one by one in front of each other's eyes, starting with the children first. They were throwing the children off the cliff into the running river below in front of their parents' eyes, laughing, because our captors were sadistic sonofuhbitches and I was full of pain and anger at the things I was seeing that I ran, and I escaped into the building and hid in a small compartment behind the gears of the dam mechanism, watching the dead bodies float in until I saw that many of the children had survived the fall. So I climbed out of the shadows into the larger outer compartment and pulled them out of the water and sat them on the ledge, and told them to be quiet and tried to hide them. There were so many. Our captors then realized that some of the children may still be alive so they decided to flood the compartments but as soon as I heard the gears clank, I made the children climb up as high as they could onto ledges so that even if the water came up a lot they would survive. But it was a dirty trick and the captors only shifted the gears to trick us into climbing higher into view, and then one of them floated in to see how many of us were left. He was young, and we tried to drown him, me and these 4 to 8 year olds, but he alerted the other captors before he gave me the finger and floated away. Many more captors came and tried to shoot us and I remember picking up children and moving them higher and to darker and safer places, but there were just so many children I couldn't do anything to save them, and every time I thought I put them somewhere safe, the captors found the little groups and I could hear so many screams. So I ran, with one other person closer to my age, we ran through old boxes and metal rooms, being pursued at every turn, there was always someone who saw us and was following us. I lost my partner while darting in and out of rooms, zigzagging through boxes and metal rods, but I saw a door and I kicked it open, and found myself staring over a parking lot with empty metal boxes and rusted cars piled on top of another. But it was a drop, the door opened in the middle of a wall outside, and the way out was to take a step and fall several feet to the pavement below. And hearing the rustle of pursuit behind me, I did, I tried to close the door as silently as possible and I fell, feeling the scrape of the wall as I tumbled down it. And then I woke up. 

There are probably things I shouldn't write about publicly, and this is one of those things, but this dream really bothered me. Even after I woke up, for at least an hour I sat there thinking about it and trying to calm my heartbeat. Even writing that last bit horrified me a bit. Stress can certainly do a number on the brain, but it definitely left a memory .

On an unrelated and closing note, we had a bunch of pepperoni and cheese left over from making pizza a couple of days ago (forever trying to find the perfect pizza dough, sigh), so I decided to make some scones. These are some very buttery and savory scones, almost biscuit-like. If you're going for a sweeter, more-cake like scone, please refer to my Maple Strawberry Scones post (which as the addition of an egg) in the previous post. Also, warning about these all-butter scones - they stale quickly, so plan on eating them within a day of making them. I left two of them out overnight, and perhaps if I had thought to put them into the refrigerator or freezer the story might be different, but damn, that was one dry scone the next morning.

Pepperoni and Jalapeno Scones
makes 8 scones

1 1/2 C bread flour
1/2 C all-purpose flour
1 TB baking powder
1/2 C cold unsalted butter or shortening
1/2 teaspoon salt
freshly ground pepper
1/2 C grated mozzarella and Parmesan cheese
4 stalks scallions or wild onions, diced
2 medium jalapenos, diced and 1/2 seeds reserved
1/4 C sliced pepperoni
1 C milk

Preheat oven to 450 degrees F.

Mix together your flour, baking powder, and salt. Season this dry mixture with freshly ground pepper, liberally. Then grate your cold butter or shortening into flakes (using the large-holed size of a cheese grater). Add the butter flakes to the dry mixture and mix until it all resembles  a coarse meal. Do not over-mix though - you want to keep the butter cold so that it will retain its shape and then melt when baking (this is what creates flakier dough).

Add the cheese and other additions (pepperoni and greens) to the dry mixture, and mix until evenly spread out in the dry mixture. Then stir in your milk and mixing by spoon until the dough almost comes together. Do not over-mix, for the same reasons noted above. Turn the dough out onto a cutting board and fold a couple of times with a pastry scraper until any of the remaining dry flour gets hydrated. It should look like sticky, wet and thick batter. Smooth it all out into a rectangular shape, until 1/2 to 3/4 inch thick. Then cut the batter into scone shapes (right triangles) and transfer to a non-stick pan.

Bake at 450 degrees F for 15 minutes or until browned on top. Remove and let cool.